MOST AMERICANS CARE about ski racing exactly once every four years, which is why it takes a standout performance at the Olympics to build a career. Picabo Street (silver in '94, gold in '98) and Tommy Moe (silver and gold in '94) parlayed their success into lucrative endorsements and, in the case of Moe, a heli-ski operation in Alaska. Mancuso hasn't been as lucky. Going into Turin, the U.S. squad was expected to dominate. Instead, team poster boy Bode Miller guzzled ... well, you know that story ... while Mancuso and Ted Ligety—who won the team's only other medal, a gold in the combined—became asterisks to a meltdown.

If people do remember anything about Mancuso from the Games, it's probably her clashes with Street, who retired in 2002 but remains the grande dame of American skiing. The two had been bitter rivals since 1999, for reasons that are debated but may have something to do with the fact that at one point Street's boyfriend was also Mancuso's full-time ski technician and traveling partner. The day before the start of the women's giant slalom in Turin, during an interview on the Today show, Street lashed out at Mancuso for racing the earlier slalom event in a plastic tiara, a gag gift from coaches who affectionately refer to Mancuso as "Princess."

"She has a lot of growing up to do," Street told Matt Lauer. "And lose the tiara."

Mancuso's response? On a foggy morning with wet snow falling—standard conditions back in Lake Tahoe, where Mancuso grew up—she beat the second-place finisher, Finland's Tanja Poutiainen, by nearly a second. The result was instant celebrity in Europe—where ski racers rank with soccer players in sports notoriety—and comparisons to tennis's Maria Sharapova. "She's beautiful and an outstanding skier," says Patrick Riml, coach of the U.S. Women's Ski Team. "She's a star over there."

Of course, being huge in Europe doesn't always translate stateside (see Hasselhoff, David), and Mancuso feels frustrated by her lack of recognition here, despite sponsorship deals with POC helmets, Rossignol, and Tamarack Lodge that pushed her 2007 income into the seven figures. "At the Olympics, the eyes weren't really focused on me," Mancuso says. "So, even though I won, I was a little disappointed. I learned that it's not really anybody else's job to promote me. I need to take it into my own hands."

And she has. Last winter, Mancuso started a blog, Kiss My Tiara, where she chronicles her island-girl fitness routine—surfing, paddleboarding, kiteboarding, road biking, and weight lifting—and posts chatty reports on her vacations, U.S. Ski Team news, and random topics. You can find it on her homepage, JuliaMancuso.net, directly below a prominent link to her new Lange Girl poster—a ski-boot ad featuring Mancuso wearing what appears, under my careful scrutiny, to be eight square inches of red lace—and ski boots.

It may seem like an aggressive strategy for a skier, but Mancuso is convinced that she needs to transcend her sport if she's ever going to become an enduring name-brand female athlete like Sharapova or Amanda Beard. "I want to show everyone that what I'm doing is a complete lifestyle," she says. "I can be a female athlete and still be beautiful."

Two days after my waterfall flop, I'm beginning to think Mancuso's idea of getting her name out there means, in some twisted way, beating the shit out of writers. I'm straddling a six-foot surfboard in the lineup at Thousand Peaks, my backside now a deep purple. "Paddle, paddle, paddle!" Mancuso shouts from her paddleboard as a good-looking swell approaches. "Now stand up!"

I do, briefly, then splash into the Pacific for the tenth time. She mercifully trades boards with me and snaps up on the next wave, then crouches low and rides all the way down the line, raising her fists as she nears the shore. She looks like she's just won another gold medal.