When Mikaela Shiffrin last won an Olympic gold medal, in PyeongChang eight years ago, her father Jeff—known throughout the skiing community for both his unyielding fandom of his phenom daughter and his passion for ski-racing photography, as he shot everyone, not just Mikaela—put his hands on his hat in the South Korea cold. “Oh my God!” he yelled. As the last racer in this giant slalom competition, Italy’s Manuela Moelgg, moved down the mountain, it was becoming more and more apparent that Moegg wouldn’t catch Mikaela’s time, and that Jeff Shiffrin’s daughter was about to win her second career Olympic gold.
“This is a validation for all her effort,” said Jeff, whose always impressive mustache hosted a few icicles over the years as he cheered on his daughter. He was probably the happiest man on the planet at that moment.
Two years later, in 2020, Jeff Shiffrin died suddenly, in an accident in his Colorado home. He was 65. Jeff’s passing was not only a gut punch to his family—his wife Eileen, daughter Mikaela, and son Taylor—and to an elite ski circuit that admired him. It also hit home for anyone who admires a sports parent who could both nurture elite talent—Jeff put Mikaela on skis when she was 2—and, by all accounts, maintain a healthy and loving relationship with his prodigious child.
So it was only fitting that nearly a decade since that day in South Korea, Shiffrin movingly talked about her father on Wednesday, after she won the Olympic gold medal in the slalom race in Cortina d’Ampezzo. After dominating the skiing circuit for so long—Shiffrin owns an all-time record 108 World Cup wins—but failing to medal in her last eight Olympic races going back to PyeongChang, Shiffrin found herself under extreme pressure to deliver in the slalom, her best event. She did exactly that.
“This was a moment…
