Three weeks later, Julia Mancuso still in search of her boots

Three weeks later, Julia Mancuso still in search of her boots{mosimage}Julia Mancuso still has not been reunited with her ski boots, from which she was separated way back on Dec. 4 as her team departed Lake Louise following the World Cup speed races there.
 
The boots have been following her around the world since then, shipped by well-intentioned people at each stop on the World Cup, but never quite managing to catch the World Cup racer, who is ninth in the overall standings.
 
‘I haven’t been able to feel that good since I lost my boots’ she said on Wednesday. ‘It’s frustrating. … I just haven’t had any time to train on my new stuff, to get it figured out, because everywhere they get sent to, they arrive too late.’
 
The boots were shipped from Lake Louise to Aspen, but arrived a day after the team left for Val d’Isere. The boots were shipped to Val d’Isere, but got lost in transit somewhere. According to Trevor Wagner, the head women’s tech coach for the U.S. Ski Team, the boots were last traced to Lyon, France, and technicians from Rossignol are trying to track them down there.
 
Wagner said Mancuso’s boots are especially hard to replace because of the care that went into customizing them, and that Mancuso’s boots had to be ‘extra special’ when it came to canting angles and especially liners. ‘The liners are the biggest thing with her’ he said.
 
‘Imagine getting a new computer’ he said. ‘It’s like that. It’s a lot of work to fix it. But with the computer it’s just doing it, and with boots it’s all about feel.’
 
Mancuso and Wagner have slightly different interpretations of how the boots went missing. Mancuso says they ‘didn’t get loaded onto the van’ and Wagner says ‘she forgot them in the hotel.’