Mikaela Shiffrin leaves Beijing empty handed after failing to medal in mixed team event

Favored to win at least three medals in Beijing, American Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin will have to settle for the medals she already has.

Shiffrin’s Olympics ended with a close loss to Norway in the bronze medal race of the mixed team parallel event. It was her sixth event of the Beijing Games.

“My teammates are what carried me through this Olympics,” Shiffrin told NBC. “I get people will say we came up short, but the thing is, to have this depth on our team, coming from the U.S., competing in a European-dominated sport…It’s just been incredible to compete today after a long Olympics.”

It was two weeks to forget for the Alpine legend. She competed in all five individual disciplines but only finished two of them. She was ninth in the super-G and 18th in the downhill. She did not finish the slalom, giant slalom and combined races.

Had Shiffrin won a single medal of any color, she would have tied Julia Mancuso for the most ever by an American woman in Alpine skiing.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to fix,” Shiffrin told NBC after another did not finish result in the combined. “I don’t think there’s something to fix. It just went really, really wrong.”

She skied better in the team event. She won her opening slalom race against Slovakia, but then lost in her races in the quarterfinals to Italy, the semifinals to Germany and the bronze medal race to Norway. She did finish all of her races though.

Austria ended up winning the gold medal while Germany took the silver.

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