Mikaela Shiffrin Reflects on Watching Security Footage of Her Dad's Fatal Accident

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Mikaela Shiffrin with her late father, Jeff.
Credit: Mikaela Shiffrin/Instagram

NEED TO KNOW​

• Mikaela Shiffrin shared how her father’s death in 2020 deeply impacted her relationship with skiing and life

• She revealed watching security footage of her dad’s accident in an attempt to understand what happened
• Shiffrin said her gold medal win at the Milan Olympics in February helped her begin to accept life without her father

Mikaela Shiffrin is opening up about grief.

The Olympic gold medalist skier, 31, sat down with Anderson Cooper for the Thursday, June 18 episode of his CNN podcast, All There Is with Anderson Cooper, to discuss the loss of her father, Jeff Shiffrin, and how she coped after his tragic accident in February 2020.

Jeff died at the age of 65 at their family home in Edwards, Colo. after he fell from the roof of the house and sustained severe head trauma. Shiffrin told Cooper that she watched the security footage of her dad's accident in an attempt to find signs that he could have survived.

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Eileen Shiffrin, Mikaela Shiffrin and Jeff Shiffrin pose with the globes for being awarded the overall season ladies' champion and lasies' season slalom champion at the 2017 Audi FIS Ski World Cup Finals at Aspen Mountain on March 19, 2017.
Credit: Tom Pennington/Getty

"When we found out that he had this accident at home, we have some cameras around the outside of our house... I went into our camera footage and tried to look up the history," Shiffrin shared.

"I think my goal was to see how much time was he laying there with his brain bleeding until somebody actually found him," she said. "If this was under a minute, then maybe he has a chance of recovering. I think it was about eight and a half minutes."


"I went through this whole footage and I kind of saw the whole thing happen, which I don't know if I would suggest people to do that," admitted Shiffrin, who was 24 years old at the time of her dad's death.

The Olympian, who considered her dad her biggest champion, recalled a tactic that her father would do when they traveled. As an anesthesiologist, Shiffrin said he was a "stickler" and very aware of blood flow throughout the body.

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Mikaela Shiffrin with her parents, Eileen and Jeff Shiffrin, after winning the gold medal at the FIS Alpine Ski World Championships Women's Slalom on Feb. 18, 2017.
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"We don't want any blood clotting and we want to make sure that we're keeping our bodies moving," she said of what her dad would say. "He'd like, lay down on the floor, lay down on bed and he'd hold his leg and he'd just like extend his foot up into the air and down, just bend and straighten his leg."

Shiffrin recalled her dad doing a similar motion on the security footage after the accident.

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"And when he was laying there, I could see him doing that," she shared. "And I was like, oh, he knows that he needs to like, somehow move his body, but he couldn't get up. And then he was unconscious again when our neighbor found him. I think it was 12 minutes [later] when the ambulance arrived."

Elsewhere in the interview, Shiffrin opened up about grief and the challenges she faced after her dad's death. She said it impacted her relationship with the sport she loved the most, as the person who's considered one of the greatest — and most decorated — alpine skier of all time.

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Mikaela Shiffrin of Team USA celebrates during the prize-giving ceremony after the Audi FIS Alpine Ski World Cup Women's Slalom in Sestriere, Italy, on Feb. 23, 2025.
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"I experienced this overwhelming sense of apathy," she told Cooper. "I almost dreaded that there would come a point in time where my team and my family and the people around me would ask, like, okay, so when do you want to get back on snow?"

"I've never struggled with wanting to be alive," she said. "But there were so many points — and I just don't really know the proper wording here — but I think a lot of people feel it it's like, what is the point of my existence?"

"And that's just been an ongoing question in my head for probably at least the first two years, but especially the immediate few weeks," Shiffrin continued. "Sleep is hard. I don't think I ate. I just felt like it was hard to feel the will to live."

"Not that I didn't want to be alive, but just that I really was searching for a reason to get out of bed and didn't really have that," she said. "I didn't feel like ski racing was nearly a good enough reason to want to exist, and I didn't feel like wanting to win ski races had any place in my life anymore."

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Gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin of Team United States celebrates on the podium during the medal ceremony following the Women's Slalom Run on day twelve of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.
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Shiffrin said that she could "actually accept" her dad's death after her gold medal win in slalom at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

"This was a moment I have dreamed about. I've also been very scared of this moment,” she told reporters, including PEOPLE, at a press conference after her podium ceremony in February. “Everything in life that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience."

"It's like being born again, and I still have so many moments where I resist this," she continued. "I don't want to be in life without my dad." Still, Shiffrin's gold medal moment helped her come to terms with that, she said.

“Maybe today was the first time I could actually accept this reality. And instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him,” the Olympian said at the time.

"And with the whole team who's here with me now, and with my mom, who is here with me now and has been with me since the beginning," she said. "It was just a little more spiritual than I usually am, but I'm really grateful for that."

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