MILAN – A day after dropping one of the most dramatic gold medal performances in Olympic slalom history, American star Mikaela Shiffrin dropped an F-bomb as she announced victory – a mid-air slip she joked may have been influenced by an espresso martini she drank during a post-race celebration.
Shiffrin has won more World Cup races than any skier in history but has failed to medal at the Olympics since 2018, including missing the podium in one of her first two events at the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina, Italy this month.
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But in her third and final time to win a medal on Wednesday, Shiffrin dominated the slalom, her strongest event, winning with the biggest Olympic victory since 1998.
In the more than three hours between Shiffrin’s first and second runs, she tried to sleep in the Team USA tent in Cortina to “regulate her energy.” He said he started trying to talk to his father, Jeff, who died in 2020.
“When I was sleeping, I started thinking about my dad, and it was just, it was at this point, like, I want to be able to communicate with him, and I can’t have it,” Shiffrin said on “TODAY.” “But I thought, so what? Maybe it’s all right if you talk to him, even if you can’t hear him answer, you know, in a normal way. It was more spiritual than I usually do; I’m more logical, I’m rational.”
“But at the same time, I think there’s been a real spiritual journey that I’ve been on over the years that I just, I don’t know, took a moment and said, f——g,” he said, stopping after realizing he’d been shocked on live television.
“S—!” Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” he said.
As Shiffrin continued to apologize, he was asked how he spent Wednesday night enjoying the cathartic victory, which included a stop at Team Austria’s home ground in Cortina d’Ampezzo. That celebration included an espresso martini, which he said was his first drink in at least two years, as he had been quiet during his recovery from the horrific 2024 accident that left him with a puncture wound to his side.
“So everybody kept giving me espresso martinis because I said it was my destiny to have one last night,” Shiffrin said. “Everybody kept bringing it to me, but then they said, which is probably one of the reasons for swearing—I’m so sorry, again—they kept giving it to me, and it was like, ‘But you go!'”
“Everybody’s like, ‘Just go slow, but here’s something else. I probably, in the middle of the night, I probably only had one theme, so I felt really good this morning.”
The gold medal added to her Olympic gold in slalom from 2014, when Shiffrin was 18. The 12 years between that win and her return to the podium Wednesday is the largest gap between individual gold medals for any athlete in the same event in Olympic history, according to NBC Sports Research.
She joins Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider as the only women to win two slalom gold medals in their career.
With four Olympic medals in her career, Shiffrin tied Julia Mancuso for the most of any US Alpine skier. And outside of sports, Shiffrin is also one of four US athletes to have won three gold medals at the Winter Olympics.
“There were three or four times where I would have been out of the field, but the kind of every run I do, if it’s a winning race, it feels like a miracle that I made it to the end,” Shiffrin said. And maybe it doesn’t look that way, but it feels borderline. And I crossed the line, and I said, ‘I know it was good skiing, so take a moment to appreciate that.’
