Mikaela Shiffrin never had to be the Michael Phelps of skiing

By no sane metric could Mikaela Shiffrin’s second Olympics, which concluded on Thursday afternoon with her silver medal in the alpine combined to go with last week’s giant slalom gold, be fairly assessed as anything but a success.

She competed in three events in Pyeongchang after the weather conspired to spoil her ambitious bid for a record-breaking five medals in five events. Expectations were warped by months of hype which could only be characterized as unrealistic in the notoriously volatile trade of alpine skiing, where the margins that separate triumph and disaster come down to the most innocuous variables.

When it was done Shiffrin’s results in the races she entered spoke for themselves: first, fourth and second. But more importantly, she has rightfully assumed the role that awaited her as the face of the US ski team for the foreseeable future, a mantle held for more than a decade by Lindsey Vonn. That she did it all with uncommon poise and affability in the face of unthinkable pressure is as remarkable an achievement as you’ll see at these Winter Games.

NBC had put forth Shiffrin as the face of these Olympics in part due to her transcendent talent, but even more because her events were spread out over two weeks. One-offs like Chloe Kim and Shaun White, brilliant as they are, are no substitute for the appointment television a sprawling narrative engenders. With it came a months-long crescendo of hype that cast Shiffrin as the Michael Phelps of the piste, feeding into the unspoken addendum to the Olympic motto in America: Citius, Altius, Fortius, Plus. Just how many golds would be enough to deliver on advance billing? The chest tightens just thinking about it.

But skiing is an outdoor sport and the blustery conditions that prompted three days of postponements at the start of the alpine skiing created a logjam that demanded Shiffrin drop the super-G. Suddenly, the drive for five became the tour for four.

She wasted no time when the racing finally started last Thursday, coming from behind to win the giant slalom, her third best event, for her second career Olympic gold. Less than 24 hours later, the American was back on the hill, this time for her signature discipline: the slalom. Four years after becoming the youngest ever Olympic champion in the sport’s most technical event, Shiffrin came in fourth. The curveballs weren’t limited to the schedule: her boyfriend, the French skier Mathieu Faivre, was sent home after badmouthing his team-mates, an odd episode that no doubt entered her mind at a time when clarity was paramount.

Then on Monday evening Shiffrin’s program was squeezed from the other end when organizers moved the combined up from Friday to Thursday due to a projected forecast of strong winds, prompting her withdrawal from the downhill and ending hopes of a hotly anticipated showdown with Vonn. They finally met on Thursday, where Shiffrin won a silver as Vonn faltered, a symbolic passing of the torch as snow began to fall at the Jeongseon Alpine Centre.

There may always be a sense of “what if” surrounding Shiffrin’s fortnight in Pyeongchang. Who knows what records might have fallen had only the weather complied? But rather than ponder what might have been, better to marvel at what Shiffrin laid down amid outrageous circumstances.

Even with a truncated program Shiffrin became the first American woman to win at least a gold and a silver in alpine skiing at a single Olympics since Andrea Mead Lawrence in 1952. She’s only the fourth American to win at least three Olympic medals in alpine skiing, joining Vonn (three), Julia Mancuso (four) and Bode Miller (six).

And she’s only 22.

That’s why Thursday’s alpine combined, the first and only time Shiffrin and Vonn would compete against each other at the Olympics, was rich with symbolic value. We bore witness to the past giving way to the future – and the future is bright indeed.

Shiffrin’s dominance in the slalom is well-documented, but she’s since blossomed from specialist into quite possibly the world’s best all-around skier. Her eye-popping 41 victories in World Cup events before the age of 23 is more than any other skier in history. (Vonn, now five off Ingemar Stenmark’s all-time record of 86, had won four at the same age.)

Nothing is guaranteed in alpine skiing, particularly as Shiffrin dips her toes further into the more hazardous disciplines of the super-G and downhill. But at the moment she’s got the world by the tail, time on her side and hard-won experience sizing up, managing and beating back the most heightened of expectations, exponents all of a beautiful mind.

It turns out Shiffrin never needed to be the wintertime Michael Phelps, not when the external pressure, as she repeated time and again during the Pyeongchang run-up, are nothing compared to the pressure she puts on herself. Being Mikaela Shiffrin is more than enough.

“I’m in a really good place in my career right now,” she said in Thursday’s aftermath. “In four years, it looks good but anything can happen. The thing that I’ve learned most in the last couple years is that as soon as I start to let my brain get ahead of me, of where I’m actually at, then things start to go downhill.

“It was important for me at this Olympics to focus on my skiing, not the medals. It’s always, always important for me to focus on where I’m at and what I need to do to get better the next day.”