Twelve years ago, under a black night sky in the Caucasas Mountains north of Sochi, Russia, 18-year-old American Mikaela Shiffrin skied to a gold medal in the Olympic slalom. She was precocious — the youngest U.S. Alpine ski racer to win a gold medal (or any medal at all) — but also preordained, a prodigy whose future was laid out years earlier when she was an adolescent star at a ski academy in Vermont, schooling much older racers, set on fast rails toward greatness. That night, German skier Maria Reisch, who had won four Olympic medals, including two in those Games, spoke for the chorus: "She will definitely win many, many races." Surely that would include many, many medals. At the bottom of her winning run, Shiffrin skied a wide arc around the finish corral and raised her arms into the air; her father, Jeff, put down his ever-present camera and screamed for joy, tears filling his eyes and running into his salt-and-pepper mustache. It was the beginning.

Shiffrin won another Olympic gold medal in the slalom on Wednesday afternoon, this time in the beautiful and ancient village of Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites. She became the first Alpine skier to win golds 12 years apart (whether in the same event or others). And after being the youngest American to win a gold, in Sochi, she’s now the oldest, at age 30. (Not the oldest from any nation; Italian Federica Brignone, 35, has won two golds at these Games). It was Shiffrin's fourth Olympic medal, the most by an American skier; and her third gold, ditto, although her first in eight years, and those eight years are the spine of her story.

This time she did not skate a wide, joyful arc in the corral; she drifted slowly and then fell to her knees and dropped her head toward the snow, as if in supplication, which in effect she was. Four years ago in Beijing, she failed to complete her first runs in slalom and giant slalom, and her slalom run in the Alpine combined. She did not earn a medal in six races, a stunning performance from an athlete acknowledged as the best in the world. Thus her story was re-written on the fly as a tale of struggle — and failure — against expectation and pressure. That is partly fair. Shiffrin said after her victory, "I have an ever-evolving relationship with expectations." 

With those expectations and that pressure piled ever higher in Cortina, she skied a shockingly slow slalom in the two-person combined event and finished 4th with downhill winner Breezy Johnson. She was 11th in the giant slalom, in which she has slowly come back from an injury a year ago, and was just a medal contender, not a favorite. Nevertheless, it was all incongruous: Shiffrin arrived in Cortina with 108 World Cup victories, 23 more than any other skier, and a preposterous 71 wins in slalom. Away from the Games, she was a winning machine; at the Games, the distance grew from her last medal.

But it wasn't just a story about expectation and pressure. It was also a story about love and loss, about grief and absence, about a change so big that it can't be defeated. Jeff Shiffrin died in the first week of February in 2020, in an accident in Colorado, while Mikaela and her mother/coach, Eileen, were on the circuit in Europe. Like so many sports families, the Shiffrins were a team, bound together by frenetic schedules, shared understandings, and by love. Jeff was the first person to tell Shiffrin to ski in arcs, not the pizza wedges taught to most toddlers. To teach the beauty of the perfect turn. To chase process, not medals, from which medals flowed. She has missed him since, and it was inescapable that until Wednesday, Shiffrin had not won an Olympic medal since her father died. In Beijing, after skiing out of the slalom, Shiffrin said to reporters gathered at the bottom of the hill, "Right now, I'd really like to call him, so that doesn't make it easier. So I'm pretty angry at him, too. He would probably just tell me to get over it." It was right there to see.

On Wednesday in Cortina, Shiffrin took a giant lead of 0.82 seconds in the first run of slalom. On the hard, fast snow that showcases her skills, Shiffrin looked like the skier who had won seven of the eight World Cup slaloms this year (the last seven of those 71 overall); dazzlingly quick feet, quiet upper body, controlled desperation. A league apart from the others.

Between runs, she tried to take a nap. At her best, Shiffrin is a prodigious sleeper; it is one of her many superpowers. Instead: "I sort of started to cry a little bit because I was thinking about my dad." More: "Part of my journey through grief has been challenging because I don't feel this thing that people talk about, this like deep spiritual connection with their loved one. Sometimes I've also been resentful of the people who talk about feeling this [deceased] person like 'They're here with me and they're carrying me though this day,' and I'm like, 'Where?' Like, 'The f—?' Sorry. Why do you get to feel that and I don't?" This is what she carries. And in her fashion, shares.

She skied the second run more perfectly than the first, a stunning combination of grace on snow and violence against the mountain, a succession of perfect turns. She won by 1.50 seconds over Camille Rast of Switzerland, the biggest margin in any Olympic Alpine race since 1998. She has always struggled to quantify her performances in the language of sports, of victory and defeat. "My whole career has been built on focusing on my turns, and trying to just improve my skiing," she said after Wednesday's race, "which probably feels a little bit boring. I love going training and taking runs and just lap after lap ... I love and treasure that so much. In races ... you have two runs and it's a little more stressful. I have a challenging relationship with racing." But this was racing in its most primal form, dominant.

On this day, she set herself free. "The biggest task was to simplify and focus on the skiing," she said. "But I had some moments today where I could imagine doing the skiing, cross the finish line, and to have this moment, actually. And to connect with the people who can't be here, and also the people who are here, and for my dad, who didn't get to see this. I don't want to be in life without my dad, and today was maybe the first time I could actually accept this." So as she knelt on the ground: "Instead of thinking I would be in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him."

It is ever perilous to suggest that an athlete is owed something, or anything. The scoreboard always makes that decision. Shiffrin was asked about Sochi. "The world was my oyster," she said. "And I did not know my path over even the next four years." Never mind 12. She did not know that she would win two more medals in 2018 in PyeongChang, and yet be subtly called out for not winning a third, in slalom, a ridiculous qualifier. That she would lose, first, a grandmother, and then her father. That her mother would be diagnosed with cancer. That Beijing would yank the joy from underneath her skis. That Cortina would restore it.

Through it all, Sochi demanded a bookend. The most accomplished Alpine skier in history deserved better than to have an asterisk stuck next to her name. Perfect turns deserved gold.