How Mikaela Shiffrin Met Fiancé Aleksander Kilde

The couple first bumped into each other in Chile. Later, they were the only athletes to arrive the night before an Atomic media event, so they had dinner together with Shiffrin’s mom and her agent. 

Shiffrin, on the podcast, asked Kilde if he thought the dinner was awkward. 

“I didn’t find it awkward,” he said. “There’s a reason I asked you out again.”

The next day, during the media event, Shiffrin felt shy. She was only in her early 20s and said she hadn’t yet come out of her shell. She decided to sit in the back of the room. Kilde walked in and sat down right next to her, and Shiffrin wondered what his motivations were. 

“I was like, is this guy interested in me? I don’t know,” she said.

After the media event, on Facebook Messenger, Kilde asked Shiffrin when they were going to get dinner again. Shiffrin, trying to flirt, said, “We already had dinner.” Kilde took that as a rejection. Shiffrin, for her part, thought Kilde had ghosted her.

When Kilde and Shiffrin had finished recounting the meet cute that didn’t work out at the time, a voice piped up off camera, saying, “And the rest is history.” The rest, indeed, is history.

In 2024, the couple announced that after several years of dating, they were engaged to be married. On What’s the Point, Kilde and Shiffrin addressed the status of their wedding. 

“We’re going to get married, guys, calm down,” said Shiffrin. 

“There’s just like a couple things that are going on right now,” she continued, in an apparent nod to the Winter Olympics, which are only a few months away. Kilde, too, is still recovering from a serious crash he suffered in January 2024.

Kilde added that when he asked Shiffrin to marry him, he told her that there was no rush. 

“We don’t have to do this now, I just know you’re the woman in my life, and that’s gonna happen,” he said.