Mikaela Shiffrin surprisingly struggled at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The 30-year-old Team U.S. alpine skier had a difficult time during her slalom run on Tuesday (February 10), and her scoring ultiamtely led to a 4th place finish for herself and teammate Breezy Johnson during the debut alpine skiing combined event, a first at the Olympics.

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The new competition sees two people from the same team compete, one in a single downhill run and the other in a single slalom run, and their scores are combined for the final result.

She skied with “measured” effort and showed “tension,” an NBC announcer said during the run, via HuffPo.

Mikaela previously won the world title at the 2025 FIS World Alpine Ski Championships.

“Heading into Cortina, there are things that I, for lack of a better word, there’s things that scare me. Some of it is sort of irrational. Some things are like really very real, you know kind of logistical concerns and things like that. Most of it actually has nothing to do with sport…it’s like life oriented,” she said on What’s the Point with Mikaela Shiffrin.

“It’s things having to do with my family and the health of my family and just things that are unrelated to the performance, unrelated to the Olympics entirely. But these are things that I just simply can’t push into a box and forget they exist for 3 weeks.”

Her teammates Jacqueline Wiles and Paula Moltzan took the bronze.

She has three Olympic medals. Her career haul includes two gold medals (slalom in 2014, giant slalom in 2018) and one silver medal (combined in 2018). She is competing in her fourth Olympics.

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