Para alpine ski champion Mac Marcoux announces retirement

Para alpine ski champion Mac Marcoux announced his retirement Wednesday, but he isn't done with sport.

The 26-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., won six Paralympic medals, including three gold, and five world titles in the visually impaired classification of alpine skiing.

His guides included his brother Billie Joe followed by Robin Remy, Jack Leitch and Tristan Rodgers.

Marcoux took gold in four of his five races at the 2017 world championship. He won all eight World Cup races he entered in 2019-20.

He claimed downhill silver in Beijing's 2022 Paralympic Games despite missing months of training and racing because of knee surgery and a back injury.

Marcoux crashed in Beijing's super-G and withdrew from the rest of the Paralympic Games with a re-injured back.

"We're at the point in my career where my body's not holding up the way it used to and starting to have some more long-lasting effects with the back-injury stuff," Marcoux said. "It's time for me to kind of focus on the rest of my life and hopefully be able to put my socks on for the foreseeable future.

"It's been a pretty incredible run over the last 12 years. The community that ski racing has created for me ... it's humbling to look back and realize how big a part of your life ski racing was and even though I'm not competing, I still have such a big community within the sport."

Marcoux, who began skiing at age four, starting losing his eyesight to Stargardt macular degeneration at nine. He was eventually left with six per cent vision. His brother Billie Joe began guiding him in ski racing in 2011.

"When Mac and BJ burst onto the scene they were barely teenagers," Alpine Canada high-performance director Matt Hallat said in a statement.

"They were just two kids