Mikaela Shiffrin did not get off to the start she hoped for at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Shiffrin, the defending gold medalist in the giant slalom, will not have an opportunity to defend her Olympic title after the 26-year-old skied out during her first run of the event on Monday in Beijing. Because she did not complete the run, Shiffrin is disqualified and will not compete in the second run.
Shiffrin fell and missed a gate early in her run.
“I was attacking and just a small mistiming of when I set my edges and just slipped out,” Shiffrin said on NBC, via Karen Mizoguchi of People.com. “It’s amazing surface, it’s such amazing conditions, but you don’t have any room for some small errors or anything like that and I was pushing, so I’m really happy with that but five gates into the course, that stings.”
According to Tim Layden of NBC Sports, Shiffrin has skied out just 14 times (including Monday) across 229 World Cup, Olympic and World Championship career races, and just three times in four years.
While she will not defend her gold medal from the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, Shiffrin should have plenty of opportunity to take home some hardware. According to The Associated Press, she “hopes to enter all five individual events” in the sport.
If she can claim first place in any event, Shiffrin will be the first Alpine skier from the United States to win three Olympic gold medals.
