Mikaela Shiffrin Completes Her First Race of These Olympics, Super-G

Five days and three races after her Beijing Olympics journey began, Mikaela Shiffrin’s smile returned to an Alpine finish area on Friday.

After failing to navigate more than 12 gates and not completing her opening runs in two of her best events this week, Shiffrin skied a clean and efficient run in the super-G, a speed race she has not entered in an Olympic Games.

To many sports fans, the Alpine races may not seem dissimilar. But they are as varied as the 100-meter and 5,000-meter competitions in track. Shiffrin, a three-time overall World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist, does not specialize in speed events. She took years to “learn to fly” — a term skiers use to describe the adjustment to high-speed, jump-infused speed events — and the treachery and danger of those races are not a natural fit with her personality.

Shiffrin slipped once in the midsection of Friday’s race and had another small miscue elsewhere in the racecourse, but showed no tentativeness in her approach and instead charged aggressively from the start to capture the lead in the race’s opening segment. Most of her descent at the National Alpine Center in Yanqing was solid and technically adept and after the first 15 most highly ranked super-G racers in the field had completed their runs Friday, Shiffrin was eighth, .79 of a second off the early leader Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland.

Her run complete, Shiffrin grinned as she slid to a stop and then gave a little wave to the crowd. Within minutes she was embraced by her mother and coach, Eileen, and hugged by her boyfriend Aleksander Aamondt Kilde, who earned his first Olympic medal yesterday with a silver in the men’s Alpine combined.

The scene was a reversal of two heartbreaking days of racing earlier this week in her best events, the giant slalom and slalom when she could not successfully negotiate the top portions of either racecourse.