Mikaela Shiffrin Says Winning Olympic Gold Is Why She Could ‘Actually Accept’ Her Dad’s Death After She ‘Never Thought’ She Would Ski Again Following His Fatal Accident
Mikaela Shiffrin just took home her third Olympic gold medal in women’s slalom at the 2026 Winter Olympics at Milan Cortina. The skier couldn’t have gotten her moment of glory without her parents.
Shiffrin has been open about how her father’s death has affected her competition and abilities. “This was a moment I have dreamed about. I’ve also been very scared of this moment,” she said in a press conference after winning gold. “Everything in life that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience. It’s like being born again, and I still have so many moments where I resist this. I don’t want to be in life without my dad.”
“Maybe today was the first time I could actually accept this reality. And instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him,” she said, fighting back tears. “And with the whole team who’s here with me now, and with 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, but I’m really grateful for that.”
Who is Mikaela Shiffrin’s dad, Jeff?
Jeff Shiffrin was an anaesthetist based in Vail, Colo. He met his wife, Eileen, when he was taking his residency at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton, Massachusetts, where she was an ICU nurse. He was a skier at Dartmouth.
Jeff and Eileen were heavily involved and supportive in Mikaela’s career in skiing, and they enrolled her and their older son Taylor, in Ski and Snowboard Club Vail.
Jeff Shiffrin died due to a head trauma accident on Feb. 2, 2020. “He was doing something on the roof and somehow, he fell off and hit his head,” Eileen shared in the Adidas video. “Mikaela laid with her head on his chest for nine hours. We ended up having to withdraw support, and she heard his heart stop beating, so that’s a hard thing to go through.”
She added, “We lost our rock — the person that we all loved the most.”
While grieving her father’s death, Mikaela’s mom revealed that she was contemplating her skiing career. I didn’t think Mikaela would ever ski again,” Eileen said in adidas’ Illuminated docuseries. “I don’t think she thought she would, either.”
She took a break from skiing and started it up again in hopes of getting closer to her father. “That whole season, we didn’t want to be there,” Mikaela recalled in the docuseries. “There was this crazy battle between, ‘I don’t really want to be here or existing, but I still like ski racing, and I still am good at it, and I still want to win races.'”
During her races, she wears a locket with pictures of her dad and text inscribed, “Always with you, love Dad.”
Who is Mikaela Shiffrin’s mom, Eileen?
Eileen Shiffrin is Mikaela’s coach. She was an ICU nurse and became her daughter’s coach when she was a toddler.
The two have an unbreakable bond. “Probably one of the factors that has made a difference between my career and anybody else is having her to keep me on track, to help me stay sane, to be my best friend, to be my mum, to be my coach,” Shiffrin told CNN in March 2017.
At the 2025 World Cup, Eileen missed her daughter’s races because she was diagnosed with cancer and had six weeks of treatments.
