TO FIND OUT HOW THE TEAM had come so far, I went to Park City, Utah, last July to meet Bill Marolt, 62, CEO and president of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), which manages several Olympic snow sports, including alpine skiing, cross-country, freestyle, nordic combined, and snowboarding. No one has been more instrumental in rebuilding America's ski-racing program—raising money, improving coaching, and streamlining the racer-development system—than Marolt.

An Olympian and, in 1963, national downhill champion himself, Marolt was the team's alpine director in the late seventies and early eighties. His tenure coincided with a golden age in American ski racing, when Phil and Steve Mahre, Tamara McKinney, and Bill Johnson gave the Europeans all they could handle. In 1984, Marolt left to become athletic director at the University of Colorado, where he watched his head football coach, Bill McCartney, take the Buffaloes from a 1-10 record in 1984 to a national championship in 1990.

It was Marolt's success at Boulder, combined with his ski-racing pedigree, that convinced the USSA board he could save their sinking ship. The nineties were dismal years for skiing in America. The sport lost the cachet it had enjoyed since the seventies. Snowboarding became hip. Skiing became that thing your parents did. From 1992 to 1999, snowboarding grew from 1.6 million to 3.6 million riders, while skiing lost nearly one-third of its 10.8 million participants.

As the ski business struggled along, the U.S. Ski Team's budget, supported largely by corporate and

Bill Marolt, the chief architect of U.S. skiing's turnaround, uncapped a pen and wrote: best in the world. "That's what we want to be," he declared.

private donations, steadily eroded. Promising junior racers drifted into snowboarding or the sexier and more lucrative world of freeskiing. On the World Cup circuit, the Americans were getting lapped. The team made do on a bare-bones budget, trundling up icy mountain roads packed ten to a van while European superstars like Alberto Tomba zoomed by in Ferraris. At one point, money got so tight that the team asked the athletes to chip in to cover travel expenses. A string of CEOs—three in three years—seemed powerless to stop ski racing's decline.

That changed with Marolt. In the spring of 1997, shortly after he took the helm, he gathered the USSA's top officials in a conference room at the group's Park City headquarters. The USSA needed a clear mission, Marolt told them. "[Colorado football coach] Bill McCartney always talked about goal setting and focus," Marolt went on. "He'd say you're not really committed to a goal unless you're willing to write it down and put it up on the wall."

Marolt uncapped a pen and wrote four words on a sheet of paper: best in the world. He tacked the sheet to the wall. "This," he said, "is what we want to be."

Marolt pounded goal setting into the USSA's corporate culture. Coaches and athletes were expected to lay out goals for every season, every training session, every race. He laid out his own list: Stop the revolving door that sent old coaches out and new coaches in every year; reconstruct the talent pipeline, which meant reconnecting with some 350 amateur ski clubs around the country; and create sophisticated sports-medicine and training programs from scratch. Above all, he needed to build up the organization's financial foundation, the key to achieving his aims.

Marolt reached into the pockets of both corporate America and the nation's wealthy skiers. I happened to be in Park City while he was hosting the USSA's annual Partners Summit at the Canyons Resort. I sat in as Marolt, a tan, trim, and perpetually upbeat figure, presented his "best in the world" pitch—now much closer to reality—to a conference room full of financial backers.

"We have the men's overall World Cup champion, Bode Miller," he said. "Our women's team will challenge the Austrians. We'll come into the Torino Games as the biggest single story on the U.S. Olympic Team."

Representatives from Chevrolet, United Airlines, Tommy Hilfiger, Visa, and other brands nodded approvingly. In eight years, Marolt has more than doubled the USSA's budget to $19 million.

Marolt also touched on other alpine stars. Behind Miller and Rahlves stand hard-charging youngsters like Ligety, the defending U.S. slalom champion, and Jimmy Cochran, 24, who finished 16th in GS at last year's world championships. (On the World Cup, the top 20 spots are often decided by tenths or hundredths of a second, meaning top-20 finishers are all within reach of a medal.)

Other promising young guns include GS specialist Dane Spencer, 28, who's finished in the top 15 six times in the past three years, and downhiller Bryon Friedman, 25, who cracked the World Cup top ten twice last year before a broken leg curtailed his season. Among the veterans, Erik Schlopy, 33, won bronze in GS at the 2003 world championships (held every two years and separate from the World Cup), while his recent fourth-place at Beaver Creek was his best World Cup result since then.

The women's side is also stocked with standouts, including speed skier Lindsey Kildow, 21, four-event standout Julia Mancuso, 21, young slalom and GS charger Resi Stiegler, 20, tech veteran Kristina Koznick, 30, and slalom specialist Sarah Schleper, 26, who took gold at last year's World Cup finals. Add downhillers Kirsten Clark, 28, and Jonna Mendes, 26, and the multidiscipline veteran Caroline Lalive, 26, and you find that all the women—with the exception of Stiegler—have nabbed a podium finish on the World Cup. As good as Miller, Rahlves, and the American men are, the women's team could steal the show in Turin.

After his speech, Marolt went out in the hallway to the breakfast buffet of bagels, pastries, and orange juice. "Hey! Good to see you," he said to an old friend. He chatted up new acquaintances, inviting them to become USSA partners.

If all goes well, the partners will each pony up sums ranging from a few thousand dollars to several hundred thousand for another year's sponsorship. Chevrolet, the ski team's biggest backer, is already in for $2 million. By the end of April, private donors and fundraising events are expected to bring in another $5 million. The money is helping Marolt reach the USSA's endowment-campaign goal of $60 million, part of which will be used to build a new training center in Park City. More recently, the expanded budget bolstered the team's sports-science program and helped produce a series of instructional DVDs, which the USSA distributes to regional coaches to better harmonize teaching methods in the farm system.

The revived finances have helped lift the program, if not beyond the Austrians, at least within reach of them—and that will be particularly important at the Winter Olympics. Not many Americans know that Bode Miller won the World Cup last year, but plenty will know if he wins gold in Turin. And in America, where ski racing takes center stage only every four years, that may be all that really matters.