We're celebrating, too. Here's to Ted Ligerty! We were on the course watching his smoking second run. He just killed it to win the combined. The Americans should have been one and two. Bode posted the top downhill run and then smoked the first run of the slalom only to be disqualified.

The course was lit brighter than SBC/Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. Dick, Jeff, and Johnnie course slipped all the men's combined courses under the lights. Slipping a slalom is like standing back of second base during the World Series. You can almost touch the racers as they fly by.

In 1972, at the Sapporo Winter Olympics on the island of Hokkaido, Japan, the United States had high hopes to win a medal in alpine skiing. The men were lead by Rick Chaffee, Bob Cochran, Tyler Palmer, and Hank Kashiwa, all members of the successful 1970 Val Gardena World Championship squad when Billy Kidd captured the gold in Combined, an American first. In Japan Palmer took ninth in the slalom; Bob Cochran earned a top ten finish in the downhill.

Eric Poulsen

"It's a lot of work. We're on course before daylight and usually don_t quit until the end of day," says Rouse, 46, a Palisades Tahoe race coach since 1981. "The job only pays in room, board, and experience, but we wouldn't miss it for anything."

Not only are the hours endless, but working a World Cup/Olympic alpine course, especially a speed event, is not for the faint-hearted. Grizzly, the formidable Snowbasin downhill, is ranked as one of the top three World Cup speed courses by Herwif Deschar, former head coach of the Austria and United States women's team.

Edith Thys
Heading into the 1988 Calgary Winter Games, most of the U.S. Women's alpine team fortunes rested in--or had only recently left--a hospital ward.

An Extreme Athlete
Few "extreme" athletes of today could have competed with the likes of Soda Springs native, Dick Buek. Whether he was diving off cliffs in Acapulco to win gas money home or flying his airplane under the chairlift cables at Palisades Tahoe and beneath the Lincoln Highway Bridge on Donner Summit, Buek was a fearless athlete and skier. He was characterized by Oakley Hall in his novel, The Downhill Racers.

Daydreams was shot and edited during the winter of 1974-75 by North Shore resident, Craig Beck. Thirty years later it remains the last, un-forked pea on the plate of American ski-film making--a rare inspiration.

Trying to choose a Tahoe, all-star team can give anybody indigestion, especially when the selection criteria are vague. No doubt it's a testament to the strength of the local breeding grounds when Eric and Sandra Poulsen, two of America's greatest racers in the past, don't even end up on the list of twenty. Anytime an effort to complete such a list is attempted, it leaves open the possibility of slight. But here goes.

Ahead of me, Tom Telluride boogied more expertly and enthusiastically, "shaking my assets," he bragged out loud. He had been righteously shaking them since the mid-seventies when we both first moved to Lake Tahoe. It all seems so long ago.

Those were the days before snowboards, cell phones, and SUV's, websites, and the X generation humping on MTV. Back then, Tom and I dated girls who did homework, and we skied a ton. Palisades Tahoe's KT-22, the Headwall, and the Bear Pen bar were our favorite hangs.

As has been the case often in the past, Tahoe-Truckee will have many fine athletes in the Games. Following is a list of known competitors as well as those who are still vying for a chance to compete in Torino.

Alpine Skiing
Daron Rahlves
Age: 32
Hometown: Truckee, Ca.
Training: Sugar Bowl, Ca.
Years on the Team: 13
Golden Moment: 2001 World Super G Champion; 9 World Cup victories.