Thursday afternoon, roughly one month from the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, Mikaela Shiffrin was still a bit out of breath from a slalom training session in Austria. But it felt good, and not just because Shiffrin, an eight-time Olympic and world champion, is once again atop the Alpine World Cup overall standings.

“I finally feel like myself again,” she said in a phone interview.

Ten weeks ago, as she sat in the kitchen of her Colorado home, Shiffrin all but predicted her comeback…