Racing to find her passion
Skiing is in Marguerite Thorp’s DNA. So is perseverance. The Michigan native was on skis at age 2. When she was a child, her parents moved the family west, and she spent her youth in the snow-packed mountains of Colorado and Utah, careening down trails, hungry for speed and any jumps she could find. “I was in love with being in the air,” Thorp recalled. Her passion became the unpredictable sport of ski cross. (Think roller derby on skis, with tight turns, airborne racers, and high-speed collisions.) But a horrific crash on the slopes during a routine race with the Harvard Ski Team during her junior year left her with a metal plate and six screws in her left leg, and a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her right leg. The sanguine senior, who spent almost two months on campus in a wheelchair, knows it could have been worse. “I was lucky,” Thorp said. “At...