"MY HIP IS CLICKING," Rahlves observes on a chairlift at Sugar Bowl, a resort near Squaw Valley. "It shouldn't be."

It's Thursday, three days before the Ski Tour's 'cross finals at Squaw, and Rahlves is testing his pelvis. It hasn't felt right since February, when, at the third stop on the Ski Tour, in Aspen/Snowmass, he caught an edge during a training run and shot 20 feet in the air before splashing down so hard he left three-inch divots in the hardpack. He looks solid enough to me, though, slashing his Atomic giant-slalom boards against a frozen steep named Rahlves' Run. Huge chunks of terrain get swallowed with each turn. If he's down to one hip, that hip is excelling. Rahlves appears, as only racers can, to accelerate out of his turns. Nominally, those are braking moves. Yet I can't keep up with him, despite beelining straight down on a healthy hip. Must be a wax thing.

But all of this—the athletic grace, the fun-at-any-cost mind-set, the multi-pronged unretirement—is perfectly in character for Rahlves. If this guy wants to star in ski films and a new Olympic discipline, expect to see him on DVDs every winter and in sit-downs with Bob Costas in 2010.

The son of a champion water-skier, Rahlves was always primed for athletic success. He and his younger sister were raised active and outdoorsy in the Bay Area and on the California side of Lake Tahoe. He recently took up skateboarding and already excels at snowboarding, mountain biking, wakeboarding, surfing, jet skiing, and motocross. Excels on a world-class level. He claimed the 1993 World Jet Ski Championship in the expert division, completed the Baja 1000 motocross relay in 2006, and won his class at the prestigious Glen Helen Outdoor National motocross race, in September. Though he spends most of his days at his family's longtime Truckee compound—with his wife, Michelle, and their six-month-old twins, Dreyson (a boy) and Miley (a girl)—Rahlves just bought a second home in Southern California to be closer to moto-friendly desert and good surf.

"I was there in January and February surfing—the first time in my life I wasn't in a wintry place in those months!" Rahlves beams.

He says the world jet-ski championship in '93 marked a turning point: whether to train for the highest echelon of that sport or for ski racing. He chose the latter "because it was more of a challenge" and was racing on the World Cup circuit a year later. Good choice.

At five foot nine and 175 pounds, Rahlves gave up at least 20 pounds to Bode Miller, Tommy Moe, and the other hosses he raced against, and he lacks the Buick-size trunk found on gold medalists like Picabo Street and Hermann Maier. "A bigger guy can go faster on a straightaway than a small guy like me," Rahlves tells me at Sugar Bowl. "So I learned to really stick my turns in just the right place and at just the right time."

Among his 12 World Cup wins was a victory in the 2003 Hahnenkamm, the most hallowed downhill in the world. The slope, already steeper than Stephen King's forehead, is fiendishly watered down to make it icier. Rahlves is the only American to have won it in the World Cup era, and the performance made him a legend in Europe, where Hahnenkamm wins mean more than Olympic medals.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rahlves had a tendency to disappear into back bowls whenever races were canceled because of excess snow. "Eighty percent of World Cup racers wouldn't touch powder skis or hit jumps," he marvels. "They said powder would ruin the feeling of a course!" Raised on the Pacific-fattened dumps of Tahoe—Bode Miller grew up on the ice sheets of the Northeast—Rahlves always craved the stuff.

In the past few winters, though, weather cancellations started happening more because of drought or unseasonable murk. "I had gotten spoiled," Rahlves says of his last year on the World Cup. "If it wasn't perfect weather, if the conditions sucked, I'd lose interest. All the years of traveling, training, and committing to one sport began to wear on me. It was the right time to walk away."

Rahlves made his competitive skiercross debut at the X Games last January, easily winning the individual qualifying run and every heat through the semifinals. But in the finals he got squeezed off his line and knocked off balance. His left ski ripped away from his boot, his arms flailed, and he landed on his can as his opponents sped away. "Shit happens so much quicker in 'cross," he says. "You're not skiing the run; you're skiing the guy in front of you."

He also biffed at the first Ski Tour 'cross, in Sun Valley in January, and then again at Breckenridge in February. Then there was the February crash at Snowmass that injured his right hip. Despite all this, he headed into the finale at Squaw in seventh place in the series standings.

"Daron gets impatient sometimes," says Casey Puckett, another American World Cup and Olympic veteran who's become the world's top skiercross racer. "You want to pick your places to pass. Most of the time you see crashes is when a guy tries to make a pass where it's impossible."

For his part, Rahlves admits he still has a lot to learn. "Ski racing, it's just me versus the mountain," he says. "Here, it's me versus the mountain plus three other guys."