THE NEXT DAY up in the queue for the GS course, Ligety was razzing Rahlves about sharing some swag. "D, you gotta get us some of those Oakley 'phones," he said.

Ligety and Rahlves provide an object lesson in the brutal economics of ski racing. Rahlves, fifth in the World Cup standings at the end of last season, earns more than $1 million a year from race purses and sponsorships like Oakley. Ligety, who stood in 62nd place at the end of last season, was scraping by. Ligety's racing suit is emblazoned with ads for Visa and Chevy, but that money all goes to the USSA. The only real estate available to the racers is the front of their helmets. Rahlves's helmet reads red bull. (It might as well say big money.) In Sölden, Ligety's helmet also paid homage to his financial sponsors. Scrawled on a piece of tape was mom + dad. (It now reads PARK CITY MOUNTAIN RESORT, a new sponsor attracted by Ligety's recent strong results.)

The very fact that Rahlves and Ligety are teammates represents another Jesse Hunt revolution. One reason the U.S. men's team lagged in the late nineties was premature attrition. The team's best skiers—Tommy Moe, AJ Kitt, and Kyle Rasmussen—all retired before they turned 30.

"When I took over as the men's coach, I went back over the previous ten years," Phil McNichol says, "and I looked at the average age of the athletes in the World Cup top ten. It was 27, maybe 28. Then I looked at the average age of retirement on our team. Which was 25."

AJ Kitt, now a real estate broker in Hood River, Oregon, recalls a lot of good times on the World Cup circuit. "But I did it for 11 years, and after a while a burnout factor sets in," he says. "It just wasn't that fun anymore."

Career longevity is a common denominator among ski racing's elite. It's only when you stand next to World Cup veterans like Norway's Lasse Kjus and Austria's Hermann Maier that you realize exactly why it pays to keep athletes racing into their thirties. Older racers have an astonishing thickness of body that younger skiers haven't developed.

"We call it old-man strength," says assistant coach Needell. "You race for 20 years, it's like doing 7,000 days of extreme core work." Top racers develop oak trunks, burly thighs, and asses as wide as Karl Malone's. As one course technician told me, "Da big butts win."

Keeping athletes racing for three decades means keeping them healthy, both physically and mentally. The physical component was mostly in place by the 2002 Olympics. The money raised by Bill Marolt allowed the USSA to create a state-of-the-art sports-science department that revamped the team's training regimen. Out went an emphasis on brute strength—"Our sports science consisted of doing push-ups until we passed out," Kitt says—and in came a focus on cross-training, balance, and body chemistry. During the season, it's all about optimizing the time on the mountain.

"About five years ago," says USSA sports-science director Andy Walshe, "we figured out that the best way to train was to have high intensity on snow and then make sure the athletes recover well, so they're primed for the next day's training."

In practice, that means Miller, Rahlves, Schlopy, and their teammates aren't doing endless laps on the training hill. They'll do five or six runs at race-day intensity and then head back to the hotel fitness room and briefly pedal on stationary bikes to flush the lactates and stay limber. Nothing is left to chance. Trainers take blood samples and test lactate levels while the athletes spin and sip a specially formulated recovery drink.

To keep morale up and the spirit fun, Morin schedules pick-up soccer games with the women's team. John McBride commemorates each athlete's birthday with a pie in the face. Phil McNichol distributes bowling shirts embroidered with hot-rod flames to any racer who scores World Cup points by placing in the top 30. "C'mon, boys," McNichol will tell his squad the night before a race. "We're gonna get our flames on tomorrow."