Mikaela Shiffrin has been having a tremendous run with her skis in the last few months. As a result, she has also been nominated for the Laureus Sportswoman of the Year award this year.
However, although Shiffrin had a glorious end to the year 2022, she did not have a similar beginning to it. At the start of 2022, the skiing legend had to return without a medal from the Beijing Olympics, which led to a lot of social media hate. But she didn’t stand alone in that low moment of her life. 7x Olympic medalist Simone Biles stood right alongside her.
Now that skiing icon has been nominated for the award, Mikaela Shiffrin, Simone Biles and 5x gold Olympic medalist Missy Franklin had a live Instagram session together for Laureus Sports ahead of International Women’s Day. During the live chat, Biles and Shiffrin opened up about the unsuccessful Beijing Olympics and what they felt about it.
An unsuccessful event for a legend like Mikaela Shiffrin can be extremely hurtful for her as an athlete. But when the hate comments from social media add up to that, it becomes worse. In the live, Shiffrin depicted the way she felt during these Olympics as it was amidst COVID with strict lockdown protocols.
Altogether, it made the quarantine bubble smaller and broke all the connections from outside the Olympic village. She expressed her emotions saying, “The only connection you get is on Twitter, on Instagram, just basically seeing what comments come up. Sometimes what you see is negative comments, you don’t see any of the support. It’s always like, ‘You choked. Don’t even come back to the US. It’s unbelievable you could fail so badly.’”
On the other hand, Simone Biles, went through the same during the Tokyo Olympics when she withdrew her contention from the finals. She knew how Shiffrin would have been feeling after the Olympics.
Hence, she connected with her so that she didn’t feel alone. In the video, Biles disclosed her thoughts back then. She said, “I saw the experience that Mikaela went through and I had just gone through that, so I didn’t want her to feel alone and [I was] like, ‘Hey, it’s OK. This stuff happens. You’re still amazing. Who cares about the comments?’”
