Mikaela Shiffrin made history again on Tuesday, winning her 105th career World Cup race in the floodlights of a French alpine night. This win in the slalom at Courchevel was her fourth in a row to start the Olympic season. But for an athlete who could have enjoyed being so much better than everyone else, the feeling she chose to enjoy was not fulfillment, but a signal to start the next, more difficult climb.

Shiffrin told The Athletic after her win, “Lock in this feeling.” Her words were not about the past but about the challenging future.

“I have some work I want to accomplish with (giant slalom). The super-G was such a positive step, so I want to get some training there too. But it’s time for a little bit of recovery as well after the last nine weeks.”

The work she talks about is quite personal; it’s an effort to rebuild both her body and mind. Shiffrin was badly hurt in a fall during a giant slalom competition in Killington, Vermont, last season. She had an almost three-inch puncture hole in her lower abdomen that almost hit her colon and needed surgery. It was challenging for her to get better physically because she had to rebuild her core muscles from scratch.

However, the more dangerous problem was how it changed her mind about the speed and aggression needed for giant slalom and super-G, the very sports where she is now trying to make up for what she did wrong. And this season has been a careful effort to gain that prowess back.

Mikaela Shiffrin is taking calculated steps

Mikaela Shiffrin’s slalom form is a fortress of confidence, as seen by her four wins by huge margins. But giant slalom has been a different story. She calmly accepted her 14th-place finish at Copper Mountain as part of the process. Since then, she has moved up to sixth and fourth place in Mont-Tremblant. These are not setbacks for Shiffrin, but important steps.

“You want to level up the in incredible moments, but you also want to level up the baseline. This whole beginning of the season has been increasing my baseline of what I tolerate in giant slalom skiing and the speed that I tolerate and the tempo and everything,” she explained, viewing each race as exposure therapy for her instincts.

The ultimate destination for this journey is Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, and the 2026 Winter Olympics. The Games are a complicated part of her legacy. She won two gold medals there in 2014 and 2018, but she also had a terrible performance there in 2022 and didn’t win any medals. She still wants to win an Olympic super-G medal, but only if she can first make her giant slalom so safe that it will never break her confidence again.

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So, she’s not running away from the shadow of her Killington crash; instead, she’s moving into it on purpose, using the confidence she has in her slalom skiing to fix what was damaged.