Parisien enjoying life after competitive skiing Motherhood next for Olympian

AUBURN – She’s skied with the best, in races where a few hundredths of a second mean everything. Now, former Olympian and three-time World Cup winner Julie Parisien is back where it all started, hanging out with the kids on her hometown slope.

Playing follow the leader. Tag. Sliding on one ski.

“We just go out and have fun,” the 29-year-old Parisien says as she prepares for her class of 7- to 13-year-olds at the Lost Valley ski area, a compact jewel of a place where she learned to ski when she was all of 2.

“They’re total neophytes. I’m basically giving them the fundamentals. That’s what I should be doing, giving them a solid basis.”

And having fun.

It wasn’t all fun and games in 1992 when Parisien vied for a medal in her Olympic debut in Albertville, France. With four front teeth knocked out, stitches in her lip and a cast on her wrist from falls three weeks earlier, she competed in the slalom and giant slalom.

By only 5/100ths of a second, she missed third place in the slalom – a margin many said would have been erased if it weren’t for her injuries. She finished fifth in the giant slalom.

The following year, Parisien won a silver medal in the slalom at the World Championships.

Parisien returned to the Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 and Nagano, Japan, in 1998, and she was a member of the U.S. Ski Team for eight years.

In 1998, she joined the Pro Tour and has twice been overall Pro Tour champion.

Now married and four months pregnant, Parisien has entered a new phase of life, back where it all started in snow-rich central Maine. Instead of facing gates and time clocks and enduring bumps and bruises, the worst discomfort Parisien faces these days is morning sickness.

“It’s been wiping me out,” she said. “I throw up every day.”

But her passion for skiing shines through it all. Parisien, a member of a family of Olympic skiers, has visited more than a dozen Maine junior high schools and Boys and Girls Clubs during the past few months to inspire children to keep fit and stay active.

She tells kids to cut back on computer games and TV and get outside.

“Winter is Maine’s best season,” she tells them.

At Lost Valley, Parisien says she can relate to the way children view the setting because she remembers it so well when she was their age.

“I’m not looking at it through adult eyes. I’m looking at it through their eyes too,” she said as skiers whizzed down a trail called Bull Moose behind her. “I can look at a little bump and say, ‘Look at that jump!”‘

The memories of little Lost Valley never faded, even when Parisien was crisscrossing Europe in a frenzied schedule of big-time competitions that took her from one huge ski resort to the next. “Some days,” she said, “I didn’t know what country we were in.”

She noted that European countries are dotted with smaller places like Lost Valley.

“After skiing in so many huge resorts, I’d much rather ski in a place like this,” she said. “It’s exactly the same as it was 25 years ago.”

Parisien has retired from major competitions, but still can’t resist a chance to race. She races every Thursday at the Auburn resort on an all-women’s team and competed two weeks ago in Vail, Colo., in a promotional event for Rossignol skis that will be televised Sunday on NBC at noon.

Off the slopes, Parisien has resumed her college education that was put on hold by her skiing career. She is in a pre-nursing program at the University of Southern Maine.

Parisien attended the private Burke Mountain ski academy in Vermont. In the same year she graduated, 1989, she finished fourth in the Super G at the U.S. Alpine Championships.

Julie, her sister Anna and brother Rob have all competed in the Olympics. Parisien has called her brother Jean Paul, who died in an auto accident in 1992, her inspiration to become an elite skier.

Parisien’s husband, Tim Nuce, who is from Colorado, isn’t much of a downhill aficionado and never became wrapped up in the complex world of big-time racing. “He’s a back-country skier,” Parisien said.

As for the burgeoning popularity of snowboarding, “I’ve only tried it once,” said Parisien. She doesn’t like the falls when you’re learning. “It hurts.”