Parkite alpine skier Lauren Macuga tore her right ACL in giant slalom training last Friday in Copper Mountain, Colorado. The 23-year-old speed skiing specialist was preparing to make her season debut at the venue in a giant slalom World Cup race the next day.
Macuga now faces surgery on Monday and a long injury rehabilitation process afterwards. She expects it will be nine months before she can ski again, however that’s plenty of time to ready for the first World Cup of next season.
More difficult for Macuga than missing out on Copper Mountain and all the World Cups to follow this season is missing out on what would’ve likely been her first Olympics in Milan this February. She entered the season as the fourth-ranked downhill and sixth-ranked super-G skier in the world.
Macuga will instead get her surgery in Vail then start her rehab process in Park City. She will spend lots of time using the facilities at the U.S. Ski Team’s Center of Excellence in Quinn’s Junction, though she may travel a bit and cheer on her siblings and team. Her sisters Alli and Sam are Olympic hopefuls in moguls and ski jumping, respectively, and her brother Daniel is an up-and-coming speed skier.
“When I spun, I just couldn’t get my feet up and the way they caught just put too much pressure on the ACL,” Macuga said about last Friday’s tear. “You can see the knee looks looks very bent.”
The alpine skier immediately posted a video of the crash on her Instagram account, playfully set to a SpongeBob SquarePants clip.
Macuga said she was readying to break into giant slalom at the World Cup level. She finished 15th in the World Cup Finals giant slalom in March. Both Lindsey Vonn, a speed specialist, and Mikaela Shiffrin, a tech specialist, have skied the opposite disciplines as well.
“I always wanted to start branching into GS. That was supposed to be the start of it,” she added. “I still want to come back to that at some point, but I just am not sure how the points work and if I still will have my spot then. I guess it depends on how return to competition goes.”
Macuga will be able to enter ample speed skiing World Cups upon her return next season due to injury protection rules. She’s hopeful she can maximize her time off and come back even stronger at the beginning of next season. Macuga said all of her teammates have been uplifting and reminding her of similar injuries they’ve overcome and how much of her career is still ahead of her.
“Luckily it doesn’t hurt, but it was hard the next day watching my teammates race at Copper and not me,” Macuga said. “It’s hard because all you want to do is be an Olympian, but it is nice knowing that I do have time and I’ll be back.”
The Parkite said teammates Vonn, Jackie Wiles and Breezy Johnson have all been tremendous sounding boards. Macuga didn’t realize how severe some of their past injuries were until they shared more details. Wiles returned to skiing following a 2018 crash where she tore her ACL, MCL, LCL, POL, lateral meniscus, tib/fib joint and broke her fibula with perennial nerve damage.
Macuga said one of the hardest parts about the injury will be taking the recovery slow. As an up-and-coming speed skier, she’s been used to skiing fast and checking off one achievement after another. It will likely take Macuga about a month-and-a-half to be able to put weight on her right knee, a little after that to return to light weight lifting and another few months to jump and do plyometric exercises.
“Luckily, living in Park City, I’ll be at the COE all the time, which will be nice,” she said. “I want to go see Sam or Ali. … I got to watch Daniel yesterday.”
Macuga is trying to find all the “silver linings” possible this season. She hasn’t spent this much time at home in a winter since 2019, when she broke her leg.
The speed skier believes her team is deep and others will step up and fill her shoes this World Cup season and in Milan. She’ll be following them closely and cheering them on, but she acknowledged a dream scenario for the rest of the season would be one of her siblings walking away with an Olympic medal.
“I’ll be following along, watching and rooting for all of them,” Macuga said. “It’s exciting because it is a very strong team. In the training before (the injury), we were all pretty neck-and-neck.”
Macuga won’t let this injury derail any of her long-term goals. She’s looking forward to the 2030 Olympics, and laughing as her teammates tell her about how hectic Milan will be with its spread out locations and logistics.
“Puts it back a year, but no the goals haven’t changed,” she said. “I guess looking forward to the French Alps is the new driving factor. … Everyone’s trying to make you feel better, and they’re like ‘Luckily, France will be a lot closer together and it won’t be as hectic as Milan.’ I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, right. I didn’t want to go to Milan because it was going to be hectic.’”