After fearing she might not be able to return this season, Mikaela Shiffrin is ready to race.
Shiffrin’s next victory will be the 100th of her career. She’s won seven times at Courchevel, including two wins in slalom.
Shiffrin made her announcement Thursday morning with a video of herself in the gym and back on snow. The last frame had ‘Courchevel 1/30 … See you soon.’
‘It’s been a little bit uncertain whether I could even return this season. But I’ve been able to get on snow, I’ve been able to train a little bit the last week or so,’ Shiffrin said in an interview on the TODAY show.
Shiffrin said she still isn’t 100% and will probably be dealing with the effects of the injury for the rest of the year. But she’s no longer in pain and was able to ‘ski with intensity’ during GS training on Monday. That gave her confidence to race again.
‘I was worried about how that would go because this crash happened during GS and the implications of getting back in a GS start, I wasn’t sure how that was going to feel. It felt pretty good,’ she said. ‘The next step is racing. That’s the next step of this recovery. So the recovery is not really over but I’m strong enough to get back in the start gate.’
After winning twice in her first three races this year, the expectation was that Shiffrin would get her 100th victory in Killington, one of her favorite venues and a two-hour drive from the Burke Mountain Academy that she attended as a teenager. All was going according to plan after the first run in the giant slalom, where she took a comfortable lead over Sara Hector of Sweden.
But less than 15 seconds from the finish line of the second run, Shiffrin lost an edge. She slammed into one gate and somersaulted into another before coming to a stop in the safety netting. She spent about 20 minutes on the hill before being taken down on a sled.
Shiffrin also said there was some concern she’d damaged her colon because the puncture occurred close to it and there were some air bubbles. But an examination after she returned home to Colorado showed it was fine.
‘We would have seen symptoms sooner but it’s just good to have that confirmation,’ she said.
Shiffrin had another surgery Dec. 12 to clean out the wound.
Shiffrin said at the time of the crash it would be ‘several weeks’ before she’d be back to racing. She missed the slalom in Killington the day after the crash, as well as the World Cup stop at Beaver Creek on Dec. 14-15, the first time the women raced the famed Birds of Prey course.
She’s missed six slalom and giant slalom World Cup races since the beginning of the year and is likely out of the running for the overall title this year. She’s currently 16th in the overall standings, and ninth in the slalom standings.
Still, just being able to race again is a win, though she tried to temper expectations.
‘I haven’t really skied for the last seven weeks,’ she said. ‘I’m coming back into competitions with the best athletes in the world, with the World Cup athletes, and trying to hold my own against that. They’ve been skiing and are in totally top form, and I’m coming back from ripping my oblique in half.’