Second race back: Lindsey Vonn wins

Lindsey Vonn won Saturday. Improbably, maybe, but only if you don’t know Lindsey Vonn, who is as mentally tough as they come. That she won is good -- obviously -- for her. Better, it’s good for the U.S. team, for alpine skiing and for Olympic sports, because the Olympic world needs stars and Lindsey Vonn is a big star, arguably the biggest in all of winter sports, even though she didn’t even ski at the Sochi Olympics.

For her to be back — it’s just good all around. That’s reality.

Vonn won a World Cup downhill in Lake Louise, Canada — a course on which she has won so many times in recent seasons it has been dubbed “Lake Lindsey.”

Her victory capped a 1-2-3 U.S. finish, with Stacey Cook taking second and Julia Mancuso third, the first-ever U.S. Ski Team podium sweep, men’s or women’s. It marked the best finish in two seasons for all three.

The last nation to sweep a women’s World Cup podium: Austria, 2009.

For Vonn, Saturday’s race was only her second start since knee surgery last January knocked her out of the Sochi Games.

Every day has gotten better here,” she said after winning by 49-hundredths of a second. Mancuso finished 57-hundredths back.

“Today,” Vonn added, “I went a little bit more aggressive than I did yesterday and took some more chances. I’m finally feeling confident again going fast. I’m pushing the limits and I want more speed. I haven’t had that yet until today.”

Vonn’s victory was her 60th on the World Cup tour. She moves within two of the women’s record, held by retired Austrian Annemarie Moser-Pröll. She has said she not only wants to break that mark but is thinking about the men’s mark — 86, held by Ingemark Stenmark of Sweden — and wants to keep racing through the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games.

Fifteen of Vonn’s 60 victories have come at Lake Louise. She won seven races in a row there from 2010 to 2012.

For most of the past year, Vonn has been in ski limbo.

At the February 2013 world championships, she shredded her right knee in a crash. She underwent surgery.

In November 2013, in a training crash, she injured the knee again.

Last December, trying to suck it up for Sochi, she skied at Lake Louise, finishing 40th, 11th and fifth. In a fourth World Cup race last Dec. 21, she aggravated the knee in a race in Val d’Isere, France. Another knee surgery in January meant no Sochi Games.

Her comeback since has been well-chronicled. She said Saturday evening in a brief teleconference with reporters that the knee feels great; she has to wear a brace when she skis but that's it. No restrictions, she said.

Vonn finished eighth in Friday’s downhill, a race that, for the first time in two seasons, saw four American women land in the top 10, Laurenne Ross in fourth, Mancuso seventh and Cook ninth.

Saturday’s downhill saw the same, the 1-2-3 and then Ross in sixth.

“I always thought this was something possible with our team,” Cook, who made her first World Cup podium since Dec. 1, 2012, said. “I really wanted to be a part of it when it happened. It’s a good day to step up. I’m so excited for Lindsey too. It’s a cool day.”

Mancuso, who has four Olympic medals but hadn’t been on a World Cup podium since March 3, 2013, said, “It’s cool because both of the girls on the podium with me are my age. We’re all the same age—born in ’84—and we’re veterans of the World Cup. We’ve all been working very hard and I’ve grown up with both of them. It’s an awesome day!”

Vonn, in that 10-minute teleconference Saturday evening with reporters, said this:

"I definitely think I shocked a few people. Yesterday I think everyone was, you know, genuinely happy for me and they thought it was a really great start to my season. But I don’t think really anyone expected me to win today. And I could definitely see that on a few of the girls’ faces.

"I could see that my teammates knew it was coming. They know me very well. They were extremely supportive and happy.

"Like I said in the finish, I am not expecting this to happen all the time. I am still, you know, kind of getting a feel for things and building my confidence and getting used to racing again. But, you know, I feel a lot better after the win today. My confidence is definitely a lot -- a lot -- better.

"I just hope to keep the ball rolling and keep improving."

Jackie Wiles: downhill fun

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — When she got to the bottom of the run Saturday, after a time that would land her in fourth place in the third training run for Wednesday’s women’s Olympic downhill, Jackie Wiles, the 21-year-old newcomer on the team, found herself ushered along through the pen where the athletes talk to reporters and TV types, and there, hanging out with the press, was, well, Picabo. Some people might be all, like, OMG — that’s Picabo Street, maybe the greatest power and speed skier of all time.

Not Jackie Wiles. She snapped to immediately, of course, because she understood she was in the presence of American ski royalty. But the reason Jackie Wiles is now going to be racing in the downhill, and the reason she is skiing in a way that suggests she very well might throw a huge surprise on Wednesday, is that she was hardly overwhelmed — even though this was the same Picabo Street whose picture she, Jackie Wiles, used to have in her room growing up.

Politely, respectfully, she told Picabo, “I had a picture of you on my wall — obviously,” like of course it would be obvious, adding, “In middle school, when I was little.”

For the rest of this post, please click through to NBCOlympics.com: http://nbco.ly/MAYYYu

Laurenne Ross makes it 6-for-6

The U.S. women's ski team is so deep that three weeks ago coaches had to make a difficult choice about who to leave off the start list for the downhill at the world championships in Schladming, Austria. Ultimately, they decided, reluctantly, that Laurenne Ross would be the one who wouldn't go.

So who takes second Saturday in a World Cup downhill at the famed Kandahar course in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, site of the 2011 worlds?

Of course.

Tina Maze of Slovenia won the race in 1:40.46, adding to her historic season -- she now has 2,024 World Cup points, most ever, more than Austria's Hermann Maier's previous-best 2,000 in 2000. Maze has totally locked up the World Cup overall title and there are still seven races yet to go.

Ross finished 39-hundredths back, in 1:40.85. Local girl Maria Höfl-Riesch, the 2011 World Cup overall winner, took third, half a second behind in 1:40.96.

Ross became the sixth American woman to finish in a World Cup top-three this season in the downhill or super-G.

Before the start of the 2012-13 season, the U.S. women's speed team, led by coach Chip White, set a goal of landing all six on the podium.

Alex Hoedlmoser, the U.S. team's head coach, went up to White after Saturday's racing was done and said, "We did it," adding a moment alter, "This is really promising as we look ahead to Sochi," and the 2014 Winter Games next February.

On the tech side, meanwhile, Mikaela Shiffrin has won three World Cup slalom races; Shiffrin also won the slalom in Schladming at the world championships.

The race Saturday marked the first top-three World Cup finish of Ross' career. She joins Stacey Cook, Leanne Smith and Alice McKennis as first-time podium finishers.

Lindsey Vonn -- who tore up her right knee in the super-G in early February in the first race of the world championships -- has three downhill victories this season; Julia Mancuso has three super-G podium finishes and, as well, a super-G borne at the world championships.

Vonn, who obviously has missed the last two downhill races, nonetheless still leads the World Cup downhill standings, by all of one point. Maze is second. There's one race remaining.

The race Saturday played out in two different acts.

Act one was consumed by fog. It stayed that way through McKennis' run. She started with bib number 12. Entering the final "Tauber Schuss," she crashed -- hard -- and was airlifted by helicopter to a local hospital, where doctors found she broke a bone in her lower right leg.

Act two was everything that followed. By the time the race started again, the mountain was splashed in sunshine, the visibility perfect, the racing so much faster.

Maze ran 18th, Ross 26th, Höfl-Riesch 20th.

Ross' previous best finish had been fourth, in a super-G, two seasons ago.

"I just put it all out on the line and I'm psyched," she said.

Sorry: Justin Bieber not the secret

Last summer, before dominating the London Games, the U.S. swim team memorably made a just-for-fun video of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." This winter, the U.S. women's ski team is on a killer roll, underscored by yet another memorable performance Saturday, when Lindsey Vonn won the downhill at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, with Leanne Smith third.

That came after Tuesday's night slalom at Flachau, Austria. There, 17-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin picked up her third World Cup victory in her first full year on tour.

Just like the swim team last summer, the skiers will be among the primary U.S. stars next February at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Again, just like the swim team, the ski team's success is rooted in the same fundamentals. There's a strong management team. Great coaches. Obvious talent. And, now the final piece of the puzzle -- a winning culture, the kind of thing the swim video made plain.

The ski team has it, too, and that came shining through in a long, long answer to a reporter's question after Saturday's downhill in Italy. Revealingly, it came not from Vonn but from Smith. The reporter asked about a "family feeling" on the team.

Here is what she said:

"Yesterday, we were talking about on the bus at lunch how often we have been asked this question. And we were trying to come up with ways to -- things to say in response to that. And, first, we were like, 'We listen to Justin Bieber -- Justin Bieber together.' Or, 'Like, we all sleep in one big bed every night.' Or, 'We have like these crazy rituals.'

"No, there are a lot of hard workers on this team. Everybody wants to help each other out and see each other do well and the hard work, whether it be in the gym in the summer or training in Portillo [in Chile] or in New Zealand and the working and the racing and being confident -- as, you know, in any sport or skiing, in particular, and all the variables and things that come at you every day, you need to in the right mind state. You need to be confident in your abilities.

"When you see a teammate come down and be on the podium, you're like, 'Oh, I can do that, too.' You know? You train with Lindsey and Julia [Mancuso], every day, you watch them ski, you see what they do, you can try to emulate that, because obviously they have had a lot of success in the past, and are very experienced. They have been on the World Cup tour for a long time so there is a lot to be taken from them. And -- it's kind of nice to be on the U.S. team right now, I have to say. We're having fun, that's for sure."

Shiffrin -- who spent most of Tuesday doing homework for school before winning the race that night -- now leads the World Cup slalom standings. She has also won races in Are, Sweden, and Zagreb, Croatia, and has won $175,000 for the season.

"Maybe I will make a trip to Maui," she said Tuesday. "I am a 17-year-old. What do I have to do with money? Let's save it up for retirement."

Smith's third-place made for her second podium finish of the year. She took second in the downhill in Val d'Isere in mid-December.

Vonn's win Saturday was her fifth of the season, the 58th of her career. She now stands just four short of the women's all-time record, held by Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll.

Vonn, hospitalized in November with an intestinal illness, failed to finish two races in France in December and then left the tour for nearly a month. She missed six starts. In her first races back last weekend, in St. Anton, Austria, she finished sixth in Saturday's downhill and fourth in Sunday's super-G.

Alice McKennis won the St. Anton downhill.

Stacey Cook finished second to Vonn twice in downhills run in Lake Louise, Canada, in December.

It's the first time four different American women have finished top-three in a downhill in a single season on tour. A look at the World Cup downhill points standings shows Vonn first, Cook second, McKennis fourth, Smith sixth, Mancuso 11th and Laurenne Ross 21st.

Meanwhile, the Cortina super-G -- a race Vonn has won the last three years -- is due to be run Sunday. She said, "I finally feel like myself again."

Vonn throws Lake Louise three-peat times two

Lindsey Vonn made it three-for-three on a snowy Sunday in Lake Louise, Canada, winning the super-G, a World Cup victory that capped a spectacular weekend for her individually and, for that matter, the U.S. women's team. Vonn -- just as she did last year -- won all three races in Lake Louise. She won downhills Friday and Saturday. And then she won the super-G Sunday in 1:22.82.

The Lindsey Vonn statistics and numbers show can sometimes seem overwhelming because she is, without question, the finest American racer of all time. Here is just a taste: she became Sunday the first skier ever, male or female, to win three World Cup races at the same venue in two different seasons.

American teammate Julia Mancuso came in second Sunday, 43-hundredths behind. Austria's Anna Fenninger took third, two-hundredths behind Mancuso.

Thus: Americans went 1-2 in all three races this year in Lake Louise. Vonn and Stacey Cook went 1-2 in both downhills. Another American, Leanne Smith, finished eighth Sunday, in 1:24.41. Laurenne Ross was 13th, and Cook 29th.

The victory Sunday moves Vonn into second in the women's all-time World Cup wins list, with 56. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll leads with 62.

Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden is far and away the overall leader with 86 World Cup victories.

Just to make the top-three in the World Cup is difficult enough. Cook, for instance, made 150 World Cup starts before her two top-two downhill finishes this weekend.

It is a measure of how crazy good Vonn is to say that she had been tied with Swiss star Vreni Schneider for all of one day, with 55.

It is another measure of Vonn's brilliance that about three weeks ago, she was in a Vail, Colo., hospital, with stomach pains. When she got out, she literally was having trouble walking from one end of her condo to the other.

"This weekend was a huge boost for my confidence," she said. "I was definitely feeling extremely low after being in the hospital and my poor result in Aspen," a reference to the tour stop last weekend, where she struggled -- hardly a surprise -- in the one event she ran, a giant slalom, visibly exhausted at the end.

"But I knew if there was a place to turn it around, it was Lake Louise. So I just tried to get myself every opportunity to rest and recover for the races this weekend."

She also said, "Every athlete has their favorite hill where they feel confident and comfortable. I know the hill like the back of my hand and have confidence knowing I have won here in the past."

More Vonn numbers:

She became the fourth female skier with 100 World Cup podiums. Moser-Pröll has 114; another great Austrian champion, Renate Götschl, has 110; Schneider, 101.

Vonn's victory Sunday was her 14th in Lake Louise -- 11 downhills, three super-Gs -- and seventh straight on the mountain.

The seven straight wins is a women's World Cup record for a single venue. The prior mark: six, held by Sweden's Anja Paerson at Maribor, Slovenia.

The three wins moved Vonn up significantly in the overall 2012-13 World Cup standings. Slovenia's Tina Maze leads with 397 points; Germany's Maria Höfl-Riesch is second, with 319; Vonn now stands third, with 310.

Vonn won Sunday wire-to-wire.

She was ahead at the first interval by three-tenths of a second, then at the second -- a section of the course that gave her trouble all weekend -- by only three-hundredths. At the third, she had built her lead back up to 42-hundredths and pretty much kept it that way through her tuck through the finish.

Next week the tour heads to St. Moritz, Switzerland. Vonn won the downhill there last year by a second and a half, over Höfl-Riesch.

Six more downhills and seven more super-Gs await on the World Cup calendar.

1-2 again: "Amazing" runs from Vonn, Cook

Even when Lindsey Vonn is not at her best, she's still too good. Vonn skidded hard Saturday on the downhill course at the World Cup stop in Lake Louise, Canada. Anyone else probably would have crashed and gone flying into the nets.

Not Lindsey.

She recovered and not only went on to finish but to win, and by a whopping 52-hundredths of a second.

For the second straight day, American Stacey Cook finished second, another terrific performance. Before this weekend, Cook's best World Cup finish had been a fourth, in 2006, in Lake Louise.

Cook, 28, had been building toward these sorts of results.

She was a member of the 2006 and 2006 Olympic teams, 10th in last-season's downhill standings, fourth in this week's final Lake Louise training run. She said after Friday's second-place run, "I really shut my brain off today -- I know I can ski with these girls. I have been so close for so long, so today I decided it was time. I let my ability take over."

Vonn, after Friday's racing, said of Cook, "I'm so proud of Stacey. She has had the ability to be a podium skier for so long. She really deserved to be there today."

And Saturday, too.

"I hope this is the tip of the iceberg for me," Cook said. "My coaches have told me like for a long time that I'm like fine wine -- that I get better with age.

"This has been a long time coming and I'm just now starting to believe that this is actually happening."

For her part, Vonn was behind Saturday at the first two checkpoints, by 18-hundredths at the first, by 21-hundredths at the second.

By the third, she had worked her way into the lead, up by eight-hundredths.

Then, though -- disaster.

Or what for anyone else would be disaster.

Vonn slipped and got herself turned virtually sideways on the hill.

For an instant, she was on one ski, tottering.

Of course, her momentum and speed were at a standstill.

Cook said, "There was a second there that I actually thought I might win this thing, but Lindsey is amazing. When she made that mistake my heart actually stopped for a second. She’s amazing -- she’s the only athlete that could stop on-course and then still win."

Indeed, Vonn somehow righted herself and aimed straight down the mountain again.

Later, Vonn would say, "I felt like I just hit a few bumps and caught my inside ski and almost went into the fence, then somehow kept going. It was definitely interesting, but I didn't give up. I haven't won with that big of a mistake before."

There were two turns remaining before the flats. Those she turned into flat-out speed.

Numbers don't lie.

At the fourth checkpoint, Vonn was 52-hundredths of a second behind.

By the fifth, she was ahead by a tenth of a second.

In between, there's a radar gun that measures how fast each skier goes. Vonn was clocked at 135.6 kilometers per hour, or 84.2 mph.

At the finish, Vonn was 52-hundredths ahead of Cook.

So -- from the fourth checkpoint to the finish, she made back a full second (and four extra hundredths).

After she crossed the finish line, Vonn shook her head and stuck out her tongue in apparent disbelief.

She said, "Over the last few years I’ve really worked on getting stronger and that helps recover from mistakes like that one. It’s not the way you want to ski, but it helps my confidence to know that I can recover from them."

Vonn has accomplished some outlandish things in Lake Louise both this season, and last. She won Friday's downhill by 1.73 seconds. She won both last season's downhills as well, the first by 1.95 seconds, the second by 1.68.

But to win, when all seemed lost, and by .52-hundredths -- it's yet another chapter in the annals of America's greatest alpine ski racer.

Remember, too: just a little over two weeks ago, Vonn was in a Vail, Colo., hospital, being treated for stomach pains. When she was released, she could barely walk.

The victory Saturday marked Vonn's 55th career World Cup win, tying her with Swiss star Vreni Schneider for second on the women's all-time wins list. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll leads with 62.

It was her 13th Lake Louise victory -- 11th downhill, two super-G -- and sixth straight win on the mountain.

Slovenia's Tina Maze leads the still-young 2012-13 World Cup overall standings with 347 points. Vonn stands fourth, with 210.

The third leg of the three-race Lake Louise series goes off Sunday, a super-G.

Lindsey Vonn makes a statement

After yet another spectacular performance by Lindsey Vonn Friday in Lake Louise, Canada, one seriously has to wonder: why can't she ski against the guys? Vonn won the first of three World Cup races over the weekend in Lake Louise, a downhill, by an absurd 1.73 seconds.

American Stacey Cook took second -- her first World Cup podium, and the first 1-2 finish for U.S. women in a World Cup downhill since 2006. Germany's Maria Höfl-Riesch and Liechtenstein's Tina Weirather tied for third, one-hundredth of a second behind Cook.

Vonn had petitioned skiing's international governing authority, FIS, for permission to race here last week against the men. FIS turned her down, essentially saying  men race against men and that's that.

Since then, Max Gartner, the president of Alpine Canada, has said he's in talks with Red Bull, which sponsors Vonn, to put together a race, and to hold it at Lake Louise.

Such a race would be a marketing and publicity boon for a sport that needs it, especially here in the United States.

Alpine skiing is great stuff. Lindsey Vonn is a great champion. FIS should put her front and center, someway, somehow. What's so difficult about that?

Aksel Lund Svindal, the two-time overall men's World Cup champion from Norway, gets it, and told the Canadian Press: "I've trained with her. My experience is if you are on a hill that she likes and you don't ski good, she can beat you. It's realistic that she would be in the race."

Vonn said after flying down the course Friday, "Well, I kind of felt like I had to win today. I mean, like you say you want to race with the men -- you can't really not win the women's races. I knew that. I was trying to prove a point, mostly to myself but to everyone else who doesn't think I should race with the men. I don't know. I just do my best."

Lindsey Vonn's best, especially at Lake Louise, is so good one struggles to keep finding words to describe just how good.

The first victory of her career -- ever -- came in Lake Louise, in 2004.

Friday's victory marked her 54th. She now stands one behind Vreni Schneider on the all-time women's list.

It was her 12th in Lake Louise -- 10 in the downhill, two in super-G.

It was her fifth straight victory there and first of the still-young 2012-13 World Cup season.

Last year, she won the first of the two Lake Louise downhills in 1:53.19. Her winning margin in that race was an absurd 1.95 seconds.

She followed that up by winning the Saturday downhill by "only" 1.68 seconds, and then winning Sunday's super-G.

This year, her winning time Friday: 1:52.61. At the second speed check, she was flying along at 84 mph.

Making all this even more outlandish: Vonn was in a Vail, Colo., hospital just a little over two weeks ago with stomach pains. In a column she writes in the Denver Post, she said that after she was released it made her tired just walking down the hall of her condo: 'I felt like I was 100 years old, and I couldn't even think about skiing."

At the end of last Saturday's race in Aspen, she collapsed in exhaustion.

This, however, has always been the Lindsey Vonn way.

She has faced a succession of extraordinary challenges: a crash in the downhill in Torino in 2006, a gashed thumb at the world championships in Val d'Isere in 2009, a banged-up shin before the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.

Invariably, she rises to the occasion.

After the race Friday, Vonn was asked -- naturally -- how she felt, and if you were the other women on the tour, maybe you would be giving some thought to the notion of whether she ought to race the guys at Lake Louise, because this is what she had to say: "It just gives me confidence."

Best in the world -- believe it

Three weeks ago, in Sochi, Russia, Bode Miller, America's best male Alpine skier, smashed his left knee coming off one of the jumps on what will be the Olympic course at the 2014 Winter Games. He tried to ski through the pain the next weekend at the World Cup stop in Bansko, Bulgaria. But it wasn't good. So Miller flew back to the United States, to have the knee scoped at a clinic in Vail, Colo.

If you know Miller and his ways, you know he could well have called off his season right then and there.

But no.

From the get-go, Miller had purchased a round-trip ticket. He was always intending to go back to Europe, back to the next stop, in Crans Montana, Switzerland -- underscoring the incredible culture that is at the core of everything the U.S. Ski Team does, manifested in its motto, "best in the world."

That slogan was so easy to make fun of when the Americans were anything but. But look now, and understand the success that is across the board, from alpine to cross-country to snowboard to freestyle to ski jumping and Nordic combined, and these are just a few of the many examples:

Lindsey Vonn on Sunday won a super-G at Bansko, her 10th World Cup victory this season, 51st lifetime. The 18th super-G win of her career, she is now the World Cup leader in the discipline. Vonn is way ahead in the World Cup overall points race for the 2012 season.

Cross-country skier Kikkan Randall leads the World Cup sprint standings.

The incomparable Shaun White is, plainly put, the best snowboarder on Planet Earth. Kelly Clark has 15 straight halfpipe wins.

Moguls artist Hannah Kearney won 16 straight World Cup races.

Sarah Hendrickson has six World Cup ski jumping victories.

Tom Wallisch has won every slopestyle contest this season but one.

For every Vonn, by the way, there are many, many others. The Americans have depth.

The U.S. women's alpine team, for instance, currently leads every other country in the world in the downhill standings, including the vaunted Austrians and Swiss. Racing in Sochi earlier this month, for instance, four of six American starters made the top-10: Vonn, Julia Mancuso, Stacey Cook and Alice McKennis. And Laurenne Ross was 18th, Leanne Smith 26th.

Someone ought to do a Harvard Business School case study about the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.

For real.

There are huge corporations that could learn a lot from the U.S. Ski Team. Business-wise. Culture-wise. Success-wise.

All those things are intertwined.

When Bill Marolt took over, USSA had revenues of $8.14 million. That was for the fiscal year ending April 1996.

The fiscal year ending April 2012? Revenues will total $24.75 million.

At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the U.S. team won 37 medals, best in the world. The U.S. Ski Team accounted for 21 of those 37 medals.

Miller won three in Vancouver, including gold in the super-combined; Vonn won two, including downhill gold. The breakout story of the 2010 Games: the four medals won by the American Nordic combined team, testament to 14 years of consistent funding, improved coaching and training.

Marolt, USSA's president and chief executive officer, stayed the course with the Nordic combined program.

He also, over his tenure, has directed initiatives that produced the Center of Excellence, the Park City, Utah, facility that opened in May, 2009, that serves as USSA's all-in-one training center and headquarters; the Speed Center at Copper Mountain, Colo., which gives alpine racers early-season training; an ongoing partnership with 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic venues that includes, among other things, roller ski train development at Soldier Hollow; and an overall organizational focus on what's called "sport science," everything from cutting-edge advances to simple stuff like making sure American athletes drink enough water on airplane trips.

Staying hydrated on those long-haul flights, U.S. sport scientists have found, makes a huge difference in keeping the athletes healthy so they can actually make use of those training days when it's winter Down Under but summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

A new initiative: combining sports and school in an academy. If you are, for instance, Mikaela Shiffrin, and you are turning 17 in two weeks, and you have already made a World Cup podium (Dec. 29, bronze, Lienz, Austria, slalom) but you might have designs on college and beyond -- why should you or your parents be put to that either-or?

"We want to send that message to parents," Marolt said. "This is a big commitment, a big family commitment of time and resources. They're thinking, 'If my child gets to the point where they could be an Olympic great, I'm going to have to make a choice: academics or athletics.' We don't want them to have to make that choice. They can be both."

Marolt, along with Luke Bodensteiner, USSA's executive vice president for athletics, are big believers in the vision thing and in the concept of culture driving the mission. Both, it should be noted, are former Olympic athletes -- Marolt in alpine skiing in 1964, Bodensteiner in cross-country in 1992 and 1994.

"We started with the idea of 'best in the world,' and … they thought I was nuts," Marolt said. "But you can't change it unless you put it out there. And we have done that."

Bodensteiner said the brilliance of "best in the world" is that it is one, "super-aspirational," and, two, easy to understand and translate.

He explained: "When Bill came on and said, 'We are the best in the world, or aspiring to be the best in the world,' he has never wavered from that. That is a very visible pronunciation. That goes all the way down to the deepest levels possible, down to a race in a tiny mountain somewhere. It's a simple concept but also so powerful and people feel good about being brought in.

"Part of the evolution of that statement -- and it has been interpreted so many different ways, us saying we are the best when we were not but it is something that a lot of people have aspired to -- is that it has been a filter for every decision we have made for the last 16 years: Is this going to make us better or not?"

Bode Miller, as things turned out, ultimately did have to call off the rest of his season. He got to Crans Montana and the knee just didn't hold up. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Or buy-in.

"I'm still having fun and as long as skiing is enjoyable, I'm going to continue to do it," Miller said in a statement issued by the U.S. Ski Team.

Marolt, in an interview before Miller's season would come to a close, said, "One of our strengths is the idea that we tried to create a team. Not just an athletic team but an entire organizational team where everybody buys in, everybody understands what it is you try to do. Everybody multitasks and does more than is required.

"That is what makes us so good, everybody pulling on the rope at the same time and in the same direction. That is a hard one. It is difficult to achieve, because of the personalities and the profiles of every individual, from the chairman of the board to the person answering the phone in the lobby. But it's a good team, and the team is our strength."

A historic 50th for Lindsey Vonn

You wonder whether Lindsey Vonn is so good this season that the point has come whether she has simply imposed her will on everything and everyone around her. She did it again Saturday, winning the historic 50th World Cup victory of her career in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, even though temperatures in the Bavarian Alps were crazy cold and she had to survive a near-crash about halfway down.

Lindsey's winning time, in temperatures of -13 Fahrenheit, so cold that racers had to tape their faces to avoid frostbite, was 1:44.86. She trailed through the early intervals. Yet by the finish she was, again, first, and by almost half a second.

Nadja Kamer of Switzerland finished second, 41-hundredths of a second back. Tina Weirather of Liechtenstein crossed third, 79-hundredths back, for her third World Cup podium finish, all this season.

Last year's overall World Cup winner and a Garmisch local, Maria Höfl-Riesch, Lindsey's good friend and rival, finished fourth, in 1:45.85, 99-hundredths back.

At 27, Lindsey is the youngest woman to reach 50 World Cup victories. Only Annemarie Moser-Pröll of Austria, with 62, and Switzerland's Vreni Scheider, with 55, have more.

Of the three, Lindsey got to 50 the fastest, with just seven years between her first World Cup win and her 50th. It took Moser-Pröll eight years.

Men's racers with 50 or more victories: Ingemar Stenmark (86), Hermann Maier (54), Alberto Tomba (50).

"I mean, when I was a kid I dreamed of winning the Olympic gold medal and I wanted to ski like people like Alberto Tomba did," Lindsey said Saturday night from Garmisch on a conference call with a few American reporters. "But I never dreamed I would have reached the successes they reached in their careers.

"I still have a lot of years of racing in me. I have been at a loss for words all day. It definitely is something I never expected. It takes a lot of hard work to get to this many wins and it is a huge milestone in my career."

The Garmisch downhill, 1.8 miles long, is called the Kandahar. It's a course that, by now in her career, Lindsey knows well -- but, intriguingly, one she had never won.

Last year, they held the world championships on this course, and despite battling the effects of a concussion, Lindsey finished second.

All week, anticipation ran high that Lindsey would get that 50th victory. She had come oh-so-close to 50 last weekend in St. Moritz, Switzerland, winning first a super-combined (48), then a downhill (49) and then, last Sunday, coming in second, behind Höfl-Riesch in another super-combined by a mere three-hundredths of a second.

In Garmisch, there's an American military base essentially at the bottom of the run. During the week, Lindsey and others on the U.S. team had visited with some of the U.S. troops -- so she and the other American racers, as they always do there, had a built-in red, white and blue rooting crew.

Three other Americans finished Saturday in the top 15: Stacey Cook ninth, Laurenne Ross 10th, Julia Mancuso 13th. The U.S. women's team leads the downhill Nations Cup standing race -- over Austria -- by 433 points. Austria leads the overall standings with 3555 points, the Americans second with 2428.

At the second split, Lindsey trailed by 62-hundredths. Then came a bump about halfway down the course that saw Lindsey lose the inside edge of a ski and slide onto a hip and almost out of the race. Almost.

She recovered, found a line and made up time.

The U.S. head coach, Alex Hoedlmoser, who had been standing by the side of the course about 20 meters away from the spot where Lindsey almost went down, said afterward that watching her slip "stopped my heart a little bit."

But, he said, she "pulled it off like nobody else would."

She said, "I definitely gave the coaches a little bit of a scare there."

She also said, "I felt like I was down on my hip and then right back up again," the kind of mistake she has made before and assuredly will make again. "I do make mistakes quite a few times in downhill and super-G. I just have to keep my composure and ski the line I expect at maybe a more aggressive pace -- I have to keep my composure and keep going."

The victory Saturday was Lindsey's ninth -- already -- on the 2011-12 tour. She has won four downhills.

Of her 50 World Cup victories, 25 have been downhills.

Lindsey now has 1350 points for the season, a whopping 482-point lead over Tina Maze of Slovenia. Höfl-Riesch stands third with 746.

Lindsey leads the downhill points tally as well, by 230.

The next event: a super-G, on Sunday, still in Garmisch. Lindsey leads the super-G standings this season, too.

This season, of course, has come amid considerable turmoil in Lindsey's personal life. She split from her husband, Thomas. Lindsey's sister, Laura, was on hand in Garmisch as was her father, Alan Kildow, and stepmom. She said she was glad to be able to share the historic moment with family.

Make no mistake. The time that Lindsey gets on the mountain is, in many ways, sanctuary. When she's up there in that start gate, it just her and her very considerable will, alone.

The best two minutes of her day are coming right up. She couldn't be happier.

"I'm really enjoying skiing," she said in that conference call. "I feel like no matter what going on in my personal life I can put my skis on and go out and have fun.

"Skiing has been honestly the best thing for me in my life at this point. It's hard to describe. Things in the personal front aren't any better than they were a few months ago. I feel very clear-minded when I'm skiing. I enjoy it … it's just a different state of mind."

Lindsey Vonn: 47 and counting

After she had won the super-G Sunday at one of her favorite spots, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and made history yet again, Lindsey Vonn shared a little bit of herself. Last week, at the World Cup stop in Bad Kleinkirchheim, Austria, Lindsey was suffering from a stomach illness. She came in 18th in the super-G -- the first time in 19 starts she missed a World Cup super-G podium. It was her worst finish in super-G in five years.

"You know," she said after winning Sunday, her 47th career World Cup win, "for me, if I don't have the strength, I can't do what I want to do and I don't trust myself. Confidence and trust are very important things in my skiing. I have those two things back.

"I knew what I had to do to win the race today and I think I executed my plan well. I"m really happy the way the whole weekend went and I'm really proud of buy whole team. As a team, we had an incredible weekend. Stacy and Julia and Leanne and Laurenne and everyone is skiing really well. So I think for the entire U.S. team -- it was very successful."

There you have it, in two paragraphs -- Lindsey Vonn, the 2012-season version.

Confidence and trust in her own skiing and the bond with her team that helps keeps her going amid the -- many -- other distractions in her life, some deeply personal.

The victory lifts Lindsey into third on the all-time World Cup win list, ahead of Austria's Renate Goetschl, who has 46. Switzerland's Vreni Schneider has 55; Austria's Annemarie Moser-Proell has 62.

"The records in skiing are really important to me," Lindsey told reporters afterward.

"It's the history of our sport and it's something you can look back on and be proud of what you've done with your career. I never thought that I'd be able to reach as many victories as I have now. Renate has always been such a role model. I can't believe I'm at a point where I can stand alongside her in history."

Lindsey hadn't won a World Cup race since a super-G Dec. 7 at Beaver Creek, Colo. She led Sunday at every interval, finishing in 1:26.16. Germany's Maria Hoefl-Riesch, last season's World Cup overall winner and Lindsey's longtime friend and rival, finished second, in 1:26.77. Slovenia's Tina Maze took third, in 1:27.02.

Cortina, as Lindsey noted, is where she first made her first World Cup podium -- eight years ago, in the downhill. The victory Sunday was her fourth straight super-G win in Cortina and sixth at the Italian resort.

"I say it every time I come here: Cortina is always a special place for me … I like the hill. It's -- the snow is perfect here. It's always dry, dense snow, similar to Colorado where I grew up skiing."

When you have that and when you ski with confidence and trust in yourself, you get classic Lindsey -- a "good combination of risk and aggression but still staying in control," as she put it immediately after the race, declaring, "I'm happy."

Julia Mancuso finished fifth, just 12-hundredths back of Maze. Leanne Smith finished 10th -- the third-best result of her career. Laurenne Ross took 13th -- her second-best result-ever. Stacey Cook, who had finished sixth in Saturday's downhill, finished 25th. Alice McKennnis landed in 38th.

The Americans were awarded what's called the "Cortina Trophy," which goes to the most successful team over the weekend. Imagine how even a few years back how that would have been unthinkable -- an American ski team winning such an award in the heart of Europe.

With the victory, Lindsey now leads the 2012 overall World Cup standings by 291 points over Maze. She leads the super-G standings by 87 points over Fabienne Suter of Switzerland.

All in all, there was only discordant note to the day. Asked by a reporter about Denver's blowout loss to the New England Patriots in the NFL playoffs Saturday night, Lindsey -- who, remember, is a Colorado girl and even Tebowed after her super-G win in Beaver Creek -- said, "I'm really bummed out the Broncos lost."