Mikaela Shiffrin’s Beijing 2022 Olympics were one of the most dramatic storylines of the Games, turning from sky‑high expectations to a shockingly medal‑less campaign that she later described as both heartbreaking and transformative.

What happened in Beijing 2022?

Shiffrin entered Beijing as a multiple Olympic champion and one of the biggest stars of the Games, with many expecting her to contend for several medals across multiple alpine events. Instead, she struggled in uncharacteristic ways, especially in her best technical disciplines, and left the Olympics without a single medal.

Her individual event results at Beijing 2022 were:

  • Giant slalom (7 Feb): DNF in the first run.
  • Slalom (9 Feb): DNF in the first run (her signature event).
  • Super‑G (11 Feb): 9th place.
  • Downhill (15 Feb): 18th place.
  • Alpine combined (17 Feb): 5th fastest in downhill, DNF in the slalom leg.

In her final opportunity, the mixed team parallel event, Team USA finished fourth after losing the bronze-medal race to Norway on time tiebreak, so she left the Games without any medals.

The DNFs and emotional impact

The most shocking part of her Beijing 2022 story was the back‑to‑back DNFs in the giant slalom and slalom, both within just a few gates of starting, and then another DNF in the slalom leg of the combined. For an athlete who is historically dominant in slalom and had recently broken the all‑time World Cup record for wins in a single discipline, these errors were nearly unimaginable and became a defining narrative of the Games.

In interviews, she sounded stunned and frustrated, saying she didn’t have a clear explanation for why things were going wrong, even though she didn’t feel like she was taking reckless risks. She talked about how “annoying” it was not to understand what was happening and admitted that she always tries to analyze mistakes, but in Beijing she felt a strange disconnect between what she knew how to do and what her body did on race day.

Mixed team event and “almost” medal

Her last race was the mixed team parallel, where she and Team USA came agonizingly close to the podium. The U.S. squad:

  • Beat Slovakia in the opening round.
  • Beat Italy in the quarterfinals.
  • Lost to Germany 1–3 in the semifinals.
  • Faced Norway in the small final and tied 2–2, losing on total time (time countback).

Shiffrin skied all of her heats on the slower red course and won 1 of her 4 head‑to‑head races, losing three of them by fractions of a second. After finishing fourth, she said it “could have easily been a bronze, it could have been a silver, it could have been a gold,” and that she was proud of the team’s potential even while feeling she had let them down.

Pressure, hate, and her response

The poor results triggered intense scrutiny and online criticism, which she publicly acknowledged. In the months after the Games, she drew parallels between her experience in Beijing and Simone Biles’ highly scrutinized Tokyo Olympics, noting the pressure, confusion, and the difficulty of treating herself with the same compassion she had for others.

Shiffrin later posted about the hateful comments she and others receive, explaining that she had shared some of those messages not to amplify “haters” but to support people who are being targeted. Her message to them was to “keep on going,” not to waste energy on haters, and to focus instead on getting up each day and continuing their own path.

How Beijing 2022 fits into her story now

Beijing 2022 stands out as a rare Olympic low in Shiffrin’s otherwise dominant career, with an eight‑race Olympic medal drought stretching across those Games and into her next Olympic appearances. Yet later coverage has framed her subsequent Olympic gold as “sweet redemption,” explicitly contrasting that triumph with the “disastrous” Beijing campaign and emphasizing how she used that setback as fuel to keep competing at the highest level.

Many fans and commentators now look back at Beijing 2022 as a turning point: a moment where one of the most successful skiers in history had to confront failure very publicly, talk openly about pressure and mental resilience, and then rebuild toward later success.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.