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Mikaela Shiffrin inspects the course before the Women's Team Combined Slalom on day four of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics at Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre on February 10, 2026 in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. (Mattia Ozbot/Getty Images)
Mattia Ozbot via Getty Images
MILAN — Breezy Johnson is the newly crowned queen of the downhill, a hard-charging risk taker wired to find the most direct line down a mountain and attack it.
Mikaela Shiffrin is the greatest slalom skier of all time, a master of technique who excels at making the tightest possible turns to save precious nanoseconds.
This American power duo entered Tuesday’s women’s team combined event as the unequivocal favorites to capture gold. And yet at the end of a long afternoon of racing, another pair of skiers was standing atop the medal stand.
Johnson posted the fastest time in the downhill portion of the competition by six hundredths of a second, but Shiffrin surprisingly was unable to hold the lead several hours later in the slalom. She posted the 15th-fastest time in her run — more than a second slower than the pacesetter, Germany’s Emma Aicher. As a result, the two Americans settled for fourth place.
Austria’s Ariane Raedler and Katharina Huber took gold, while Aicher and Kira Weidle-Winkelmann took silver and Americans Jackie Wiles and Paula Motlzan won bronze.
For Shiffrin, Tuesday’s race is a rocky start to what she hopes will be a redemptive Winter Games for her. Shiffrin was the favorite to win gold in a minimum of three of the six events she entered in Beijing four years ago, but the most accomplished World Cup skier of all-time unfathomably came home with three DNFs and without a single medal.
Mere seconds into her defense of her 2018 Olympic gold medal in the giant slalom, Shiffrin lost her edge making a turn, skidded across the snow and missed the fifth gate. She made a similar error at the top of the slalom course in Beijing. It was the skiing equivalent of watching LeBron James go scoreless in an NBA Finals or Tom Brady throw six interceptions in a Super Bowl.
Shiffrin endured more hard times in November 2024 when a horrific crash in Killington, Vermont, sent her somersaulting over her skis and left her with a puncture wound in the abdomen. She expected to power through her recovery in time to return to competition in a couple months, but the post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the crash was far more debilitating than she expected.
In a first-person account of the ordeal in The Players Tribune last May, Shiffrin described involuntarily stopping in the middle of training runs and not being able to get her body to move like it needed to.
“It was almost as though I was no longer in control of my body,” she wrote.
Shiffrin eventually fought her way back from those setbacks and returned to her previous level. On Feb. 23, 2025, she became the first skier to win 100 career World Cup races. She has continued to stack up victories this season ahead of the Olympics.
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