So Hilarious! Mikaela Shiffrin explains on why she used Taylor Swift’s ‘Ruin the Friendship’ to celebrate her Gold Olympic Medal.

When Mikaela Shiffrin won gold in the women’s slalom race on Feb. 18 at the 2026 Winter Olympics, she celebrated in part by sharing a lyric from a Taylor Swift song to Instagram: “My advice is always ruin the friendship.”

The line comes from Swift’s track “Ruin the Friendship,” which is about the singer’s regrets over a high school friendship that stayed platonic, but could’ve been something more had she taken the leap.

While Shiffrin, 30, is happily engaged to Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, the song choice was still significant for the alpine skier, who tells PEOPLE that the Life of a Showgirl track “really speaks” to her.

“The lyrics go into some loss and regret and things like that, but at the end of the day, when I started out this season listening to the album, I kept putting on ‘Ruin the Friendship,’ ‘cause I’m like, ‘This is what I want to feel what I’m in the start gate. I want to go. I just want to leave it all behind and ruin the friendship,’” she explains.

Shiffrin — who is a member of Team Visa’s athlete program, and even appeared in an ad for the brand celebrating her road to the 2026 Games — says that to her, the song is all about putting ones’ self out there in a big way, which is what she does each time she races down a course.

“It’s about taking risks, kind of, in my life. That’s how I sort of translate it to my life, and that’s not always the easiest thing to do,” she says. “But yeah, it really felt like the right moment.”

The most decorated skier of all time says she was also intentional when it came to the photo that she chose to accompany her caption, as she considers it “probably the best photo I’ve ever had of a slalom turn.”

“[It’s] the best action shot. And it just felt like this was the mentality that spoke to that photo, so yeah. It felt right,” she says, before adding of Swift: “And I got a comment [from] the author herself. Just crazy.”

Swift, 36, gave Shiffrin’s post her seal of approval, commenting, “”HISTORIC 🥇🥇🥇.”

Shiffrin is a longtime Swiftie, and attended the star’s Eras Tour show in Denver in 2023. She told The New York Times in 2024 that Swift’s music “has been guiding me a little bit every step of the way.”

Her teammate Breezy Johnson is also a fan of the Grammy winner — when Johnson’s now-fiancé Connor Watkins proposed at the finish line of the Super-G race, he used a lyric from her song “The Alchemy” to do so, prompting another comment from Swift on Instagram.

“One of my favorite other lyrics from the song is, ‘Where’s the trophy? He just comes running over to me,’ ” Johnson told PEOPLE earlier this week, adding “It was cool,” for Swift to pick those exact ones for her comment.