Inside The Icy Cat Fight Between Olympic Skiers Julia Mancuso & Lindsey Vonn!
Lindsey Vonn, 25, and Julia Mancuso, 25, may both be on Team USA, but lately it seems like they’ve been competing against each other! It’s apparently well-known that the two, who have skied together since grade school, are jealous of one another — but the tension between the teammates intensified when Lindsey crashed during the Giant Slolom event Feb. 24 in Vancouver. Lindsey’s accident, which caused her to break her pinky, also cost Julia her chances at placing in the event. When Julia did finally finish the descent, she fell to the ground and cried.
And because this is the digital age, Julia immediately took to the Internet after the event to vent her disgust for the outcome. “I was flagged in GS,” she tweeted. “That is ******.” Realizing she may have gone overboard, Julia quickly deleted that post, replacing it with this more G-rated thought: “That yellow flag in GS was such … just want to scream. I’m really miffed,” she tweeted. Miffed, eh?
“I know [Julia] was disappointed, and I know that she was mad, and probably frustrated, and probably mad at me,” Lindsey told reporters after the disastrous race. “But I can’t help that I fell. I wanted to finish.” During a later interview, Julia suggested that Lindsey should have been quickly removed from the course after her fall, rather than simply lay on the ground “like a pretzel.”
But her resentment towards Lindsey had already come through loud and clear when she spoke with Sports Illustrated earlier this week. “Our team is struggling, as a group,” Julia told the magazine on Feb. 23. “People are having a hard time reaching their potential because it’s such a struggle for attention. You come to meetings after races and it’s like it’s a bad day if Lindsey didn’t do well.” Ouch!
When Lindsay was approached Feb. 25 about Julia’s comment, she simply shrugged it off. “It just bums me out,” she said.
In an attempt to diffuse the feud, Julia told the Associated Press on Feb. 25 that the whole mess has “been taken a little out of proportion.” She said “the way it came across, that it was a media-attention fight or something like that, is just ridiculous.”