Mikaela Shiffrin did not get out of bed for a few days after her father, Jeff Shiffrin, died. She didn’t eat, and her mother feared Mikaela would never ski again. Anderson Cooper recalled those hard days on the All There Is podcast’s Father’s Day edition with Mikaela Shiffrin. The three-time Olympic gold medalist looked back on those days, recalling her grief, confusion, and feeling lost.

“I didn’t care,” Shiffrin said on the All There Is podcast. “I experienced this overwhelming sense of apathy. I almost dreaded that there would come a point in time where my team and my family and the people around me would ask, like, “Okay, so when do you wanna get back on [laughs] snow?” And I just was, like, wishing everything would come to a standstill.”

That feeling was perhaps inevitable, given how close Shiffrin and her father, Jeff, were and how integral he was to her skiing journey. The older Shiffrin literally kicked off his daughter’s journey into the sport when she was two years old. Then, from the moment she decided to take it seriously, he was her everything.

She added, “And that’s just been an ongoing question in my head for probably at least the first two years, but especially the immediate few weeks. Sleep is hard. I don’t think I ate. I just felt like it was hard to feel the will to live.

“Not that I didn’t want to be alive, but just that I really was searching for a reason to get out of bed, and didn’t really have that. I didn’t feel like ski racing was nearly a good enough reason to want to exist.”

Her reaction made sense given the role Jeff played in her life. While her mother travelled with her for Mikaela Shiffrin’s competitions, her father did everything else. She even revealed in 2022 in a piece for The Players’ Tribune that after winning Olympic gold in Sochi, she doesn’t remember much. If anything, she admitted that she felt more “dumbfounded” than anything else, not really grasping the reality of the moment.

But what Shiffrin does remember very vividly is celebrating with her father, the first person she hugged after winning gold.

“He was crying… He pulled me tight, and he was so proud. I can still feel that hug,” she wrote.

That trend continued as Mikaela Shiffrin flew down slopes, collecting gold medals like candy. And her father was right there almost every time. He became so ever-present that the skiing community fell in love with the man filming his daughter’s success at almost every meet.

It’s why his sudden death at 65, in February 2020, after an accidental fall at their Colorado home, stunned Shiffrin so badly. She even questioned: “What is the point of my existence?” The 31-year-old fell completely out of love with skiing.

She believed skiing was no longer worth it, so much so that it became a looming question in her head for a long time. She felt a “complete sense of apathy in my whole body.”

“I didn’t feel like wanting to win ski races had any place in my life anymore,” Shiffrin explained. “So it was more like maybe this guilt that you have things that inspire you, the things that drive you in life that feel very meaningless when something like this happens.”

At 24, an already historic career was on the verge of ending. Few would blame her, but the right support system, including her brother Taylor and mother Eileen, helped Mikaela Shiffrin wade through it. It was a tough return, winning her first event ten months after her father’s death, and the feeling of doing so without Jeff made it even tougher.

Mikaela Shiffrin reflects on winning Olympic gold without her father

The Milan Cortina Olympics proved to be Mikaela Shiffrin’s comeback. Not that a skier of her level even needed one. And yet after her disastrous performance in Beijing four years prior, she needed to turn things around. In her favorite discipline, the giant slalom, Shiffrin did what she does best.

She didn’t just win the gold medal. The American star dominated and beat silver medalist Camille Rast by the largest margin of victory in over 25 years. Not just that, Shiffrin won her first Olympic medal without her father waiting to hug her. And that, more than anything, hurt the 31-year-old.

“Maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this reality, instead of thinking I would be going into this moment without him (her father Jeff),” Shiffrin said after winning gold as per NBC.

“To take the moment to be silent with him, and with the whole team who is here with me now, and my mom, who is here with me now and has been with me since the beginning. It was just a little more spiritual than I usually am, and I’m really grateful for that.”

Now, as she continues re-creating World Cup win records after equalling Annemarie Moser-Pröll’s record for most World Cup titles, Mikaela Shiffrin marches on with her biggest supporter watching from up above.