MILAN — A day after dropping one of the most dominant gold-medal performances in Olympic slalom history, American star Mikaela Shiffrin dropped an F-bomb while describing the victory — an on-air slip she joked may have been influenced by the espresso martini she drank during her post-race celebration.
Shiffrin has won more World Cup races than any skier in history but had failed to medal at the Olympics since 2018, including not making the podium in either of her first two competitions at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy this month.
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But during her third and final opportunity to medal on Wednesday, Shiffrin dominated the slalom, her strongest event, winning by the event’s largest margin of victory at an Olympics since 1998.
During the more than three hours between Shiffrin’s first and second runs, she tried to nap in Team USA’s tent in Cortina to “control her energy.” She said she began trying to talk with her father, Jeff, who died in 2020.
“When I was sleeping, I started thinking about my dad, and it was just, it was just this moment, like, I want to be able to have some communication with him, and I can’t have that,” Shiffrin told “TODAY.” “But I thought, what the heck? Maybe it’s OK if you talk to him, even if you don’t hear him respond, you know, in the normal way. It was a little bit more spiritual than how I normally am acting; I’m a little bit more rational, logical.”
“But at the same time, I think there’s been definitely a spiritual journey I’ve been on the last years that I just, I don’t know, I took a moment and I just said, f-----g,” she said, stopping herself after realizing she cursed on live TV.
“S---!” Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” she then said.
As Shiffrin continued to apologize, she was asked about how she spent Wednesday night reveling in the cathartic victory, including a stop at Team Austria’s house in Cortina d’Ampezzo. That celebration included an espresso martini, which she said was her first drink in at least two years, as she had paused amid her recovery from a brutal 2024 crash that left her with a puncture wound in her side.
“So everybody kept handing me espresso martinis because I said that it was my destiny to have one last night,” Shiffrin said. “Everybody kept bringing them to me, but then they would also say, which may be some of the reason for the swearing — so sorry, again — they just kept handing them to me, and then they’re like, ‘But pace yourself!’”
“Everyone’s like, ‘Just pace yourself! But here’s another. But pace yourself!’ I probably, through the course of the evening, I probably had a total of just one, so I felt actually great this morning.”
The gold medal added to her Olympic gold in slalom from 2014, when Shiffrin was 18. The 12 years between that win and her return atop the podium Wednesday is the largest gap between an individual gold medals by any athlete in the same event in Olympic history, per NBC Sports research.
She joins Switzerland's Vreni Schneider as the only woman to win two gold medals in slalom in their career.
With four Olympic medals in her career, Shiffrin has tied Julia Mancuso for the most of any U.S. Alpine skier. And regardless of sport, Shiffrin is also one of just four U.S. athletes to ever win three career gold medals at the Winter Olympics.
“There were three or four moments where I could have been off the course, but sort of every run that I take, when it’s a winning run, it feels miraculous that I make it to the finish,” Shiffrin said. “And it maybe doesn’t look that way, but it feels so on the limit. And I crossed the finish line, I was like, ‘I know that was good skiing, so take a moment for yourself to sort of appreciate that.’”
