Mikaela Shiffrin Watched Video of Her Late Father’s Final Moments: ‘Saw the Whole Thing Happen’

June 23, 2026 · Yahoo Sports

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Mikaela Shiffrin pored over security camera footage of her late dad’s fatal accident to check if he could’ve been saved.

The Olympic skier, 31, opened up to Anderson Cooper, 59, about navigating grief during a special Father’s Day edition of his CNN podcast, All There Is With Anderson Cooper, which aired on June 18, 2026.

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Mikaela’s dad Jeff Shiffrin passed away in February 2020, aged 65, after he tragically fell from the roof of his family’s home in Edwards, Colorado. He suffered severe head trauma and later died in the hospital.

“When we found out that he had this accident at home, we have some cameras around the outside of our house,” Mikaela revealed. “I went into our camera footage.”

“I think my goal was to see how much time was he laying there with his brain bleeding until somebody actually found him. If this was under a minute, then maybe he has a chance of recovering,” she said, adding that it was actually about eight and a half minutes before a neighbor arrived.

“I went through this whole footage and I kind of saw the whole thing happen, which I don’t know if I would suggest people to do that,” the gold medalist added.

Instagram: Mikaela Shiffrin

On the video, she even saw her dad, who was a doctor, performing leg exercises to try to keep his blood flowing, which she remembered he often did when they traveled.

“I was like, ‘Oh, he knows that he needs to somehow move his body,’ but he couldn’t get up,” she explained. “And then he was unconscious again when our neighbor found him.”

Following her dad’s death, Mikaela found it hard to “feel the will to live,” admitting she didn’t eat and had trouble sleeping.

“Not that I didn’t want to be alive, but just that I really was searching for a reason to get out of bed and didn’t really have that,” she explained. “I didn’t feel like ski racing was nearly a good enough reason to want to exist, and I didn’t feel like wanting to win ski races had any place in my life anymore.”

Mikaela went on to win gold in slalom at the 2026 Winter Olympics — which took place in Milan and Cortina, Italy, in February 2026.

In an emotional press conference after her win, she said, “This was a moment I have dreamed about. I’ve also been very scared of this moment. Everything in life that you could do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience. It’s like being born again.

“And I still have so many moments where I resist this, ‘I don’t want to be in life without my dad.’ Maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this reality,” she continued. “It’s like I am thinking I would be in this moment without him, to take the moment of this silence with him, and with the whole team with me, and it was just like, a little bit more spiritual than I usually am. But I’m really grateful for that.”