A very good year, overall

Vonn enjoys view from top of the hill

Overall and downhill champion Lindsey Vonn and giant slalom champion Ted Ligety show off their World Cup trophies. (Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press)

No one ever doubted her talent. Even when circumstances denied her an Olympic medal at the Turin Games in 2006.

Certainly no one ever doubted her guts, remembering how she skied the downhill in those Olympics even though she could hardly walk to the press podium because of a back injury.

Her training regimen is legendary among her peers, and for all these reasons and more, few were surprised with this winter's breakout season by 23-year-old Lindsey Vonn.

As the US Alpine Ski Team goes through its intramural games this week - the US Alpine Nationals - aside from the usual showcase for up-and-coming talent, there is definitely a victory-lap feel at the Sugarloaf Ski area.

US skiers not only matched the 25-year-old feat of winning both men's and women's overall titles turned in by Phil Mahre and Tamara McKinney, they also won three other discipline titles. In all, Americans took 5 of 12 crystal globes, a national record.

Vonn won the women's overall World Cup as well as the downhill title; Bode Miller, though not a team member, still brought the overall home to the US as well as the combined crystal globe, while Ted Ligety took the giant slalom title at last week's alpine World Championships in Bormio, Italy.

Vonn, the leader of the pack, is the only one of the three racing here at the nationals. Miller will miss racing on the mountain where he honed his craft as a Carrabassett Valley Academy student, and Ligety reportedly is being treated in Colorado for hand injuries.

For Vonn, who says she had her sights set all season on the downhill title, winning the overall was something of a surprise.

"I've been working so hard for this goal," she said. "It's been my entire life, a dream come true.

"From the beginning I was only concentrating on the downhill, trying to score points in the rest of the events. But I didn't think [the overall] was possible.

"It's so hard to win it. You have to be on your game the entire season. I just can't believe this year it was me."

Not that she didn't work toward the overall points title, especially once she had the downhill title virtually put away by late December when she had won four races and stood atop a 100-point lead.

Only later in the season, when two technical races were canceled for weather conditions, did the shortening of overall available points begin to work in Vonn's favor. At Crans Montana in early March she won her fifth downhill of the season, and looked to be the odds-on favorite if she could survive the two technical races left.

"I was pretty nervous that Maria Riesch and Niki Hosp could catch up, and then when a downhill was canceled at Bormio, I was worried."

But Vonn did not rely on luck or scheduling quirks to get the job done. Entering the super-G with the knowledge that she had not done well in this discipline all season, Vonn nailed the course for a second place. Only then, she recalled, "I realized the overall title was within my reach."

In fact, Vonn might well have skipped the final technical races at Bormio and still held the overall, but it's simply not her style. So last Friday in the Bormio finale, Vonn's 11th-place finish put the title out of anyone else's reach.

In her eyes, winning with a slalom after perfecting her speed skiing was ironic.

"It was just cool, because coming from Minnesota, I grew up just skiing slalom, so to win the title that way was a good way to finish the season," she said.

On hand to watch her reach that milestone was McKinney, the last US woman to win the overall in 1983. But Vonn, speaking to reporters around the world on a teleconference after the race, could not seem to absorb the full impact of her feat.

"It's just so weird," she said. "It doesn't seem like it's happening to me. I'm always the one who admired everyone else and wanted to be like everyone else. And now I'm that person."

One of those "everyone elses" in her life came a generation after McKinney, and soon was the leading ski racer in team history, Picabo Street.

Street, a speed skier who was dominant for several seasons in the 1990s, happened to meet Vonn - then Lindsey Kildow - in a ski shop in her hometown of Buck's Hill, Minn. Vonn remembers being about 8 years old at the time, and her talk with Street not only inspired her to enter ski racing but began a friendship that has lasted throughout Vonn's young career.

Asked about surpassing Street's record for career downhill wins, Vonn said, "It did feel kind of strange. I didn't hear from her and wondered if she was mad about it."

Later, however, when Vonn spoke in a teleconference from Whistler Mountain when she won the downhill title, Street was on the phone to congratulate her in public.

After that win, Vonn was her usual reflective self when speaking of her idol and friend.

"I've surpassed my idols, and maybe I'll now be someone that kids will look up to the way I looked up to Picabo," she said. "It's strange to be in that position because I'm only 23 years old."

Since beginning the season at Thanksgiving and racing in 11 countries, Vonn won six World Cup races, five downhills, and a super-combined. She appeared on the podium with four other top-three finishes.

Looking ahead, Vonn knows that next year, a non-Olympic season, it may be harder to find motivation than it will for the runup to Vancouver in 2010.

"Well, there are the Worlds next year, and that'something I'm thinking about," she said. "But just to go to that gym and get on the bicycle for hour after hour - that's really tough."

While fans appreciate her accomplishments, the coin of the realm for Americans, she said, is Olympic medals.

"Americans pay attention to the Olympics, and so that's a big goal," she said, adding that the 2006 setback, "only makes me more determined."

After Sugarloaf, Vonn is heading back to Europe for appearances in a world where she has attained megastar status.

"It's just so crazy, everywhere I go," she said. "People over there really respond to US ski racers."