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With her second Olympics about to open, this is Mikaela Shiffrin: capable of confidently executing her plan and winning by margins with which ski racing is unfamiliar, but simultaneously batting the hamsters in her head. She is a transcendent talent who brandishes her gifts with extraordinary diligence and flat-out work. But she admits, sometimes with alarming candor, of occasionally having to visit “a dark place” in order to access her best performances.

“It’s definitely more pressure for me to repeat than to do something new for the first time,” she said.

Photo by Toni L. Sandys / The Washington Post

Whatever the path through her mind, her best performances are stunning. This season on the World Cup circuit, Alpine skiing’s highest level of competition, she has won five of the seven slalom races that have been contested. In none of those victories has her nearest competitor come within three-quarters of a second of her time – a blink for most of us, enough time to run errands and do laundry in ski racing. Throw in her two victories in giant slalom, a surprising victory in a downhill and two more wins in “city event” head-to-head slalom competitions, and she has 10 victories and 15 podium finishes in the 23 World Cup races she has entered this season.

And she worries about whom she’s letting down?

“I’ve been encouraging everybody to slow down and really appreciate what she’s doing right now,” said Mike Day, Shiffrin’s coach for the past two seasons. “On the same hand, we did not spend really much time at all soaking it in, because we get straight back to work. She’s such a process-oriented athlete that literally, these wins are just part of the process, and these performances are just part of the process. As soon as they’re over, they’re over.”