Ascensionism®

This report, in the WSJ will likely have been missed by you all.  Note how The Roger F actually educed and processed Shiffrin.

On that day last March, the four adults gathered around a table as the Federers’ four children played, and Federer talked to Shiffrin about her approach to skiing.
“He was saying, In order to preserve the longevity of your career, you need to take the moments to look around, appreciate where you are, breathe it in,” Shiffrin said. “As he got more into the depths of his career, when it gets harder to kind of look up and around you and appreciate everything right in that moment, is when it’s the most important to do it.”
Federer had become choosier about which events he played in as his career went on, she remembered him saying. He encouraged Shiffrin, who has a wide range of skill but excels most at the slalom event, to also be selective. At one point he brought up skiing’s longest and most perilous event, in which athletes can exceed 80 miles an hour.
“He mentioned that downhill seems, like, pretty scary,” Shiffrin said. “I was like, ‘It’s not that bad. It’s actually really, really fun to do.’”
Federer is a fan of elite skiing—and recently hit the slopes himself after abstaining for 15 years to avoid injury. Shiffrin recalled that his presence caused a stir on the first day of the Lenzerheide races when the competitors spotted him on a TV broadcasting the event.
“All of the women were like, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re showing Roger—Roger Federer’s here! He’s in the finish!’” Shiffrin said. “Everybody got so nervous—more nervous that he was there than for the race itself.”
Shiffrin, likewise, is an admirer of tennis’s greats. She has exchanged messages with women’s world No. 1 Iga Swiatek. She also loved watching the top men’s players of the era—Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Federer. “But Roger was like the person that inspired me to watch tennis and be such an enthusiastic fan,” she said.
Shiffrin also plays tennis—usually with her mom—as a workout and to train her mind. “It requires, obviously, eye-hand coordination, but also the mental fortitude to stay focused when you’re tired at the end of a long interval, essentially,” Shiffrin said.
During their lunch, Federer—a two-time Olympic medalist—downplayed the three-time Olympic medalist Shiffrin’s disastrous results at the Beijing Games in which she skidded off course in three races. He encouraged her to look at her entire career, not just that two-week period, and ask herself how long she wanted to compete in a way that was enjoyable.
He urged her to, “‘Enjoy the most incredible moments because what you do is incredible,’” Shiffrin said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Roger Federer’s talking to me about my career.’ It was a little bit hard to really reel it all in and understand everything he was even saying, because I was sort of awestruck the entire time.”
Eileen Shiffrin spent much of the afternoon talking to Federer’s wife, Mirka, whom Eileen described as “a stick of dynamite. She’s so cool and assertive and ‘girl power.’ She just rocks.”
As lunch stretched past two hours, Eileen remembered saying a few times that it was probably time to let the Federers get on with their day.
“And Federer would reply, “‘No! We’re not in a rush,’” Eileen said. “And he’d ask another question. He’d say, ‘I’m just curious about this….’”
Federer talked about longevity, throwing out that the now 27-year-old Shiffrin could compete for 10 more years. At first she laughed—it sounded like such a long time—but because the message came from him, she said, “I could definitely see quite a few more years.”
As Shiffrin and her mom drove away from the Federers’, Shiffrin says she felt relief. “For the first time since the Olympics I kind of got rid of that yucky feeling that I had there,” she said.
Eileen Shiffrin has a feeling that Federer’s invitation came from the sense that Mikaela needed a boost. “For me,” she said, “all I could think of was, ‘This is exactly the medicine she needs right now, just to talk to Roger.’”
Federer retired from tennis in September, but at the time of his lunch with Shiffrin, he was still competing. Federer didn’t provide a comment for this article.