Winter Olympics Live: Lindsey Jacobellis Wins First U.S. Gold

When Mikaela Shiffrin, a two-time Olympic champion and ski racing’s most dominant figure for several years, fell on Monday and made an early exit from the women’s giant slalom at the Beijing Olympics, it seemed an anomaly, a glitch that will happen on steeply pitched mountains in slippery conditions.

But Wednesday, Shiffrin did not finish her second race and again lasted only scant seconds before skidding off the course. This time it was her best event, the slalom. She ended up on the side of the trail, where she quickly ditched her skis and poles, sat down in the snow and buried her head between her bent knees. She remained there for more than 20 minutes as her rivals whizzed past.

Nothing in Shiffrin’s professional career would have portended such quick, complete, recurring failure on her sport’s biggest stage. Slalom is ski racing’s most dauntingly precise discipline, but for the most decorated slalom skier in history to last just 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 three Olympic races left if she chooses to enter them, something that no longer seems a certainty. After her race on Wednesday, she was shaken and confused. In tears as she spoke with reporters, she did not hide her heartbreak.

“I will try to reset again and maybe try to reset better this time,” she said. “But I also don’t know how to do it better, because I just don’t. I’ve never been in this position before, and I don’t know how to handle it.

“If I am going to ski out on the fifth gate, well, what’s the point?”

Petra Vlhova, who has had a pitched rivalry with Shiffrin throughout this season, came back after an erratic first run to win Wednesday’s race to become the first Alpine Olympic medalist from Slovakia. Katharina Liensberger of Austria was in second place .08 behind Vlhova and Wendy Holdener of Switzerland won the bronze medal, trailing Liesnburger by .04 of a second.

Shiffrin, who was expected to contend for multiple gold medals at these Games, had trouble in Wednesday’s 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. She nearly fell rounding the fourth gate, and while she was still upright, her usually composed bearing was harried. As she passed the fifth gate she was heading for the side of the trail and knew her race was over. She was disqualified before the sixth gate.

“I had the intention to do my best skiing and my quickest turns,” Shiffrin said. “But in order to do that I had to push the line, the tactics. And it is really on the limit then. And things happen so fast that there was really not space to slip up even a little bit.”

Her voice pained, Shiffrin also explained what she had been thinking about while she sat on the side of the trail. She said she was overcome by a feeling of having…