Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • TIME

    INSIDE THE RACING MIND OF THE BEST SKIER ON EARTH

    Mikaela Shiffrin is ready to set records in PyeongChang
    by SEAN GREGORY/AVON, COLO. Feb 12, 2018 8 minutes
    Shiffrin during her ’17 world championship slalom race; she’s chasing five Olympic medals

    “YOU WANT ME TO SAY SOMETHING THAT I CAN’T. I don’t do guarantees, and I’m not gonna start now just so you can bet on me. I have no idea how I’m gonna feel on race day. I only know that right now, I’m happy, I’m skiing fast, and I’m having FUN.”

    ONE HOUR BEFORE RACING DOWN A mountain in Flachau, Austria, in early January, the 22-year-old American skier Mikaela Shiffrin typed those words on her phone. It was a text message to herself, a way of coping with the potentially crushing expectations that come with being the most dominant all-around skier in the world and a favorite to win multiple gold medals at the Winter Olympics, which open Feb. 9 in PyeongChang, South Korea. The texts help Shiffrin focus on the present rather than fretting over the future, allowing her prodigious talent to nudge aside her sometimes crippling anxiety.

    It worked in Austria. Shiffrin trailed after her first run, but she rallied in the second to win the event, becoming the first woman or man in two decades to win five straight World Cup races. “I can also tell you,” she wrote in that same message, “I’m equipped to handle dang near anything that can possibly come my way.”

    Much is riding on those

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from TIME

    TIME2 min read
    What’s With All The Cicadas?
    More than a trillion noisy, inch-long (or larger) cicadas have surfaced from underground across much of the U.S. this spring, in a massive co-emergence that hasn’t been seen in more than 200 years. It was the first time since 1803—when Thomas Jeffers
    TIME2 min readPolitical Ideologies
    The Party Of Mandela Fails To Deliver
    The African National Congress has led South Africa’s government since the end of apartheid in 1994. But as voters go to the polls on May 29, there’s good reason to wonder whether the ANC might be in real trouble. During the ANC’s most recent term in
    TIME2 min read
    A Man In Full, Adapted And Redacted
    Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publicatio

    Related Books & Audiobooks