PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Racing is the fun part. Losing is the hard part. And moving on? For Mikaela Shiffrin, that often feels like the impossible part.

“I’m terrible at that,” said the 22-year-old skier, moments after her surprising slalom finish Friday, the shock and disappointment still fresh.

In back-to-back days, Shiffrin left everything on the snow. She put on a gutsy performance Thursday, winning gold in the giant slalom, followed by a gut-emptying stunner a day later in the slalom. The defending Olympic champ in the event – and the world’s best slalom racer since she was 17 – finished in fourth place. Just a few days ago, the biggest question surrounding Shiffrin was how many medals she’ll take home from PyeongChang. Now it’s not even clear how many events she’ll enter as she tries to figure out how to rebound from Friday’s upset.

She entered these Olympics considering four or five disciplines. Bad weather early in the week condensed the competition schedule, and Shiffrin decided against racing in Saturday’s super-G, giving her more time to prep for the downhill. But following Friday’s slalom, Shiffrin said she can’t yet commit to the downhill and might wait to race in the combined. She’ll take downhill training runs Monday and Tuesday and then make a final decision.

Between now and then, she’ll try to process and move past Friday’s race, in which she finished 0.40 seconds behind winner Frida Hansdotter of Sweden – and just 0.08 seconds away from a spot on the podium.

In a 24-hour span, these Olympics showcased everything there is to know about Shiffrin as an athlete. She’s elite, dominant, capable of blowing away the field and winning gold every time she steps into her skis. Also, she can ski endless circles in her head.

She knows this, and her team knows this. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

When she vomited at the top of the course before her first run Friday, even Shiffrin didn’t quite understand what had happened. Was she sick? Nervous? Something else? Her stomach clenched like a fist. She’d been through this before – most of last season, in fact – but even if it’s a familiar feeling, it’s never a welcome one.

“It was almost like a food poisoning feeling,” she said. “Like, what is happening?”

Hours later, she was still trying to untangle it all.

“I don’t feel sick right now,” she said. “I don’t think I have a virus. I was thinking that after the first run. It might’ve been a little bit of me trying to make an excuse. I went through this whole phase between the first and the second run where I was like, ‘Okay, get over yourself and try to do what you can.’ ”

Shiffrin hasn’t hidden from her Alpine anxieties. In some ways, the pre-race jitters and irritable stomach were just accepted parts of her routine throughout last season. It became such an issue, she eventually sought the help of Lauren Loberg, a sports psychologist who works with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. All the work Shiffrin had put in over the past year, though, suddenly didn’t seem to matter much.

“It was like all of the tools I have that make me feel equipped to handle whatever pressure I feel, I didn’t have anymore,” she said.

As these Olympics inched closer and she became more ever-present in television commercials and NBC promotions, the chatter about her competing for four or five Olympic medals grew louder, which made these PyeongChang Games markedly different from Sochi four years ago.

“It’s definitely more pressure for me to repeat than to do something new for the first time,” she said before these Olympics.

She has grown and changed plenty since then – becoming more dominant each World Cup season – but that wasn’t as evident Friday. She finished her second run, appeared to shrug her shoulders and then began the long search for answers. She couldn’t say how, exactly, but she felt Friday’s rattled nerves were different from last season’s. “It’s hard to really explain,” she said.

Her team has, of course, been through this before. Her mother, Eileen, also serves as a coach, and Mike Day is her coach with the U.S. Ski team. Between runs, the world’s best female ski racer was facing a final slalom run with a gold medal on the line, but they had no idea what to say. They were searching for a solution, but Shiffrin couldn’t articulate the problem.

“My coaches, my mom, my whole team was incredibly supportive. But they don’t know what to do in that kind of situation,” she said. “It’s like, ‘What is up? What do you do?’ I sometimes feel like the only one who can beat myself in the slalom is me.”

In these early days of the Games, Shiffrin can’t really escape from the magnitude of what she’s trying to do here. But the pressure, she insisted, is internal. “It’s more when I get into the start gate, how I feel about what I’m trying to accomplish. Today I didn’t feel like I was up for the challenge,” she said. “Actually, I did. But when I was actually skiing my runs, that didn’t come out.”

She’ll wake up Saturday hoping to focus on her next race, not her previous one. Whether these Winter Games amount to a single Olympic gold – certainly nothing to shed tears over – or multiple medals will hinge on how she responds and whether she can settle her worries – not to mention her stomach – before her Olympic schedule resumes.

She knows she’s not good at moving past these tough defeats, but Shiffrin also knows she has no choice.

“Every single loss that I’ve ever had, I remember that feeling so thoroughly,” she said. “It’s like a piece of my heart breaks off, and I can never get it back.”