Raising Ski Great Mikaela Shiffrin, and Finding Balance

On a cold night in February five years ago, I ended up at a dinner in Beaver Creek, Colo., with Jeff Shiffrin, father of the otherworldly skier Mikaela Shiffrin.

Mikaela, then 19, was there too, and would soon be competing in the World Championships, but as often happened at these things, I ended up hanging around with Jeff. As middle-aged dads of daughters, we had a lot more in common than I did with Mikaela, who had the Olympic gold medal and the freakish athletic skills, and is decades younger.

There is an archetype of the hyperdriven parent behind great athletes and scholars, adults seemingly more obsessed with the glory and trappings of success than their children are. As far as I could tell, Jeff Shiffrin, a highly respected anesthesiologist who died of a head injury on Sunday at 65, was pretty close to the opposite of that, someone who appreciated other qualities his daughter possessed far more than what she could do on snow.

That night in Colorado, I told Jeff a story of how at a lunch a few months back, Mikaela, who had come to my New York office with a half dozen others, had been the only one to offer to help me carry the trays of sandwiches and salads. When lunch was over, the gold medalist started clearing everyone’s plates and throwing them in the garbage. Again, she was the only one doing this.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/sports/skiing/mikaela-shiffrin-father-dies.html?emc=rss&partner=rss