By Alan Baldwin
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 19 (Reuters) – Mikaela Shiffrin has more records to break, more wins to celebrate and surely more medals to drape around her neck.
But the most successful Alpine skier in World Cup history, and one of the greatest of all time, struggled on Thursday to see far beyond the Milano Cortina Olympics when asked about her sporting future.
“I don’t know if I have an answer for that,” the American told Reuters.
“I’m so in it right now. There’s actually so much left of this season. It’s a big goal for me to be competing for this overall title. And there’s potentially four to six races left in the season for me.
“There’s so many things to look forward to.
“I feel that there’s some kind of transition in my career coming closer, but I don’t know what that looks like and I don’t know how to say it.”
MOST GOLDS BY A U.S. ALPINE SKIER
The 30-year-old now has the most Olympic gold medals ever won by a U.S. skier, along with a record 108 World Cup wins.
Wednesday’s slalom title was her third Olympic gold since the first in 2014 and she now has a total of four Olympic medals.
At world championships, Shiffrin has 15 medals, eight of them gold.
The American, who is engaged to Norwegian skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, is also heading for her sixth overall World Cup crystal globe, having already secured the smaller slalom one for a record ninth time.
“Every day I go out for training and I love it,” she said. “I love skiing and I love training and I love practicing.
“So I don’t know how it looks for the next four years. Four years feels like a really long time, but also it goes by so fast. So I could tell you something now and then we’d be four years from now, like, ‘Oh. Oopsie’.”
Shiffrin spoke emotionally on Wednesday about the struggle of competing without the presence of her father, who died in 2020, the silent connection she felt after crossing the finish line and a new reality.
“I have wanted to and I have really been angry and resentful of people who talk about feeling their loved one with them after passing,” she said on Thursday.
“And I’ve wanted to talk to my dad so many times and I’ve tried talking to him and he doesn’t respond. And that makes me mad.
“In this race, maybe it was the first time where I thought that I can just talk to him and he doesn’t have to respond. And maybe that was a key thing to accept the reality that I can win a medal and he’s not here to see it.”
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin;Editing by Alison Williams)
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