Taped to the bathroom mirror of Mikaela Shiffrin’s home-away-from-home in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, was a series of sticky notes—mantras to remember for her alpine ski races at the 2026 Winter Olympics. “You have the ability. Go and EARN what you want,” one read. “I am loved, and this is going to be a great day. It’s going to be so FUN to try!” read another. Every day in Cortina, she’d add a new one to the mirror.
It was the first time Shiffrin tried this tactic in her 15-year World Cup career, but she wanted to do things differently during her fourth Olympic Games.
“I’m sort of looking back at my whole career, and I'm like, ‘I want to show up to Milano Cortina, clean slate,’” she tells Women’s Health via Zoom from Austria, where she’s staying with her fiancé before going back into training for the rest of her ski season.
The Olympics carry some loaded emotions for Shiffrin. “If I could paste the Olympic rings up and then list all of the things that that made me feel, there was a lot,” she says. “It was probably half positive, half negative. And I showed up to Cortina feeling all these things.”
Mikaela already had three Olympic medals heading into these Olympics: At the 2014 Sochi Games, she became the youngest woman to win gold in slalom, and she also won gold and silver medals in Pyeongchang in 2018. She didn’t medal at a challenging Beijing Games in 2022, and then suffered a series of injuries in a 2024 crash, including a puncture wound to her abdomen and severe muscle trauma.
The 2026 Games were her chance at redemption—and she ended them with a gold medal in slalom, setting a record for the longest gap between individual gold medals in the same event. It took a lot of preparation to get back to that point, and most of it was mental.
Mindset Activation
Shiffrin did “a ton of work” with her psychologist last summer to prepare for this ski season, both individually and also in group sessions with her team and coaches. Normally, in a World Cup season, Shiffrin’s life is hectic—as she puts it, “I feel like I'm running around like a headless chicken.” She’s late to most things, lost in the chaos, and barely has time to shower most days. So going into this Olympics, she took as much off her plate as possible to focus on energy conservation.
But when she got to Cortina, the plan that was meant to help her put her at a mental crossroads. “That left me with an insane amount of time to just be with myself and my thoughts, and I was like, ‘I don't like this. I do not like this,’” she says. “A lot of that time was filled with just rambling to my psychologist—and my mom, who is also really one of my psychologists as well—and just kind of stating the things that I was seeing or hearing or worried about.”
Shiffrin admitted to her support system that she was nervous about potentially being criticized by the public for how she performed. She felt like no matter what she was able to do there, something would go wrong. That’s when she started writing reminders to herself on her mirror.
“I need to say it out loud—not just think it in my head, but I need to say these things out loud, and I need to see them,” she says. “It was all centered around basically the mentality I wanted to bring to the start gate and the turns. And I was surprised how helpful that was.”
Some of the mantras were thoughts she’s had over the course of her career; others, like “BIG ENERGY,” are mantras that have fueled her this year. She told her psychologist, who came with her to Cortina, that she wasn’t there just to win a medal—“Obviously, I want that, but I don't want to be thinking about that,” Shiffrin says—but when asked what she did want to be thinking about, she wasn’t sure. When she looked inward, the answers ended up on her sticky notes.
“It’s stuff that came from within me, I suppose,” she says. “But it’s also from the team around me.”
Letting the Haters In
It may seem surprising that an alpine skiing legend with a storied career feels the pressure of outside noise, but Shiffrin is human like the rest of us. And when you feel disappointed by an underwhelming performance from one of your favorite athletes, so do they. “We feel that the same,” she says. But she then had to log on to her social media and see comments threatening her life and her family, telling her she didn’t show up for her country and not to bother coming home.
One of Shiffrin’s coaches asked her if any of the commenters are people she actually cares about. “I’m like, ‘No,’ but that's easy to say,” she says. “If you were stuck in a room of a thousand people who were shouting slurs and all sorts of crap at you and telling you you're worthless, are you telling me that you can actually block out all of that noise?”
Shiffrin wants young athletes to know that in a time when it’s far too easy to gain access to others’ opinions, they can turn it into a learning experience. “It's really, really okay to be doubtful,” she says. “I actually think my doubt and uncertainty and my ability to care about what other people think is a superpower, most of the time. I just would sprinkle in the importance of being able to hear your own voice above those opinions.”
She did stay off of social media almost entirely before her final slalom race in Cortina—except for Instagram, where she expertly curated an Explore page that showed her exactly what she needed.
“There was no sports. There was nothing except for DIY, home organization hacks, and closet cleaning. It was so soothing. I was in heaven,” she says. She’d open the app, close her eyes, and hover her finger over the button to take her to her happy place. “And then I'd be like, ‘Now I'm peaceful.’”
Trusting Herself
At the Olympics, Shiffrin realized that, sometimes, if she’s staying true to herself and her values, there will be criticism—and that’s something she can accept. “I felt like every day we were in Cortina, it was like I gained a sticky, I lost a fuck to give to things that didn’t serve me,” she says with a laugh. “But it doesn't happen overnight. That's the thing. You can't just show up and be like, ‘I said this to myself, and now I'm going to have an Olympic-winning performance.’”
She put in the mental work for years to achieve a gold medal performance, and also made adjustments to the snow conditions and course settings during her training time in Cortina. “I felt like I had new tools in my tool belt by the end of the Games. So it was actually more about trusting the training and the practice we did,” she says. “And in moments of uncertainty, it's like, ‘Okay, we're going to let that in and sort of let it flow through. There's no guarantees here.’”
Though the Olympics are over, the ski season is not. Shiffrin has already secured the World Cup slalom title with four weeks left to go, but the overall title is a goal for her “on par with an Olympic medal,” she says. She may have won gold in Italy, but she’s not taking that for granted.
“I went through all this, and it was amazing, and this is now written in history—and just because that happened doesn't mean it's guaranteed the next time around,” she says. “Every single time you win a race, you still need to go back out and put all the same effort, or more, in the next race.”
Her Cortina sticky note collection has since been taken down. But if she could add a new one to carry her through these next few races, she says, it would be: “The work doesn't stop.”
Amanda Lucci is the director of special projects at Women’s Health, where she works on multi-platform brand initiatives and social media strategy. She also leads the sports and athletes vertical, traveling to cover the Paris Olympics, Women’s World Cup, WNBA Finals, and NCAA Final Four for WH. She has nearly 15 years of experience writing, editing, and managing social media for national and international publications and is also a NASM-certified personal trainer. A proud native of Pittsburgh, PA, she is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Follow her on Instagram @alucci.
