Mikaela Shiffrin

Mikaela Pauline Shiffrin (born March 13, 1995) is an American World Cup alpine ski racer with the U.S. Ski Team, specializing in the technical events of slalom and giant slalom. She is the reigning Olympic, World Cup, and world champion in slalom. Shiffrin is the youngest slalom champion in Olympic alpine skiing history, at 18 years and 345 days.

Background and early years

Born in Vail, Colorado, Shiffrin is the second child of Eileen (née Condron) and Jeff Shiffrin, both originally from the Northeast and former ski racers. When Mikaela was eight in 2003, the family moved to rural New Hampshire near Lyme, where her anesthesiologist father worked at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center. After five years, he took a new job in Denver; older brother Taylor was in high school at Burke Mountain Academy in northeastern Vermont, and stayed. Mikaela also attended Burke for middle school, but went with her parents to Colorado, but soon returned to Burke.

Shiffrin began rising up through the ranks in alpine racing as soon as she was old enough to compete in FIS sanctioned races. While meeting the minimum age requirement of 15 years, she won a Nor-Am Cup super combined race in December 2010 at Panorama in British Columbia, only the eighth FIS-level race in which she had competed. Shiffrin followed it up by three podiums in her next three Nor-Am races: runner-up in a super-G, third in a GS, and victory in a slalom. Weeks later, she won a pair of Nor-Am slalom races held at Sunday River, Maine. A month later Shiffrin took the slalom bronze medal at the FIS Junior World Ski Championships held at Crans-Montana, Switzerland (after having been down with a stomach flu the day before). In 2014 she was named one of ESPNW's Impact 25.