Forgive Dan and Amy Macuga if they have to consult a spreadsheet to figure out where their children are.
This is one of those things that happens when your three girls are all skiers on the inside track to make the US Olympic team. There’s a boy, too, who also skis competitively and may eventually end up on the US team, but not in 2026.
Ah, but we digress. For the next 16 months or so, the Macuga sisters of Park City, Utah (where else?), are going to be adding their own chapter to the story of standout sports siblings. You’ve heard of the Manning brothers (football) and the Williams sisters (tennis) and the Korda crew (golf and tennis). Alpine skiing had Phil and Steve Mahre way back when.
But here’s what makes the Macugas different: Through the combined forces of having different body types, different interests and probably a healthy dose of the self-preservation instinct that led them to not want to compete against each other, each Macuga pursued a different skiing discipline. . The result: When you meet them, there is a bit of a “Sound of Music” vibe to the Macugas, if the Von Trapp family had been filled with skiers rather than singers.
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“I’m Sam, I’m 23, and I like to fly,” says Sam Macuga the ski jumper.
“I’m Lauren, I’m 22, and I like to go fast.” That’s Lauren Macuga, the alpine racer.
“And I’m Alli, and I’m 21, and I like all aspects, so I do moguls.”
Like Lauren, Daniel Macuga, the baby of the family at 19, skis alpine. He doesn’t compete internationally yet, so he’s a bit more manageable. He might even attend a US-based college full-time first. Time, and results, will tell.
Their endeavors all have a bit of overlap. Alpine skiers fly 60 meters in the air over jumps. Mogul skiers go pretty darn fast while they race over massive bumps while incorporating flips and other tricks into their runs. And there may be no scarier starting gate than the one atop ski jumping’s large hill.
Three sisters on one Olympic team would be any parent’s dream. Three sisters in essentially three different sports in one Olympics is a parenting psychologist’s dream, since the girls have basically never competed against one another, except in Mario Kart and card games.
“When we play games together, it’s so competitive,” Lauren Macuga said. “If we were all in the same sport, it would not be possible.”
Lauren Macuga finished fourth in the downhill in Saturday’s World Cup event in Beaver Creek, Colo. (Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
It all happened very organically, too. After moving to Park City in 2007, the Macugas signed up their kids for the region’s Get Out and Play winter sports program, a legacy of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City that provides cheap access to winter Olympic sports for children in the region. Each sister liked something else. Their parents did not complain.
“They kind of self-selected,” said Dan Macuga, a marketing executive who has worked with Chevrolet and Usana. “We’ve always told them, ‘As long as you’re having fun, just keep doing what you’re doing.’ It’s not really our decision to make. It’s what makes them happy, and they chose the sport that they wanted to do.”
Logisticswise though, the Macuga family chronicles have long been an exercise in organizational mayhem.
For years, that meant relying on friends and other parents to get some of their kids to the right mountain at the right time. These days, the various US ski teams take care of that part.
The parents just have to try to figure out what continent and country they need to be in to catch up with the children. There’s a Google Sheet filled out months ahead of time with everyone’s schedule.
What’s happening in the coming days?
According to the sheet, on Thursday, Sam is scheduled to be in Engelberg, Switzerland, preparing for qualification the next day. Lauren will be training in St. Moritz, getting ready for Saturday’s Super-G race; Alli is training for the weekend’s moguls competition in Georgia — the country not the state — after traveling from Alpe D’huez in France the day before; father Dan Macuga and Amy are flying to Zurich that afternoon. Daniel, the little brother, is home on duty with the dogs, Yuki, a Siberian husky, and Bowser, a “megamutt,” according to the girls. The four cats kind of take care of themselves.
The spreadsheet is largely for the parents’ use. The children have their own methods.
“My teammates will be like, ‘Oh, where’s your brother? Where are your sisters?’” Alli Macuga said. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know, somewhere across the world? I think they’re in Europe. Maybe like Japan, or like Norway or, I don’t know, Germany.’ It’s always just a guessing game. Or I’ll check Find My Friends (app) and be like, ‘Oh, that’s where they are.’”
“Yeah, Find My Friends is our hero,” Sam Macuga said.
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Alli and Lauren found themselves in the same hotel in Chile this summer for a week of training. That was weird. Basically never happens.
Once they figure out where each other is, sometimes they realize a sister is competing at that very moment. They will tap away on their various gadgets until they find a live stream of the competition somewhere and cheer along from thousands of miles away.
Alli, the mogul specialist, has posted the best results of the family so far, though Lauren showed signs that she might be coming on fast. Racing the famed Birds of Prey track at Beaver Creek in Colorado over the weekend, she finished fourth in the downhill and 12th in Super-G. In the downhill, she missed her first spot on a World Cup podium by 0.18 seconds.
If she keeps that up, she will be following in the footsteps of Alli, who has come a bit out of nowhere the past couple of years to become one of the US team’s rising stars.
Mogul specialist Alli Macuga has been the top performer of the family so far, aiming for a spot on the 2026 Olympic team. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
She landed on two podiums last season and finished fifth in the world rankings and has two top-15 finishes to start this World Cup season. There’s not too much mystery surrounding her success. During her early teens, she liked freestyle skiing so much she competed in seven different disciplines, everything from “big air,” which is going off one huge jump and doing some flips and spins, to “big mountain,” which requires flying down a Steep descent filled with cliffs and frightening drops.
“I was constantly competing and traveling and not training,” she said.
She decided to choose the two she liked most, which were moguls and big mountain. But at 17, at the junior world championships in big mountain in Switzerland, she crashed on a cliff and fractured her back. That pretty much ended her big mountain career.
Two seasons ago, she was supposed to just have a few starts on the top-tier World Cup circuit and spend the rest of the season competing a level down on the Nor-Am Tour. Then she finished 12th in her first World Cup start. She ended up getting the World Cup Rookie of the Year award and also winning the Nor-Am tour.
She’s pretty sure that not specializing in one discipline too soon and those early years trying out alpine and jumping with her sisters have played a big role in her success.
“They all contributed to each other,” she said.
Lauren Macuga said she got hooked on speed skiing when her coach threw her into a downhill race in Sugarloaf in Maine when she was 16. Nearly all kids start out skiing gates and don’t move into the speed disciplines until they are older.
Lauren had never raced downhill before. She quickly discovered that the race basically happens on ice, rather than snow. She did her first training run fully clothed, wanting some protection in case she fell. She wore pants during the second one.
Her coach told her to aim for finishing within two seconds of the leaders. She finished a little more than a second behind them and got hooked on the adrenaline rush.
The shift to competing in Europe at the highest level has been an education. American mountains, especially in the lower rungs of competition, don’t have the icy steeps of Europe, with jumps over waterfalls and other high-octane challenges. One look at the left-right combination of the “Hot Air” jump in Zauchensee, Austria, last year and she thought it might be the end of her.
“At the start and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I just want to make it down,’” she said. “I guess the fear factor just kind of turned more into, it was fun.”
A season-best fifth-place finish in Super-G in Kvitfjell, Norway, last season went some distance toward that transformation.
Sam Macuga has further to go to get to that level. The US doesn’t have the history of success in women’s ski jumping that it does in alpine and freestyle. Women didn’t compete in the Olympics until 2014, and funding for an American jumping team can be hard to come by.
But she’s already accumulating points toward a spot on the US team for 2026. Her slight build has always been well-suited to jumping, where being light can help you soar. She’s also got a technical mind and studies electrical engineering at Dartmouth for a quarter each year.
Plus, there is this:
“I like to fly,” she said.
That’s not always the sort of thing a parent likes to hear. And there isn’t much comfort with the other kids, given Alli’s mid-slope flips and Lauren and Daniel tearing down sheets of ice at 80 mph.
Whatever, the Macugas are used to it.
Amy Macuga says she gets nervous for them in the starting gate but not out of fear of an injury.
“They hit the ground pretty hard, and like any parent, you can have that inkling to start running toward them, but you also know that with the team that they’re in good hands,” Dan Macuga said. “You know that people (are) taking good care of them and wouldn’t let them do something that they thought it was gonna hurt them.”
Plus, they have a spreadsheet to manage, which is enough to worry about.
“We used to operate off a whiteboard,” Lauren Macuga said. “We have upgraded.”
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(Top photo of, from left, Alli, Lauren, Amy, Dan and Sam Macuga at the US Ski & Snowboard Gold Medal Gala in New York in October 2023: Michael Loccisano / Getty Images)