CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — What's behind her has been well documented — the Olympic disappointments, the crash that nearly ended her career — but it was what unfurled in front of her Sunday that transfixed Mikaela Shiffrin.

She saw it while standing in the start gate at Tofane Alpine Ski Centre, the Olympic giant-slalom course in the foreground and the Dolomites in the distance so majestic they almost look fake.

"You're standing there and you can see the whole GS course laid out in front of you," said Shiffrin, who has won more World Cup races (108) than anyone in history. "It just goes down, down, down, down. ... Normally with GS, you see the first 10 turns, the first eight turns. It's rare that you see the entire course laid ahead of you.

"It's this really cool feeling that I know what's coming, I'm going to push and earn this. And I wanted to earn it with my skiing."

That part remains a work in progress. Shiffrin finished 11th in the giant slalom, the best of the four Americans but a combined 0.92 seconds behind winner Frederica Brignone of Italy, whose dominant performance in the morning combined with a more mortal afternoon was good enough for gold.

The local crowd cheered loudly for Brignone, who won gold in the super-G three days earlier and has made a remarkable comeback from a devastating crash in the Italian championships 10 months ago. She suffered a tear in her anterior cruciate ligament and multiple fractures of her calf and tibial plateau.

"I've been in therapy for eight or more months, and started skiing just to see if I could ski," Brignone said. "It was day by day. We were trying new things. My mantra was, 'Tomorrow is better, for sure.' It has been really hard. For five months I didn't even walk correctly. Then I started getting better and better."

She said a key to her success was she felt no pressure and no lofty expectations heading into the Games.

"I think if I was coming here to make gold medals, I'd make no medals," she said. "It's a miracle to be here, to carry the flag. This was one of the biggest things that I was missing in my life. Not the gold medal. I didn't care. I had medals. I had World Cups. I had everything that I wanted, even more in my life. So I came here just to enjoy and try my best, and be grateful to be here at the home Olympics."

In a bizarre twist, Sweden's Sara Hector and Norway's Thea Louise Stjernesund skied identical times — down to the hundredth of a second — in the morning and afternoon to tie for silver. Therefore, no bronze was awarded.

Behind Shiffrin were U.S. teammates Paula Moltzan (15th), Nina O'Brien (20th) and A.J. Hurt, who did not finish after missing a gate in the morning session.

With the women's slalom coming Wednesday, the results have been mostly disappointing for Shiffrin, who was looking to bounce back from a disastrous performance at the Beijing Olympics four years ago. Then, she was a favorite but went 0 for 6 on podiums and failed to cross the finish line three times. Her best individual result was ninth in the super-G.

Although she has 22 World Cup giant slalom wins — more than anyone — Shiffrin endured a long dry spell in the discipline. She didn't have a top-three result between January 2024 — when she was runner-up at the race in Slovakia — until her third-place finish in Czechia last month. She failed to reach the podium in her 11 races in between.

That said, since the end of 2025, she has been steadily improving, going from sixth to fifth to fourth to third in World Cup finishes leading into the Olympics.

"I'm really proud of the progression," she said after Sunday's race. "To get back into the top seven in GS before the Olympics, that seemed like a really challenging task, especially at the beginning of the season."

Shiffrin is also dealing with the post-traumatic stress of an accident in a World Cup giant slalom race in Killington, Vt., in November 2024. She suffered a puncture wound in that accident — although it's unclear what caused it — and nearly sustained a lacerated colon.

In an article in the Players' Tribune last May, she wrote: "I'd get these random flashes in my mind. These really grim images. I'd be anticipating crashes. I'd see them in my head. See myself falling and going down. The pain would flash through my body, only this time, it was my neck too. My leg. My colon.

"We'd be training somewhere in Europe, and in a quiet moment, randomly, completely unexpected, I'd sort of imagine the mechanics of the crash I had at Killington ... but just transferred to this new place. I'd see it happening on the course ahead of me, on the mountain range that I was looking down at."

Sunday was a different view of a European mountain range. A more hopeful view. The way she sounded after the race, that's good enough for now.

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