Mikaela Shiffrin says she still is not sure whether she will compete in the women’s downhill skiing event at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
Shiffrin on Monday went through her second training run in the downhill and had a time of 1:41.55. Afterwards, she told NBC that she still was not sure if she would compete in the event, which is on Wednesday.
“I want to, for sure. But I’m kind of going to see how it goes tomorrow because I definitely want to pick up my speed in sections. That’s kind of my biggest goal for tomorrow, and then we’ll see,” Shiffrin said.
As she indicated in her interview, Shiffrin is planning to ski in a third training run on Tuesday.
Shiffrin entered the Olympics planning to compete in five events — giant slalom, slalom, super-G, downhill and combined — but that plan went out the window with the poor weather conditions. The bad weather delayed competitions, compacted the schedule, and led Shiffrin to drop out of the super-G. She won gold in the giant slalom but failed to medal in the slalom. She vomited before her slalom run and later admitted she was nervous.
Shiffrin may choose to skip the downhill if she does not feel like she can medal in the event, that way she can conserve her energy and shift her focus to the combined. After all, Shiffrin does not want to have another performance that ends as a “big disappointment.”
