montrealgazette.com
Summarize this content to 100 words:
Laurence St-Germain
Age:
31
Event: Alpine skiing
Hometown:
Saint-Ferréol-les-Neiges
In the world of alpine skiing dominated by Europe and the U.S., Laurence St-Germain proved there’s always room at the top for a hard-working upstart.
The skier from the small town of Saint-Ferréol-les-Neiges, 48 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, stunned the skiing universe in 2023 by
winning gold at the FIS Alpine Ski World Championships,
the first time a Canadian had done so in 63 years. It was only the second time Canada had won gold in the event. St-Germain beat out American skiing legend Mikaela Shiffrin to win the race.
Three years later, St-Germain and the 20-person squad making up Canada’s Olympic alpine ski and ski cross teams are hoping they can score some more upsets at the Milano Cortina Games in Italy and continue Canada’s medal run. They will be competing in downhill, super-G, giant slalom and team alpine combined.
St-Germain will be accompanied by Olympics veteran Valérie Grenier of Ottawa, who, like St-Germain, is participating in her third games, and Justine Lamontagne, also of Saint-Ferréol-les-Neiges, who is competing in her first Olympics.
It would be especially gratifying for St-Germain, who suffered a series of injuries since her 2023 win that have kept her from some competitions and out of national training camps last summer. She missed the start of the World Cup season due to pain in her left knee, but was back racing in November.
“That was tough in an Olympics year, not being able to ski for that long,” she told the Canadian Press in late January. Despite the setback, she managed to record a top-10 finish in her first race of the 2025-26 season.
These will likely be her last Olympics, she said.
“For the Games, I’m hoping for a medal,” she said. “At the world championships, it was not expected of me to do that and it’s still unreal. So I think if I have a medal at the Olympics, it will feel even more insane.”
She finished 15th in slalom at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games and 17th at Beijing in 2022. The experience has helped with her mindset coming into Milano Cortina, she said.
“At my first Olympics, I didn’t really have expectations. It was just exciting to be there,” she told Olympics.ca. “At my second Games, I didn’t perform nearly as well. What I learned was to give everything and have no regrets.”
St-Germain studied computer science at the University of Vermont and became the first skier in school history (and just the sixth woman ever, according to olympic.ca) to sweep the slalom and giant slalom titles at the NCAA championships.
Leading Team Canada in alpine skiing is Toronto’s
James Crawford, who scored a bronze
in Beijing 2022 in men’s alpine combined, Canada’s first ever medal in that discipline.
There are high hopes for Team Canada in ski cross, in which multiple skiers race down a course that includes high banked turns and big-air jumps. A Canadian woman has won a medal in the event at every Games since the sport was added to the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.
Marielle Thompson of North Vancouver, who won gold at Sochi in 2014 and a silver at Beijing in 2022, will be participating in her fourth Winter Games. Accompanying her is Brittany Phelan of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, who took a ski cross silver at Pyeongchang in 2018 and is also at her fourth Olympics.
Canada has won 12 Olympic medals in alpine skiing and seven in ski cross.
RBruemmer@postmedia.com
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