The best way to prepare for an Olympics is to … not.
For many athletes, the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina fall in the middle of their competitive seasons. Focus solely on the Games, and you put the rest of the season at risk. Go about your season as you would any other, and there’s a good chance you’ll go into the Olympics in peak form.
At least, that’s how skier Mikaela Shiffrin looks at it.
“There’s not a lot you can do in our sport to peak for a big event like the Olympics or world championships. It’s one of those events that falls directly in the center of our season, just weeks if not days after our last World Cup competition,” Shiffrin said earlier this week.
“The idea that most of us tend to have is, the more consistently you perform through the World Cup season, the more you will have momentum, some level of competence — confidence and competence — to bring into the Games.”
That doesn’t mean Shiffrin doesn’t consider the Olympics to be important. She’s experienced some of her highest highs (two gold medals) and lowest lows (Beijing, enough said) at the Games, and knows full well what they mean to her and the rest of the world.
But making the Olympics the end-all and be-all for the year, putting her entire focus on those few races, all but ensures a disappointment.
“The best you can do is to, at least for me, prioritize the races that I think I’ll be the most comfortable with,” Shiffrin said.
That begins with Saturday’s giant slalom race in Soelden, Austria.
What races will Shiffrin do?
Ahead of last season, Shiffrin had planned to race slalom, giant slalom, super-G and, if she could get enough training in, downhill. But the November crash in Killington, Vermont, that left her with a deep puncture wound in her abdomen altered not only her plans for the rest of that season, but this one, too.
Though she returned to the World Cup circuit — and got her 100th and 101st wins — PTSD from the crash limited her GS training and racing. She devoted a good chunk of her offseason to finding her GS rhythm again and, while she feels like she’s in a good spot, that took up time she otherwise would have spent training super-G and downhill.
So downhill is out for this season. Super-G is still a possibility, but Shiffrin has come to terms with the idea that she probably won’t race it at Milan Cortina.
“(The World Cup race) at St. Moritz will be the opportunity for me to see where I stand, if it’s even possible to qualify for the Olympics in super-G,” Shiffrin said. “And if it’s not, then I will move forward with GS and slalom and narrow my focus.
“So that’s kind of very up in the air, a lot of uncertainty there. But I adore super-G, so I don’t want to let it go entirely,” she added. “But it also means that I’ve got to get quite a bit more super-G training in the next weeks, which is hard to balance.”
Strong US team
Acknowledging that downhill and, probably, super-G aren’t a possibility this year caused Shiffrin some “bittersweetness.” But that was tempered with excitement and pride about the rest of the U.S. women’s team, which is the strongest it’s been in years.
Five U.S. women made World Cup podiums last season, the most since 2012-13. Besides Shiffrin, Lauren Macuga won the super-G at St. Anton and claimed a silver in downhill. Breezy Johnson had a bronze in the downhill. Paula Moltzan got bronzes in slalom and GS.
And Lindsey Vonn won silver in the super-G at the World Cup finals after coming out of retirement following a partial knee replacement.
Johnson also won the downhill at the world championships, while Macuga (super-G) and Moltzan (GS) got bronzes.
“The U.S. team is stacked,” Shiffrin said. “I think if I raced downhill, I wouldn’t even qualify. And that’s just kind of the realistic side of it. So in that sense, it’s a little bit liberating to say. I have so many teammates who, they’ve got this.”
Plus, there’s the team combined to look forward to at these Games.
The team combined replaces the super combined. It’s the same premise, one run each of downhill and slalom, only it’s now split between two skiers. Shiffrin and Johnson paired up for the inaugural event at the world championships and won gold.
They had a blast doing it, too, and Shiffrin is thrilled with the opportunity to participate in the team combined again, this time at an Olympics.
“It’s a really incredible dream about team combined,” said Shiffrin, who won a silver in the super combined at the Pyeongchang Games in 2018. “So I would expect to be racing three events. I think that’s pretty safe to say.”
All that’s in the future, though. For now, Shiffrin’s attention is solely on the races right in front of her. The best way to do well at the Olympics is to do well on the World Cup circuit first.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.