CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If anyone knows what struggling U.S. Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin is going through right now, it’s former American speed skater Dan Jansen.
Much like Shiffrin, Jansen crashed out twice in a single Winter Olympics in 1988, and due to that and other tragic circumstances picked up the nickname “The Heartbreak Kid.”
Jansen was glued to a TV in his Mooresville, N.C., home Wednesday when Shiffrin skidded past a slalom gate only five seconds into her race and failed to finish for the second time in these 2022 Olympics. Her shocking miss resulted in another premature exit in Beijing for the gold-medal favorite. After missing the gate, Shiffrin sat down, alone, on the side of the course and bowed her head before her teammates came over to console her.
“I was sitting there watching her last night, and I felt sick to my stomach,” Jansen said in a phone interview Thursday. “And then I thought: ‘Yeah, I guess this is how people felt when they watched me.’ ... I was heartbroken. And I’ve been through this, so I get it.”
Two days earlier, Shiffrin had crashed 11 seconds into the giant slalom race, where she was the defending gold medalist.
The nearly immediate, back-to-back DNFs have taken their toll on Shiffrin, 26. She is already one of the most decorated skiers in history and a previous Olympic gold-medal winner, but she has now failed to finish both of what were considered her two best events in the 2022 Olympics.
In a wrenching and tearful post-race interview on NBC Wednesday after another race ended in anguish, Shiffrin said: “It makes me second-guess the last 15 years, everything I thought I knew about my own skiing and slalom and racing mentality. Just processing a lot, for sure. And I feel really bad.”
Jansen, 56, said he understood the emotion of that moment.
“I saw her interview, and it just broke my heart, too,” he said.
But when he heard Shiffrin “second-guess the last 15 years” of her skiing in part of that interview, he cringed.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Like, I know what she means. But she just can’t do that. If she had been doing things wrong the past 15 years, she wouldn’t have 80 World Cup wins or whatever.”
Now a personal trainer for elite athletes in both NASCAR and golf, Jansen has lived in Mooresville since 1999. He was able to write a happy ending to his own Olympic story. But it took him many years.
It wasn’t until 1994 in Norway, six years after Jansen’s two Olympic falls that were replayed hundreds of times just like Shiffrin’s stumbles have been, that he won a gold medal in his final Olympic event. The four-time Olympian then celebrated by taking his baby daughter on a victory spin around the ice. That daughter, Jane, was named for Jansen’s older sister, who had died of leukemia in 1988 just before another one of her brother’s Olympic races.
Jansen’s was a tragic Olympic story that ended in uplift, and he hopes the same thing will happen to Shiffrin before these Olympics are over. She still may have up to three more events in these Olympics.
“Hopefully, she can turn it around,” Jansen said. “If there’s a loss of confidence, that can get contagious, and that’s hard to come back from. But I don’t think it’s that with her.
“I do think there are issues with that snow,” Jansen continued. “I’m not a skier but I’ve talked to several. It’s all artificial snow and it’s a totally different deal. … It’s not a smooth ride the whole way down. I’m not saying she’s using that as an excuse. It’s the same for everybody. But you know she’s aggressive. That has served her really well her whole career. But it didn’t pay off this time.”
“I will try to reset again and maybe try to reset better this time,” Shiffrin told reporters in Beijing after her latest race. She also left open the possibility of ending her competition early, though, as gymnast Simone Biles did during the most recent Summer Olympics.
“But I also don’t know how to do it better, because I just don’t,” Shiffrin said. “I’ve never been in this position before, and I don’t know how to handle it. If I am going to ski out on the fifth gate, well, what’s the point?”
Jansen, and everyone else watching the Olympics, hopes she figures that out soon.
“You can definitely rebound if you know your body and you know you did everything right,” he said. “I believe, after all this time, she knows what she’s doing, and so do her coaches. I’m rooting for her.”
