By John LaConte EAGLE-VAIL — When local ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin was growing up, she dreamed of winning every discipline in ski racing.
After accomplishing that goal with a super-G win on Sunday, Shiffrin posted her thoughts on Monday, Dec. 3.
“I definitely didn’t expect for it to happen this quickly,” she wrote. “For that to happen at this point in my career, I’m really over the moon about it.”
The race itself was a near perfect effort which put Shiffrin almost 8-tenths of a second ahead of the second place finisher.
Nevertheless, the 23-year-old had a moment of doubt in the finish area.
“It took me a minute to actually find the scoreboard, when I saw it … I thought it said 8-tenths behind,” Shiffrin said in a recorded statement sent to reporters. “And I was thinking ‘Oh shoot somebody else must have really crushed it.'”
The feeling only lasted a moment.
“Then I saw that I was actually 8-tenths ahead … and I was thinking through my run I was like ‘Well, I really went for it. I really, really took the aggressive line and just barely pulled it off, and felt really good about it,'” she said.
‘WINGING IT’
The aggressive line is what it takes to win in speed races such as super-G, a mix of downhill and giant slalom with a course set that skiers are permitted to see, but not ski, prior to the one run they are allowed. While Shiffrin’s win was expertly carried out, she herself admits she’s far from a super-G or downhill expert at this point in her career.
“There are a lot of things I still need to learn about speed,” she wrote on Monday.
One takeaway from the weekend, in her words, is “winging it” isn’t always such a bad approach if you’ve put in the training and you’re confident in your ability.
“I really had absolutely no expectations,” Shiffrin said. “When I got into the gate I was like ‘You know, I kind of feel like I’m winging it, but I know that my skiing is good.'”
Over the summer, Shiffrin had focused on improving her super-G skiing.
“I didn’t necessarily get a ton of super-G training, but I focused more on super-G than downhill when we were training speed,” she said. “I was working on my position, working on equipment, trying to find a really good setup, and I think it paid off a lot, because I had the confidence to know that if I put myself in a good postilion on my skis toady then I’d be able to make a lot of speed.”
SUPER-G FREE SKIING
Another lesson learned from the weekend is a little free time on the right skis can go a long way.
“We were out there 30 minutes before anyone else, skiing when it was dark, because I was just trying to take some free runs on my super-G skis and remember the feeling,” Shiffrin said. “My equipment felt perfect, it felt amazing.”
Shiffrin said the surface of the snow also felt great.
“I could really push on it,” she said. “I …read more
Via:: Vail Daily