When failure is an option

 I don't know what happened to Mikaela Shiffrin, between the time she arrived in Beijing on the cusp of history and when she stood alone at the top of the hill for the first time. I don't know what happened, or what she saw when she first looked down at that strip of snow coursing down the mountain, or when the first doubts began to creep in.

I only know this: Failure is always an option, no matter what they said in "Apollo 13."

Shriffrin came to Beijing as one of the most accomplished Alpine skiers in the world, a heavy favorite to add to her cache of three Olympic medals, two of them gold. One more medal would have tied her with Julia Mancuso as the most decorated U.S. woman in Olympic Alpine history; another gold would have given her more than any American skier ever.

Instead, yesterday, she crashed out of the slalom portion of the Alpine combined 10 gates in. It was her third DNF of these Olympics; her only finishes have been in the downhill, where she placed 18th, and the super-G, where she placed ninth. She crashed out of both the giant slalom and the slalom, the former in the first 10 seconds and the latter in the first five seconds.

Shiffrin was the defending gold medalist in the giant slalom. She was favored to win the slalom event.

Yet she failed. And not just failed, but epically failed.

Her reaction to it has brought both tears and a stiff upper lip, but beneath it all you can sense bewilderment more than anything. A world-class skier does not just forget how to get down the mountain, and yet that seems to have happened. And it carries within it the sort of lessons that are often the saving grace for an Olympic movement grown cynical and corrupt.

The Beijing Games have served up heaping helpings of both, given that the host nation violates the Olympic ideal pretty much daily. This is equally true of the IOC, whose anti-doping initiatives have become a sour joke thanks to its acquiescence to the Russians in general, and figure skater Kamila Valieva in particular.

As this was written, Valieva seemed a lock for a women's singles medal, and a favorite to win gold. It would be the first time in memory that a known doper would be so rewarded.*

(* Update: Or, not. Valieva stumbled through her long program and did not medal, saving both the medal ceremony and yet more embarrassment for the IOC.)

And yet ...

And yet, as the Blob has noted before, it is always the athletes who redeem the Games. It is always the athletes who save the Olympic movement from itself.

It's the athletes who show us what triumph looks like, and also failure. The latter is perhaps even more instructive than the former, because it reminds us we are all fallible, and overcoming that fallibility is what sets the best of us apart. 

But it is always there. And when see a Mikaela Shiffrin fall and fall and fall again, we're reminded of that -- and also reminded of just how difficult a thing it is to fly down a mountain at 70 mph.

Shiffrin and others have so often made it look so easy, we sometimes take them for granted. And so when one of them fails, it makes their triumphs all the more worth watching.

There's no thrill of victory without the agony of defeat, after all. Wide World of Sports told us that a long time ago.