Mikaela Shiffrin’s Olympics end with no medal after mixed team near-miss

Mikaela Shiffrin will travel home empty-handed from the Beijing Winter Games after the United States missed the podium by 0.42 seconds in the mixed team parallel on Sunday afternoon.

The 26-year-old American star, the headline attraction of a US team including River Radamus, Paula Moltzan and Tommy Ford, came tantalizingly close to a redemptive bronze after defeating a Slovakia team without star Petra Vlhova in their opening tie before upsetting Italy to reach the medal round.

But the Americans were denied a shot at gold by Germany in the semi-finals, then bowed to Norway in a bronze-medal match-up on a tie-breaker to finish in fourth place and out of the medals. Top-seeded Austria won the gold in the mixed-gender team event, which debuted on the Olympic programme four years ago in Pyeongchang, edging a German team who settled for silver.

The knockout competition represented Shiffrin’s last chance at a medal after she finished no better than ninth in five individual races while failing to cross the finish line entirely in three of them, an outcome that would have been unthinkable a fortnight ago when the three-time overall World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist arrived with designs on Janica Kostelic’s women’s record of four medals at a single Winter Games.

“I am not disappointed,” Shiffrin said. “I have had a lot of disappointing moments at these Games. Today is not one of them – today is my favourite memory.

“This was the best possible way that I could imagine ending the Games, skiing with such strong teammates.”

The last alpine skiing event of the Beijing Games finally went off on Sunday morning, having been postponed for a day because of high winds, on the Ice River course that has been a house of