Personally I don't agree that "Shiffrin's model" work. Alpine skiing is nowadays, harshly said, but unfortunately very true, sport of spoiled rich brats, with no working habits. That's why it's actually possible for someone untalented (I wouldn't call Shiffrin that, but then again I have way too little info on her), to succeed just with whole bunch of work. With any other (or better to say most of other) sports, just hard work is unfortunately not enough to be on top. That's why Williams sisters, are nowhere near this model, and even less is any soccer player (sport where more money is flowing around then in all other sports together). In tennis, or in soccer, if you want to be best on world, you need huge talent, and whole bunch of hard work. Exclude one, and in best case you can be average player.
Alpine skiing is different. People in there, have absolutely no idea what hard work is. Regardless on what someone here might think of this comment, but believe me, I have seen enough of this on WC level, and my main background is in sport where you die training hard (in my case for absolutely no result), so I know what hard training is, and I know what's this what average top 10 WC racer in alpine skiing does.
But with things set like that, it actually makes it possible for someone without (much) talent, to be top of the top just with hard work. As I wrote, I can't say about Shiffrin, but I believe Muleski about this, but if you look at Kostelic, who was pretty much ruling every discipline few years back, it proves just hard work is enough in alpine to win... simply because when people train so little, you can actually afford to train twice as much as everyone else. In let's say tennis, it's physically impossible to train twice as much as top guys are training, which means... sorry no go if you don't have appropriate talent too.
But even in alpine, pushing your kid doing endless drills, having skiing as full time job at age of 5, is absolutely no guarantee you will produce world champion. It's more of guarantee your kid will tell you to fu**ck off as soon as he will dare to say that to you (as his/her parent), and he or she will quit skiing at age of 15. But then you have person or two every few decades that make it through such way, and becomes world champion, and all of a sudden every single parent think clubs and ski federations suck, and his/her kid should have his private team, with servicemen, few coaches, physio and preferably nutritionist, since he or she is 6. Because that's the only and the right way his/her kid will be World champion in 10 years, and he will finally be bragging around as proud parent of new world champ. Well it doesn't go this way. If nothing else, just look at start list of WC race (and most of those kids never come to start WC)... there's 60-80 racers, and there's in best case 2 or 3 who were World Champions
