Julia Mancuso is in a happy place.

The Fijian island of Tavarua, three miles from Viti Levu and the nation’s capital, Suva, is where the most decorated US female Olympic skier has settled – at least for the next few months.

A tiny, heart-shaped piece of paradise, Tavarua is lapped by the kind of impossibly clear turquoise waters which lure divers, snorkellers and most significantly surfers, out from their cyan-roofed luxury shelters down to the ivory sand that rings the island. Make no mistake, Tavarua is a mecca for surfers and for a lady like Julia Mancuso, who looks as happy riding the waves as she does the mountain pistes, it’s a kind of utopia.

Julia retired officially from professional skiing at the start of this year, closing the book on a career that included four Olympic and five World Championship medals. In fact she has won more Olympic medals than any other female US alpine skier.

What Julia Mancuso is not so well-known for is a career-spanning battle with a debilitating and often agonising condition called hip displaysia. After yet more surgery earlier this year Julia is finally able to walk limp free.

 And her world has opened up.

Thanks to the cultural phenomenon of social media, that’s a walk we can take with her. “I think it’s nice to be able to directly connect with fans,” she tells me, sounding a lot like somebody who uses social media in the way it was originally intended. “I like Instagram because it seems to be the place where most people spend their time now. Facebook is tough because they expect pages with a large following to pay to get their posts out there. It’s not as natural or useful as it used to be.”

At a glance the Julia Mancuso Instagram feed is a mosaic of the colours that represent her lifestyle: it’s all blue ocean, white snow and blond sand – albeit there’s a bit less of the white stuff than there used to be.

“Right now I am in Fiji, my husband is the GM of a surf resort called Tavarua and we split our time between that and travelling. My dream was always to travel the world when I retired from ski racing, so we have a fun four months ahead.”

The curtain fell on Julia’s skiing career in January this year at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. The hip problem was taking its inexorable toll, shearing the edge off her ability to compete with the top skiers in the world. But this was no overnight submission: Julia spent an entire career shrugging off the bleak forecasts of others, including medical professionals.

Hip displaysia is a condition where the socket does not fully encase the ball of the hip, and can lead to deterioration of the bone and joint dislocation. It can make walking difficult, and a sufferer wouldn’t think about a career in sport -certainly not one like skiing. At 18, Julia was given a harsh medical reality: make your choice between competitive skiing, and living a normal life. The thing is, by that point in her life the young Julia had already competed at Olympic level (at 17 she represented the USA at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games). She won the World Championship Junior titles in downhill, combined and giant slalom the same year. In short, the young Julia Mancuso had tasted competition racing and assumed, rightly as it turned out, that there might just be a shiny future ahead.