Becky Sullivan

The expectations were really high for her.

And then they got even higher still after her teammate breezy Johnson skied the first leg, the downhill leg of the race.

Johnson had another great race.

She had the fastest time on the downhill leg.

So essentially Schifrin even kind of had a head start, but her slalom time was frankly slow.

She was 15th out of the 18 skiers who finished that slalom run.

And it adds to what is hopefully really not a pattern for her, but it is the seventh consecutive Olympic race in which Michaela Schiffer did not medal.

That dates back to the 2022 Games in Beijing, where she left empty-handed.

She does still have two individual events left to come next week, including that individual slalom race.

She says she's going to spend the next five days focused on watching that tape, focusing on training, trying to figure out what went wrong today and how to fix it.

In the last Olympics in 2022, the American biathlete Deidre Irwin came closer than any American individual ever to that podium when she finished in seventh place.

Had she hit just one more target, she'd have won that historic medal.

Irwin will race that event again on Wednesday.

Team USA has a strong competitor on the men's side too, a 23-year-old Campbell Wright.

He was born in New Zealand, but New Zealand doesn't have a biathlon team, and his parents are American, so he switched to Team USA.

The men's individual event is Tuesday.

Both men and women have other events in the days to come.

The Americans also feel they have an advantage due to their coach Armin Aukenthaler, an Italian who lives just a few minutes' drive from the Olympic venue in far northern Italy.

Becky Sullivan, NPR News, Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy.

Schifrin is at the peak of her game in the slalom right now.