Today I’m sharing a profile of Olympic downhill skier Julia Mancuso that I wrote in 2008 but was never published. ESPN the Magazine decided to hold the story after I submitted it because Mancuso was not having the winning season she’d been hoping for. The piece never ran.
Long-form journalism has always been tricky business, even back in the aughts, when print was still mostly thriving. A story’s success depends not only on the writing and reporting, but also on timing, luck, and other precarities that are usually out of the writer’s control. I’ll almost always take the risk on an assignment. You never know what you’ll discover that might inspire another story, change the way you think about the world, or introduce you to a character you’ll put in another story.
It’s one of my mottos in writing and life:Everything takes you to a new place.
I spent a week with Mancuso in Austria, chasing her around the village and mountain. I was three months pregnant with my first daughter. I didn’t know that this would be, by choice, the last time I traveled on assignment and my last big profile for a long time.
Profiles are my favorite kind of magazine story to write. I find it thrilling to embed myself in my subject’s world, exploring new ways of being. It’s a full-immersion experience, and I always come home changed.
After the story was officially killed, I forgot about it. Mancuso went on to clean up at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, and I remember thinking that ESPN hadn’t been wrong in assigning the story and I hadn’t gotten the story wrong; we’d just been two years too early.
But during the recent furor over Lindsey Vonn’s decision to race the Olympic Downhill in Milan with a torn ACL, it all came back to me. A snarky naysayer on social media informed me that I was not entitled to an opinion about Vonn. But wait, a small voice in the back of my brain piped up, I did know something about elite sports and Downhill ski racing. (Read my response here.)
I went looking for the piece on my old hard drive. Julia Mancuso, who had long retired from ski-racing, had taken to her IG feed to provide perspective on Vonn’s training, rehab, and injuries. Her commentary was thoughtful and kind, defending her former rival’s right to compete on her own terms.
I was curious to see how much, or little, had changed in 18 years. As it turns out, a lot, and also not much.
I’ve pasted the profile here in its draft form. I have changed nothing since I first wrote it in January 2008, save some footnotes about what I might do differently if I were submitting this piece for publication today.
Like all stories, it offers a glimpse of a moment in time. I offer it as a reminder that first drafts are always works-in-process and can be made better with thoughtful editing (I was an editor for 12 years), but there’s also something beautiful and true when we give our complete attention to a story in its unfolding.*
Even stories that don’t see the light of day matter. They all goes into the writer’s imagination. Maybe, like this one, they will find their way out eventually.
If you’d like to read the full piece, which includes a cameo from Vonn, please take advantage of your free trial or become a paying subscriber for $5 per month.
Remember, no story is for naught! Everything is always included.
xo Katie
*The last day of the trip, Steve and I caught the season’s first tracks in the off-piste Hinter Rendl. I remember our guide, Christian, absolutely losing his mind when he found out I telemarking while pregnant. Six months later, Pippa was born and we were headlong into our next big adventure.
baby on board! putting down some powder 8s in the hinter rendll.
WHEN GIVEN A CHOICE between working and playing, there is no choice: Julia Mancuso plays. She’s playing now, in a chilly, dimly-lit indoor tennis bubble in St. Anton, Austria. It’s the week before Christmas and Mancuso, who is 23 and an Olympic gold medalist, has come to this gingerbread-trim village in the Tyrolean Alps to do what she does best: ski very fast downhill. But first she wants to get in a game of doubles.
Mancuso’s coach, Chris Knight, feeds a few euros into the coin-operated overhead lights and fishes some old balls out of a hopper. In the bluish fluorescence, the wall thermometer reads 50 degrees; outside, barely 4 o’clock and nearly dark, it’s closer to zero. Mancuso shrugs off her white down parka and lace-up shearling boots. Underneath, she’s wearing a faded red World Wildlife Fund T-shirt with the words “Hotter Than I Should Be” splashed across her chest, knee-length lycra knickers, a striped headband to keep her long brown shag out of her cornflower eyes, and mismatched socks. Sharapova she’s not, but she’s ready to play—and, it goes without saying, win.
Vonn, center, and Mancuso, right, on the podium at the 2007 World Cup Downhill in St. Anton, Austria
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Katie Arnold.
