Mikaela Shiffrin’s New Head Coach Is a Trailblazer, and a Woman

Harjo will replace Shiffrin’s longtime coach, Mike Day. The Shiffrin-Day working relationship ended last month after seven years when Shiffrin informed Day that she planned to take her staff in a new direction at the end of the season.

“Until recently, I couldn’t imagine ski racing if Mike was not there with me,” Shiffrin, who turned 28 on Monday and has won 17 Olympic and world championship medals, said. “He’s been there for the most important moments of my career and my life. I wasn’t looking for a different coach.”

Shiffrin said she learned last month that Harjo was interested in rejoining the U.S. ski team. That made her re-examine her plans.

“With Karin, I felt like this was something I cannot pass up,” she said.

Shiffrin’s team includes her mother, Eileen, a former ski racer who has traveled with her daughter and acted as one of her coaches since Mikaela joined the World Cup in 2011. It also includes another woman, Mikaela Shiffrin’s physical therapist, Regan Dewhirst.

At the youth and junior levels of racing, female coaches are relatively common, if still a distinct minority. Few have landed jobs at the sport’s elite level.

Harjo, however, has been a trailblazer. When she went to work with the Canadian women’s team last year she became just the second woman named head coach of a national team. In 2016, she became the first woman to set up a women’s World Cup slalom racecourse, which ended a decades-long procession of women’s technical courses being set only by men. Since 2016, two more women have been course-setters on the World Cup.

There have also been recent initiatives meant to promote and celebrate women in snow sports, including one spearheaded by U.S. Ski and Snowboard. The International Olympic Committee has also funded a four-year program aimed at increasing the number of elite female coaches.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/sports/skiing/shiffrin-harjo-world-cup.html