Mikaela Shiffrin (and Aleksander Kilde?!)

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Well folks, this is a big one. Olympic champion, World Champion, and 69-time World Cup winner Mikaela Shiffrin gives us a chunk of her very-busy, Olympic-prepping schedule to talk over Zoom. First and importantly, we talk about the Jeff Shiffrin Athlete Resiliency Fund (keeptheflamealive.org), which gives direct aid to National Team athletes. The fund is named after Mikaela’s late father, and I ask her a bit about him. Then we try to figure out who Mikaela would be if she didn’t ski race, what it’s like being the person that’s supposed to win every single race, and how she handles the tightrope of social media. At the end, we have some fun with her boyfriend (and 2020 Overall Champion) Aleksander Kilde. We also get to ask him a couple serious questions, as he is coming back from his ACL tear and looking ahead to the Olympics. The Skiing History nugget  this episode involves the surprisingly early invention of indoor skiing, and at the end, as always, we read the mail.