On the fringes of the World Ski Championships, Mikaela Shiffrin meets the ORF reporter who recently mistranslated a winning interview by the American and thus triggered numerous reactions.
Mikaela Shiffrin is on track for a gold medal in the combined World Championships on Monday before retiring just short of the finish line and going empty-handed. Sonja Nef is surprised in her race analysis for blue Sport: “I don’t remember that she was ever eliminated before the finish line.” Nef is convinced that the slalom dominator risked too much in her prime discipline. “Especially in the station wagon, only gold counts for them. She wanted that by all means.”
“Oh my God, you were poor?”
Even before her first World Cup appearance, Shiffrin meets Peter Brunner in an interview. At the end of January, the ORF reporter translated a conversation with Shiffrin after the giant slalom in Kronplatz – and made a mistake that subsequently caused waves. Brunner translated Shiffrin’s words that she was “in an unfavorable phase of my monthly cycle” and therefore even more tired: “I don’t even go cycling, which I do every month.”
Brunner is now using the meeting on the sidelines of the World Ski Championships in Courchevel and Méribel to personally apologize to Shiffrin. “Oh my God, you were poor?” Replies Shiffrin. When Brunner says that he has received numerous reactions and emails, the 85-time World Cup winner apologizes: “I’m so sorry.”
When asked by the ORF reporter, Shiffrin again emphasized that it was important to her to treat the topic as completely normal: “Once a month we experience something unpleasant that naturally affects the athlete’s body. It’s also something beautiful and the reason we humans exist.”
1.8 million views for Shiffrin’s post
At the time, Shiffrin was so amused by the translation glitch at ORF that she reacted to it with a published post on social networks. “So nice to get my monthly cycle,” is the 27-year-old’s sarcastic comment on a video that shows her cycling on an exercise bike.
“The video now has 1.8 million views – actually because of you, I have to thank you,” says Shiffrin, adding: “So it became a big topic. Many people have thanked me for bringing it up and sparking a discussion. We shouldn’t be ashamed to talk about it anymore.”