Julia Mancuso (born March 9, 1984) is an alpine ski racer with the U.S. Ski Team. She was the gold medalist in the giant slalom at the 2006 Winter Olympics and the silver medalist in both downhill and combined at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She has also won three medals (a silver and two bronzes) at the World Ski Championships, although she has only won four races in regular World Cup competition. Her three Olympic medals are the most ever for a female American alpine skier.
Mancuso made her World Cup debut at Copper Mountain, Colorado, on November 20, 1999, at the age of 15. She scored her first World Cup points (top-30 finish in a race) during the 2001 season. While she often struggled in World Cup races over the next few seasons, she enjoyed exceptional success at the Junior World Championships, winning a record eight medals, including five golds in 2002, 2003, and 2004.
Her World Cup results improved dramatically during the 2005 season, as she climbed to ninth place overall from 55th place in 2004. At the 2005 World Championships, she won bronze medals in both the super G and the giant slalom competitions. Her unexpected gold medal at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, coming when she had never finished higher than second in a World Cup race, launched her to stardom.
She won the race despite ongoing pain in her right knee, which was finally traced to hip dysplasia. She would finish the 2006 season in eighth place, including podium (top three) finishes in three races, although she could sometimes barely walk by season’s end.
At the start of the off-season, Mancuso endured arthroscopic surgery on her right hip to remove an inch-long bone spur on the ball of the joint. After several months off skis, she resumed training with the U.S. team in August, at their summer ski camp in South America. By the start of the 2007 season, she was almost fully recovered.
Although she started off slowly, with a number of disappointing results in the first few weeks as she worked back into race shape, the 2007 season would turn out to be Mancuso’s breakout year on the World Cup circuit. She won her first World Cup race on December 19, 2006, a downhill in Val-d’Isère, France, and then took second in another downhill the next day. She went on to win three more races during the season; a Super G, a super combined, and another downhill. At the 2007 World Championships in Åre, Sweden, she won a silver medal in the super combined. After finishing on the podium in three consecutive races (2nd, 1st, 3rd) in Tarvisio, Italy, on March 2–4, 2007, she was tied for the overall World Cup lead. She eventually finished the season in third place overall, the best finish by an American woman since Tamara McKinney in 1984, until Lindsey Vonn won the World Cup title in 2008. She was also in second place in the discipline standings in both downhill and combined.
However, she had not won another World Cup race since the 2007 season and had not even achieved a top-three finish in World Cup events in two years due to back problems, so her silver medal in the women’s downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics was another surprise. The very next day, she won another silver in the Women’s Super Combined, an event that incorporates both a downhill and a slalom run. However, while Mancuso was trying to defend her title in giant slalom, Lindsey Vonn crashed after Mancuso, the next skier, had started, forcing Mancuso’s run to be stopped just before she reached Vonn’s crash. Forced to re-start from the back of the pack, Mancuso only managed an 18th-place first run, and her strong second run only brought her up to eighth overall.