BIOGRAPHY
Lake Tahoe's Julia Mancuso, the current Olympic giant slalom champion, is setting records and collecting medals at an impressive pace. The four-event athlete started World Cup racing and was a NorAm champion at 16, competed in the Olympics at 17, set a U.S. mark for Junior World Championships medals before she was out of her teens, and started her twenties by capturing two World Championships medals and establishing a record for most consecutive U.S. championships top-3s. And then she led the first run of the 2006 Olympic GS...and rolled to gold.

UPDATE
Mancuso picked up directly from where she left off in '07 (where she finished third in the World Cup overall) by taking second in the season opening giant slalom in Soelden, Austria. She stayed consistent through the season capturing podium spots in four out of five disciplines (all but slalom) to finish seventh in the overall - her fourth straight season in the top 10. A late season flu knocked her out of a 14th straight U.S. title, but didn't slow her down for long as she and colleagues Lauren Ross and Chemmy Alcott set off to climb Tanzania's Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised $30,000 for Right to Play. Summer sessions included stand-up paddling races - a new passion of Mancuso's and training trips to South America. The '08 season also landed the star on the pages of Rolling Stone, Outside and ESPN magazines, to name a few. Between summer training sessions, Mancuso headed to Beijing, China to host "Julia's Must List" on NBC during the 2008 Olympic Summer Games.

FIRST TRACKS
Mancuso was on skis at 2 at Squaw Valley but didn't race until she was 8, and then she started making up for lost time. She was named to the 2000 Development Team (with older sister April) and her World Cup debut came at 15 years, eight months, 11 days when she narrowly missed making the top-30 cut in a slalom at Copper Mountain. She would go on to pillage the next few Junior World Championships, capturing a U.S.-record eight medals (five golds, three bronze). When she won two medals at the 2005 World Championships in Italy, Italian media immediately adopted her as one of their own; she repeatedly explained - in Bormio in '05 and again at the '06 Olympics in Torino - her family is long gone from Italy, although there "may” be a distant relative or two in southern Italy

FIRST WORLD CUP
Nov. 20, 1999 at Copper Mountain, CO (did not qualify for 2nd run in SL)

OLYMPICS/WORLDS
2007 Worlds - Silver medal in super combined, 5th in GS, 6th in SG, 10th in DH. 2006 Olympics: GS champion, 7th in DH, 9th in combined, 11th in SG. 2005 Worlds - Bronze in super G, bronze in GS, 8th in SL, 9th in CO. 2003 Worlds - 7th in combined, 21st in SG. 2002 Olympics - 13th in combined.