Olympics Updates: Mikaela Shiffrin Is Disqualified in a Second Race

In a stunning result, Michaela Shiffrin failed to successfully navigate more than a handful of turns in Wednesday’s women’s slalom and was disqualified from her second race this week at the Beijing Olympics.

Shiffrin, a two-time Olympic champion who was expected to contend for multiple gold medals at Beijing, had trouble in her run almost from the beginning with her feet and arms not in sync, her balance teetering and the gates seeming to come at her faster than she could react. Shiffrin nearly fell rounding the fourth gate and while she was still upright, her usually composed bearing was harried and as she passed the fifth gate she was heading for the side of the trail.

Disqualified before the sixth gate, she skied to the protective netting at the trail’s edge and sat down, resting her head atop her knees. After more than 20 minutes, a time during which Shiffrin was consoled by members of her coaching team who knelt next to her in the snow talking into her ear, she finally rose and skied slowly to the side and bottom of the racecourse.

Shiffrin, 26, won the 2014 Olympic Games slalom and has dominated the event ever since, winning more World Cup slalom races (47) than any other racer, male or female. One of the most consistent racers on the World Cup, Shiffrin rarely makes miscues — when she failed to finish a slalom early last month, it was the first time that had happened in nearly four years.

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Monday, she also skied out of the course, and fell, moments after beginning her first run in the women’s giant slalom, another event she was expected to contend for a gold medal. Nothing in Shiffrin’s professional career would have portended such quick, complete, recurring failure on ski racing’s biggest stage. Slalom is ski racing’s most dauntingly precise discipline but for the most decorated slalom skier in history to last about five seconds in her best event, and in a consequential Olympic race that she has spent four years preparing for, is almost unfathomable.

Shiffrin has spent the past weeks talking extensively about all the external obstacles that could prevent her from having success at these Games. She tested positive for the coronavirus in December and was dreading all the logistical issues with getting to China and the pandemic protocols of life at the Olympics.

In her first days here, she often discussed the wind, and the randomness of what could transpire on a gusty mountain. But none of those factors have come into play here. She did not mention anything about the nerves that may have caused her to last just eight gates in two races combined.

Shiffrin, a three-time Olympic medalist, is still slated to compete in Friday’s women’s super-G as well as the downhill and the Alpine combined.

The first run leaders were Lena Duerr of Germany with a time of 52.17. Michelle Gisin of Switzerland was just .03 of a second behind Duerr and Sara Hector of Sweden, who won the women’s giant slalom Monday, was in third place, trailing Gisin by .08 of a second. Petra Vlhova, whose rivalry with Shiffrin this season has been a major storyline, had a plodding, slow run and was in eighth place, .72 of a second behind Duerr.

ZHANGJIAKOU, China — The icy halfpipe yawned on the mountainside, waiting to be awakened by the world’s best snowboarders on Wednesday at Genting Snow Park.

And with them came Chloe Kim, the defending gold medalist from the United States, soaring through the qualification round and into Thursday’s 12-women finals.

Kim had the best run of the day, an 87.75 on the first of her two runs, to snag the top spot in the next day’s final. She fell on her second run, under-rotating and slipping, but it did not matter. Her first run was more than enough to carry her to the finals as the favorite for the gold again.

“I feel really good,” she said afterward, through a U.S. Olympic official because Kim did not stop to speak to reporters gathered at the base of the halfpipe. “Obviously I’m going to have to bump it up tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to that. It’s going to be like a whole new competition.”

Another American with designs on a gold medal was Maddie Mastro, a California quietly riding in Kim’s shadow the past few years. But Mastro struggled through both her runs, and had to wait for the other competitors to go to see if she would squeak into the final.

She did not, finishing 13th, one spot out of the final.

Snowboarding’s halfpipe competition is one of the showcase events for the Winter Olympics, at least for American audiences curious to see what Kim will do next, and what Shaun White might do last.

White, now 35, is competing in his fifth and final Winter Olympics, searching for his fourth gold medal. He and the other men were scheduled to go through their qualifications later on Wednesday.

The morning belonged to the women. Each of the 22 competitors were allowed two runs down the pipe, with its 22-foot walls. The best of their two scores, judged by an international panel, was used to rank them.

The top 12 advanced to ride for medals the next day. Among them were a pair of veteran Chinese riders, Liu Jiayu and Cai Xuetong. Japan’s Mitsuki Ono finished second in qualifications behind Kim.

Kim, 21, won the gold medal four years ago in Pyeongchang, South Korea. A year later, burned out and pondering retirement, she left the public eye and went to Princeton for a year of college. She went 22 months without stepping on a snowboard, the longest break since she began riding as a toddler.

She returned to competition a year ago, though, independent, refreshed and as dominant as ever. She arrives in China as the favorite to win again, though the competition appears to have crept closer to Kim’s level.

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Liu was the silver medalist four years ago. Cai was fifth. Liu fell on her first run, the first run of the competition, catching an edge off a relatively easy maneuver.

Kim followed, a bit tentative, perhaps, from what she had witnessed from her rival, but still received a strong score.

On the men’s side, White has a habit of stealing the spotlight, thanks to three Olympic gold medals and a disappointing fourth-place finish in 2014.

This time, he comes in as a 35-year-old underdog, but one motivated by knowing that this will be his last Olympics, and maybe his last competition.

Making the podium is a possibility, but so is failing to reach the final at all. No one has raised the profile of halfpipe snowboarding more than White, with his Olympic success, mainstream popularity and steady progression of tricks.

He will struggle to keep up, however, as several riders, most of them from Japan, could pop triple corks — tricks with three off-axis rotations in the mode of a corkscrew. Plopping a big trick like that in a steady run certainly would send a rider to the final. Doing it there could land a medal.

As dozens of athletes take to the halfpipe on Wednesday, they will try to dazzle fans at home with their jaw-dropping heights and dizzying flips. But no one will be watching them more closely than the six judges, and a seventh head judge, who among them will determine whether the athletes land on the podium.

“Halfpipe is about overall impression,” said Nick Alexakos, the snowboard and freestyle skiing event director at U.S. Ski & Snowboard.

It’s far from simple.

Judges will look for specific characteristics, sometimes referred to with the acronym PAVED: progression, amplitude, variety, execution and difficulty. Here’s what that means:

Progression: Judges are looking for new tricks and new combinations, either a new twist on an old standard or a completely new combination. “A lot of people are doing the same tricks in their own unique fashion — but is it a different grab?” Alexakos explained. “Was there something different that makes them unique?”

Amplitude: The higher you go, the more difficult the trick can be, Alexakos said. And the more rotations, the bigger the amplitude. “To go into the pipe wall at that speed, to get that amp, it is unique and special,” he said. The edges of the pipe itself are about 22 feet high, and some riders can soar 20 feet past that, he said. “Amp is always one of those things that wows the crowd,” he said. “And it is rewarded.”

Variety: Judges will look at the selection of tricks and grabs, and the direction of spin. “You might be able to do a front-side double cork better than anyone, but it might be your only trick,” he said, adding that “you will very rarely see a trick repeated in the same run.”

Execution: How do athletes perform the maneuver? Judges are looking for stability, fluidity and control.

Difficulty: Are athletes linking their most difficult tricks together or performing them separately? Are they performing only one major difficult trick, or is every trick difficult? “You will see them linking combos,” Alexakos said. “It has gotten to a point where the level of riding is insane. They are all multidirectional.”

Each athlete has five to six tricks, and judges use a scale of 1 to 100 to assign ranks. A score of 100 “is the best run of the day, but it doesn’t necessarily mean perfection,” Alexakos said. Each snowboarder’s high score and low score are dropped, and the remaining runs are averaged. The scores, Alexakos said, are just meant to rank the athletes and set the level of competition. “So what was a 90 yesterday in halfpipe, the same one might not be a 90 today,” he said.

There are no standardized deductions, but judges deduct more for instability or a full-out fall than for a hand drag, Alexakos said.

If a run is close, judges will analyze it trick by trick, Alexakos said, “and generate a score based on that — what stood out that was better or worse, and score from there.”

He added, “They are trying to set a range, and it is a range that is consistent throughout the competition.”

And the judges take their jobs very seriously, working their way up from regional events to the Olympic level. They have “dedicated their lives to this and do it a long time,” Alexakos said.

The U.S. broadcast coverage of the 2022 Winter Games continues on Tuesday with women’s slalom, halfpipe snowboarding and the men’s big air final. All times are Eastern.

ALPINE SKIING The two-time Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin will continue her pursuit of multiple medals at the Games as she competes in the women’s slalom event. The competition’s first run airs live at 9:15 p.m. on NBC and Peacock; the second and final run airs live at 12:45 a.m. The contest marks the latest chapter in the rivalry between Shiffrin and Petra Vlhova of Slovakia, who together have won 39 of the past 42 World Cup slalom races.

SNOWBOARDING The 2018 Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim makes her Beijing debut in the women’s snowboarding halfpipe qualifying event, airing live at 8:30 p.m. on NBC and USA Network. The three-time Olympic gold medalist Shaun White, who is competing in his fifth Games, headlines the men’s halfpipe qualifying field live at 11:30 p.m. on NBC and Peacock.

FREESTYLE SKIING In the freestyle big air event, which is making its Olympic debut this year, the returning Olympian Alex Hall is expected to be a medal contender. The International Olympic Committee announced that big air would join this year’s Olympic program back in 2018, a few months after the success of snowboarding’s big air debut in Pyeongchang. The final airs live at 10 p.m. on NBC and Peacock.

LUGE Coverage of the third and final runs of the women’s singles event in Luge will re-air on USA Network at 7:30 p.m., featuring Ashley Farquharson, Summer Britcher and Emily Sweeney competing for the U.S.

CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING Coverage of the finals of the men’s and women’s individual sprint events in cross country will re-air on USA Network at 11:30 p.m.

As of Tuesday, 31 gold medals had been awarded at the Winter Olympics, with Sweden picking up four of them to lead the pack. The United States has yet to win any golds, earning only one bronze and four silver medals so far.

What gives?

Only twice before has the United States reached at least the fifth day of a Winter Games before picking up a gold medal, said Bill Mallon, a leading authority on Olympic history. The first time was the 1984 Games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, when the skier Debbie Armstrong won gold in the women’s slalom.

The second time the United States had not won a gold medal by the fifth day was at the 1988 Calgary Games. It wasn’t until the figure skater Brian Boitano placed first in the men’s competition, defeating the world champion Brian Orser of Canada, that the United States won gold that year.

The United States is not a powerhouse in winter sports, Mallon said, a field in which Norway, Germany and Russia, which is competing in Beijing under the neutral banner of the Russian Olympic Committee, often dominate. The United States also tends to perform better in Europe and North America than in Asia, Mallon added.

“I guess we would have expected possibly one gold by now, but we haven’t had a lot of strong events,” Mallon said, adding that the American skier Mikaela Shiffrin was the strongest gold medal contender to date in Beijing.

But on Monday, Shiffrin fell and was disqualified from the giant slalom event.

The most likely gold medalist remaining is Chloe Kim, the snowboarder and defending champion in the women’s halfpipe competition, which starts Wednesday.

According to Mallon, at virtually every Olympics, the United States has won at least one of each of the three types of medal, with two exceptions: It failed to win a bronze medal at the 1984 Sarajevo Games and did not capture a silver at the 1936 Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

In January 2012, Jenise Spiteri, then a college student, posted a Facebook status that read, “Wanted: someone to teach me how to ride pipe tomorrow. anyone available??” The post garnered two likes, 10 comments and one share.

A decade later, Spiteri, 29, competed Wednesday in the women’s snowboarding halfpipe competition at her first Olympics. She was the first snowboarder to compete for Malta in a Winter Games and the only athlete representing the country this year in Beijing. She failed to qualify for the halfpipe, however, coming in second to last.

As a child in California, Spiteri wanted to become an actor. But as a high school senior she decided to pursue professional snowboarding. She went on to ride in college, and one of her teammates suggested she try to qualify for the Olympics for Malta, where her paternal grandfather emigrated from after World War II. Spiteri hadn’t considered competing in the Olympics, she said, but the idea made strategic and sentimental sense: Because she did not rise through the regular developmental pipeline in the United States, her chances of representing her country on the Olympic stage were slim at best.

But the idea was also a way of paying homage to her grandfather, who passed away in 2010 and who had his own connection to the Games. He started a company, SP-Teri, that made figure skating boots for Olympic stars like Michelle Kwan. “To be able to bring the Olympics back to his home and represent his home I thought would be a really cool and special thing,” she said.

Six months before the 2018 Olympics, Spiteri tore her Achilles’ tendon and meniscus at a World Cup event in New Zealand. She pushed through the injuries to compete in several Olympic qualifiers, but she did not land a spot in Pyeongchang.

Yet Spiteri, whose hair is bright pink and blue, was able to find her way back. Her journey is largely self funded, though she also receives financial support from the Olympic Solidarity training program, which helps countries build their national sports programs. But snowboarding is expensive, so Spiteri lives off a modest budget, reusing her gear from season to season, and has picked up odd jobs (including as an extra on shows like “Euphoria”).

To offset her rent, Spiteri lived out of her vehicle while training in Colorado and Washington during her early years. She quickly learned which foods she liked that don’t require refrigeration (canned tuna and cheese seasoning), what personal items were likely to freeze (toothpaste, contacts) and how to use a credit card to scrape away frost from the inside of her windshield.

In 2020, Spiteri upgraded to a van that she outfitted with a refrigerator and burner for cooking, but still lacked heat as she slept. Temperatures plummeted to 18 degrees Fahrenheit. “I couldn’t figure out a way to do heating without signaling the van was occupied,” she said. “I am a 5-foot-4 female, and I don’t want people knowing that someone is sleeping in there.”

While training last summer for three weeks, rather than buy a season pass for $900, plus the daily $125 fee to the halfpipe, Spiteri hiked more than a mile up the mountain with her gear to access the slopes. She spent the money she saved on coaching sessions a couple of times a week.

But the daily trek was daunting. “Three days into hiking I was like, Why am I doing this?” Spiteri recalled. “I am training for the Olympics, and I already hiked for an hour before I got to training.”

It’s been a long 10 years since that Facebook post, but for Spiteri, the sacrifices have been worth it to make the Olympics.

“I know I didn’t have the same advantages or opportunities as other people, but I never wanted to quit because of those,” she said. “That was never an option. It was like I need to work harder to make up for it.”

As snowboarders turn themselves into human pendulums in the halfpipe event at the Winter Olympics, they will be flying high and long.

The Olympic standards require a 600-foot-long run at an 18-degree pitch and U-shaped walls that are 22 feet high and 64 feet apart from lip to lip.

Some snowboarders can soar more than 20 feet beyond the edge of the pipe, sliding up the wall and into the air to the height of a two- to four-story building. Imagine dunking on a basketball hoop that is twice, three times or even four times regulation height. Now add spinning and flipping in midair to the equation.

And that’s only the height. Snowboarders are barreling down a chute as long as the Space Needle in Seattle is high.

All of which is to say that coming down can be brutal. The halfpipe is made of snow, but it is not plush — falling, especially from a 22-foot jump, can feel like landing on a block of ice.

There are only a handful of Olympic-size super pipes in the world, in locations including Calgary, Alberta; Laax, Switzerland; Mammoth Lakes, Calif.; and Copper Mountain in Frisco, Colo. Snowboarders will travel around the world to train at those resorts in preparation for competitions.

When China’s curling competitors yelled instructions at one another at the Beijing Olympics in recent days, their twanging accents filled the arena. And China’s speedskaters give their post-race briefings in clipped sounds and slang.

It’s the accent of China’s Northeast — the region that has supplied most of China’s athletes for the 2022 Games.

The Northeast is a collection of provinces near Russia and Korea, where long winters and plentiful snow make a natural cradle for winter sports. About 100 of China’s 176 athletes at the Games come from Heilongjiang, Jilin or Liaoning — the three provinces that make up most of the region.

Their dominance has even prompted jokes that Northeasterners (Dongbeiren in Chinese) deserve some kind of official recognition in the Olympics.

“At these Beijing Winter Olympics, I’m telling you, there are three languages: first, English; second, standard Chinese; third, the Northeast dialect,” Wang Meng, a retired Olympic speedskater from Heilongjiang, said in an interview that was widely circulated in China. “If you want to learn it, study from me.”

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For some Northeasterners, the region’s prominence at these Games is a welcome burst of positive imagery. It was once the industrial heart of China, but its fortunes have flagged in recent decades as state-owned factories and mines closed. Many of its young people have moved south to look for better opportunities.

Journalistic accounts of the Northeast are now “almost contractually obliged to call it a rust belt, but there are so many more sides to it,” Michael Meyer, the author of a book about the region, said in an interview. To many Chinese people, the Northeast also calls to mind its comedians, who are known for their boisterous humor.

The typical Northeast accent is “a ringing lilt of elongated vowels that sounds as earthily colorful as Cockney English and as rapidly confident as Italian,” Meyer said. “To this Minnesotan, it sounds like Bob Dylan speaking Mandarin.”

Some Chinese people have wondered online in recent days why a northeastern city did not host these Olympics. Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province, gave up on a bid for the 2018 Winter Games.

“The Northeast dialect,” said one comment that has spread online in China in these Games, “is the shared language of Chinese winter sports.”

The lighting of the Olympic cauldron is traditionally an honor given to people who symbolize the host nation, or its sporting history, or its vision of itself. China’s selection last week of the 20-year-old Uyghur athlete Dinigeer Yilamujiang for that role, along with a teammate of the Han Chinese ethnic majority, was immediately divisive.

To many Chinese, it was a feel-good message of ethnic unity. But to human rights activists and Western critics, it looked like Beijing was using an athlete in a calculated, provocative fashion to whitewash its suppression of Uyghurs in the far western region of Xinjiang, where Yilamujiang is from.

Chinese state media declared after the ceremony that Yilamujiang had “showed the world a beautiful and progressive Xinjiang” with her “smiling face and youthful figure.” The propaganda effort was offensive to many overseas Uyghurs, who have long sought to raise awareness about China’s mass detention and re-education campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims that the United States has declared as genocidal. One Britain-based Uyghur advocate labeled it “disgusting, absolutely disgusting.”

In China’s narrative, ethnic minorities in Xinjiang live a “peaceful, harmonious and happy life.” The day after Friday’s opening ceremony, CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, released a video of Yilamujiang’s family gathered in a well-appointed living room adorned with framed medals and photos of the young skier. “I was so excited, so proud, so overjoyed,” her mother, Ruxian Hatibaji, told state media reporters.

What does the athlete herself make of the debate? So far, it has been impossible to know.

Since her star turn in the Bird’s Nest stadium in Friday’s opening ceremony, Yilamujiang has kept a low profile. After her first race on Saturday, Yilamujiang failed to walk through a mixed zone with reporters, in apparent contravention of I.O.C. guidelines. On Tuesday, she was in Zhangjiakou, where the cross-country events are being held. She failed to advance out of the first round in the women’s individual sprint, finishing 56th in a field of 90.

Hurrying through the press area afterward, she did not stop to talk.