Mikaela Shiffrin 'confident' as she confirms plans to race downhill at Beijing 2022

Alpine skiing superstar Mikaela Shiffrin confirmed her intentions to race the Beijing 2022 downhill event after an encouraging second practice (Sunday's run was cancelled due to bad weather) at the Yanqing National Ski Centre on Monday (14 February).

After a "solid" run in the first training session when she clocked the ninth best time, the American skied well on the technical sections of the 'Rock' course and also took a high jump before the 'White Face', but failed to create speed in the second half: the 26-year-old was the 17th fastest skiers (out of 45 finishers), posting a time of 1 minute and 34.58 seconds, 1.40 seconds slower than the top mark set by Joana Haehlen of Switzerland.

"I feel good, confidence is a funny thing because I'm not really thinking about placing, like results, I just feel confident with my skiing and it's really nice to be on the downhill skis right now so I feel pretty confident about that," she said.

Shiffrin has only raced in one downhill (38th place in Lake Louise in December) this season, after not racing the event in the 2021 World Cup.

"It's just trying to clean up any section that I can, see if I can go a little bit faster but to be honest it's the fourth run that I took on downhill skis in two years so I'm just trusting my skiing, like the natural instincts, and for sure, I missed a little bit of speed in some sections also from a lack of doing it," the Vail-born skier said.

"I really don't have big expectations performance-wise," she added. "But I think I have a chance to do a really nice fast run so that's a good feeling because in Lake Louise I was quite slow there so this is a much better position to be in, it's possible to be a bit faster in some sections."

The two-time Olympic