“I went into her closet and just buried my head in her clothes. It was the first thing I did when I came home after my father passed away. »
Posted at 7:55 p.m.
It is on this sentence that begins the text, powerful and felt, of the American star skier Mikaela Shiffrin published Thursday on the site The Players Tribune.
The winningest active athlete on the World Cup circuit first recounts the moment when she received a call from her brother in February 2020 telling her the terrible news: their father had had a serious accident. At this time, Shiffrin was on a trip to Italy with his mother.
“The last thing the doctors said to us before we got on the plane was, ‘We’ll do everything we can to keep him alive until you get here,'” he said. she.
“That night everyone came out of the hospital room and I got on the bed with him. I just put his arm around me. I stood there for nine hours, just to let him know I was there. I put my head on his chest and I could still hear his heart beating. I know he felt that I was there with him. I know it. »
In a text full of sincerity, Shiffrin recounts his mourning. A grief that she has not yet completely overcome and that she will probably never overcome.
Usually, when something terrible happens to you in a nightmare, you wake up in a cold sweat, your heart beats very fast and you slowly realize that “Okay. It was a nightmare. Phew. They are not really dead”.
Mikaela Shiffrin
“For me, it was the opposite,” she continues. In my dreams, he was still there. When I woke up, I slowly realized that the nightmare was very real. »
A letter
In this text, Mikaela Shiffrin wanted to share her story in order to help those who could go through an ordeal like hers. It is also the letter from a stranger, a volunteer at an orphanage in Portland, who herself helped her when she was at her lowest, she explains. Said letter “resonated deeply” with her.
“I remember it said, ‘You’ll probably need to tell stories about your dad that everyone will have heard 100 times by now, but that’s okay. Keep telling them. ””
“It said, ‘Remember, grieving is not an intellectual process. It said, ‘It’s okay to be mad at your dad for leaving you. And it said, ‘You are grieving as much as you love. ””
“If that last part is true, then maybe I’ll never stop grieving. And that’s okay, too,” she adds.
After her painful loss, the skier had great difficulty returning to her sport, a sport that has always been an integral part of the Shiffrin family. A sport she learned alongside her father.
“Even when I found the strength to get back on the mountain, it was a constant struggle to just feel okay. To not feel guilty for doing the thing I loved to do, she explains. When I knew I had the chance to win my first race after his death, I experienced this surreal moment at the top of the mountain, before my second descent. I knew that if I had a good race, I would win. But if I won, I would win in a reality where my father is no more. And I wondered: do I even want to exist in this reality? »
beijing
To everyone’s surprise, the American skier went off course three times during her five races at the Beijing Olympics last February. She did not win any medals, despite having won gold in the giant slalom at the Sochi Games in 2018.
On this subject, the athlete explains that his “truth is much more complicated than what you see on television or than what you hear in a press conference”. “People always ask me, ‘What happened in Beijing? “They want an answer. And I honestly have none,” she wrote.
“After Beijing, when I won the World Cup, people would say things to me like, ‘Mikaela, now that you’re in a better place mentally…’ […] I never said it out loud, but I always said to myself: “am I really? ””
“We associate winning with being good and failure with not being good. But the real truth is that I’m neither good nor bad. It depends on the day and it has almost nothing to do with how fast I descend a mountain. »