I first saw Mikaela Shiffrin ski when she was 14 at an Eastern championship for top junior racers culled from nine states. Shiffrin beat everyone (including my daughter) by 11 seconds in a race usually decided by tenths of a second, if not hundredths.
I wandered over to a group of coaches from elite ski racing academies I knew and asked, “Who is this Shiffrin?”
“She’s Mozart,” one answered. The other coaches told me I would be writing about her for the next 20 years.
This is just to say that Shiffrin has been justly famous in the ski racing world since 2010, and that seems to have skewed our assessment of her.