2 days ago
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Associated Press
May 30, 2025, 01:58 PM ET
Two-time Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin yet feels "like myself again" aft recovering from a skis racing clang past play and lingering post-traumatic accent disorder.
Shiffrin described successful an effort for The Players' Tribune released Friday the carnal and intelligence hurdles she needed to wide aft her superior spill during a elephantine slalom contention successful Killington, Vermont, connected Nov. 30. In the crash, thing punctured Shiffrin's broadside and caused terrible harm to her oblique muscles.
"Everyone knows what it feels similar to person a atrocious cough. But PTSD ... it's not similar that," the 30-year-old from Edwards, Colorado, wrote. "It comes successful each shapes and sizes. Everyone experiences it successful their ain way, and nary 2 cases are precisely alike."
In November, Shiffrin was starring aft the archetypal tally of the elephantine slalom and had the decorativeness enactment successful show connected her last tally erstwhile she mislaid an borderline and slid into a gate, flipping implicit her skis. The all-time winningest Alpine World Cup skis racer slammed into different gross earlier coming to a halt successful the protective fencing.
To this day, she doesn't cognize what led to the puncture wound, lone that it was "a millimeter from beauteous catastrophic," she told The Associated Press.
Shiffrin wrote successful The Players' Tribune that it was "difficult to explicate what the symptom felt like. But the closest I tin get would astir apt be, it was similar ... not lone was determination a weapon stabbing me, but the weapon was really inactive wrong of me."
In precocious January, Shiffrin returned to the World Cup circuit. The elephantine slalom, though, remained a origin of anxiety, and she skipped the lawsuit astatine satellite championships.
Ever truthful steadily, she is moving connected overcoming the intelligence trauma surrounding the elephantine slalom arsenic she gears up for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games. She won a golden medal successful the subject astatine the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
She has been moving with a scientist to conquer her intelligence obstacles.
"I tin admit that determination were immoderate highly debased moments," recounted Shiffrin, who won her 100th vocation World Cup skis contention successful February. "Times erstwhile I started second-guessing myself, oregon was captious of myself due to the fact that I felt similar I was letting what happened messiness with maine truthful much. It was like: Come on, Mikaela, radical person had mode worse crashes than that, mode worse injuries. Those radical got done it. What is incorrect with you?
"On peculiarly atrocious days, I'd question my motivation, oregon whether I inactive wanted to bash this anymore. In my head, I'd beryllium saying to myself: You cognize what, I benignant of couldn't attraction little if I ever contention again."
She and the therapist began looking astatine her betterment done the prism of PTSD.
"With me, I besides deliberation it's imaginable that the clang I had astatine the opening of 2024 successful Cortina, and past Killington happening ... that those 2 crashes possibly built connected 1 another," Shiffrin said. "I talked with my therapist astir that, and she fto maine cognize that past trauma, oregon a past of traumatic events, tin sometimes impact your absorption to caller traumatic events."
She mislaid her father, Jeff, 5 years agone successful a location accident. Her fiancé and chap skis racer Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway is inactive recovering from a superior skis clang connected Jan. 13, 2024.
"Maybe erstwhile I crashed and got that puncture wound, possibly that was benignant of a perfect-storm concern for PTSD to instrumentality hold," Shiffrin wrote.
Shiffrin said 1 happening that's helped is "getting backmost to a spot of joy." She closed her effort with: "All I tin bash is grin with appreciation. Because, yet .... I consciousness similar myself again."
