Mikaela Shiffrin's View From the Top

Mikaela Shiffrin took the call that changed everything on the first day of February, at a mountain resort high in the Italian part of the Alps. She had been holed up there for an in-season training break, two months into a campaign that she had described in November as one of great “transition.” She wanted to build on her unprecedented 17 World Cup victories from a year earlier and add to her already-astounding career total. But she would continue her march toward the all-time wins record without her grandmother—her beloved Nana died last year—and while acclimating to changes with her team and its training operation. And she tried to do it all while wrestling with the fact that though she belonged among the planet’s most dominant athletes, she couldn’t always see herself that way.

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