Mikaela Shiffrin played a unique role on Saturday: fan.

The all-time winningest Alpine skier stood at the base of Golden Peak all morning in support of her brother, Taylor. The 32-year-old was one of 22 cyclists competing in the men’s pro/open XCO mountain bike race at the GoPro Mountain Games.

“I mean, it’s so fun,” Mikaela Shiffrin said of holding down the family cheer squad for once. “We tried to get to the feed station and couldn’t really figure out where we were going, so I think we missed him. Hopefully he’s doing well.”

Taylor Shiffrin, a data scientist who splits his time between Vail and Lone Tree, got roped into the race by an old Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy friend. He recently ran into Cristhian Ravelo — a former pro road bike racer — in the grocery store.

“He was like, ‘hey, let’s do the Leadville 100,'” Taylor Shiffrin said. “I was like, OK cool, let’s also do the GoPro Games, too.”

Ravelo, who started as a freestyle ski racer before moving to ski cross and eventually bikes, spent a fair amount of time training with the club Alpine racers as a youngster.

“We’ve grown up together,” Ravelo explained. “I kind of put the idea out there: the way I used to train for Leadville when I would race it was GoPro Games, the (Silver Rush) 50 into the 100. It’s a good way to gauge it and you’ve got two months to train.”

In just his second ride of the summer, Shiffrin completed three laps of the 6.8-mile Mountain Games loop in 2 hours, 19 minutes, 15.4 seconds.

“A lot of fun, a lot of pain. Kind of miss that — I miss the feeling of racing,” he said. “I kind of knew going in, I was like, ‘yep I’m going to get crushed, but we’re going to have a good time.'”

Meanwhile, Ravelo — who retired from road racing in 2023 and has been living in EagleVail since — went out with the elite leaders and tried to hang on as long as he could.

“Then I was like, ‘OK, I’m not where I used to be so I need to back it off,'” he said.

The 32-year-old wound up 15th (1:46:52.6) as Durango’s Cobe Freeburn took home the title in 1:30:13.5.

While Mikaela Shiffrin has plenty of high-stakes competition experience, she didn’t have any ultra-secret pre-race advice for her brother.

“I was like, eat some bananas!” she said with a laugh.

The superstar has been in Edwards the last couple weeks but will be on the road for about a month starting Sunday. During the brief stop at home, she’s been recharging, training and trying to see family.

“And then my brother entered this bike race,” she said. “Last year he did the Triple Bypass. He’s like, ‘I’m never doing this again.’ And then the next day he was like, ‘that was so fun … I’m doing it again.'”  

The five-time overall crystal globe winner just wrapped up a four-day training camp at Copper Mountain. The main focus was logging high volumes of giant slalom work.

“I’ve been missing that a little bit with the injury this year and last year,” she said.

After winning two of the first three races to start the 2024-2025 season, Shiffrin crashed going for her 100th-career World Cup win in Killington, Vermont, on Nov. 30. The abdominal puncture wound required surgery and sidelined the skier for the much-anticipated women’s World Cup races in Beaver Creek in December. After a 60-day absence from the World Cup, the 30-year-old returned to the circuit and eventually competed at the World Championships in Saalbach, Austria. While she won gold in the team event alongside Breezy Johnson, the 30-year-old declined her giant slalom start because of post-traumatic stress disorder.

She chronicled the triumphs and trials of her journey back in the March 26 installment of her Youtube series, ‘Moving Right Along.’

“It’s been good,” Shiffrin said Saturday regarding her progress. “I think with time and just practice and like I said, repetition, everything starts to sort of settle in and feel like, ‘OK I can do this, and I can get faster.’ And I start to feel the improvements happening again.”

Her brother is hoping to feel his own fitness improvements over the summer, too.

“I’m going to need to do a lot of training between now and then,” he said regarding the Silver Rush 50, the event in which he and Ravelo plan to use to qualify for the Leadville 100 in August.

Ravelo won the Silver Rush 50 in 2019 and placed eighth in the Leadville 100 in 2016. While he’s going into this race hoping to “just have fun,” he also is curious to see how close he can get to his old times.

“I know it’s way more competitive than when I use to do it with the Lifetime Grand Prix,” he said. “It’s kind of nice racing without the pressure of a result. Just hanging out with friends.”