Lindsey Vonn, the defending World Cup ski champion and multiple Olympic medal favorite, tried other sports as a child. Figure skating was a struggle, and she was not very accomplished at gymnastics, either.

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Vonn, who says she is a klutz off her skis, is the defending World Cup champion.

"It's definitely weird to have your face everywhere, but I'm as prepared for it as I can be," said Lindsey Vonn, the favorite in the Olympic downhill, super-G and super-combined.

"I remember in her first year with the team, I was standing with Bode Miller next to a course at Mammoth Mountain, and she came flying by and I said, 'Who is that?' " Daron Rahlves, a former American downhill great said, recalling a training camp in California in 2001. "And Bode said, 'I don't know, but she's the only girl trying to take the same line down the mountain that we are.' "

Rahlves laughed.

"I watch her now and I see the same thing," he said. "She skis like a guy. Always attacking."

According to the coaches who have tutored her throughout her career, Vonn's inherent talent was always accompanied by a herculean work ethic.

"Up and down the mountain, day after day — nights, weekends, holidays — Lindsey was always there and she never complained," Sailer said. "She would go until we turned off the lights at night."

When Vonn was 11, she began training at Ski Club Vail, an elite snow sports academy. One of her coaches there, John Cole, said that at first, he would sometimes lose track of her.

"We would be inside with the other kids because it was cold, raining or it was lunchtime, and somebody would say, 'Where's Lindsey?' " Cole said. "And you know what? We learned to look back up the hill because she had stayed out there and was taking more runs through the race course."

Though she is now 25 and one of the signature American athletes heading into the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, she still pushes just as hard — perhaps too hard sometimes. Vonn revealed Wednesday that she had sustained a leg injury last week during training.

"If you want to know why Lindsey is so good, go to the gym 90 minutes before the rest of the team is scheduled to start working out," said Jim Tracy, a coach for the United States team. "Lindsey will already be there."

Vonn has a limited number of serious pursuits, but she tends to approach each with similar determination. She spent at least half the year racing in Europe, and it frustrated her that she could not communicate more adeptly. So she learned German, and not just a little bit. When Vail Resorts was negotiating to become a major sponsor of Vonn's, the corporation's chief executive, Rob Katz, happened upon a YouTube clip of Vonn on a German television talk show.

"It was a David Letterman-type show, and there was Lindsey cracking jokes and making repartee with the host in German," Katz said. "I was blown away that she had taught herself that well. She's focused, genuine and does things in a way that people admire. When you're going to link yourself to an athlete, you are looking for Derek Jeter. We got ski racing's Derek Jeter."

Vonn, if healthy, is the favorite in the Olympic downhill, super-G and super combined, which is one run of slalom combined with one run of downhill. She will be a more distant medal contender in her other events, slalom and giant slalom. Counseled by her husband, the former Olympic skier Thomas Vonn, who also acts as an adviser and coach, Lindsey has tried to normalize the situation she faces in Vancouver.

"It's definitely weird to have your face everywhere, but I'm as prepared for it as I can be," she said. "I have worked very hard, and I've always wanted an Olympic medal. Everyone should know that I will try my best."

And then, when the Olympics are over, Vonn could achieve the second biggest goal in her life: appearing in an episode of television's "Law & Order."

"I am obsessed with the show," she said. "I'll play a stiff on a mortuary slab, I don't care. Or I could be a bystander on the street, someone who points and says, 'They went that way.' I could do that. I don't know if they want me running somewhere or doing anything athletic, but I could stand still and do something. I'd be good at that. I really would."

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Pssst.

It raises the question: have the Winter Games outlived their usefulness, given the altered sports calendar, changing viewing habits and the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Has ski jumping jumped the shark?

In retrospect, it was a mistake to separate the Winter Olympics from the Summer Olympics, beginning in 1994. When they both occurred in the same calendar year, "it was like a year of sport every four years," said Keszler, who coached the Olympic medalists Brian Orser and Elvis Stojko.

The change was made so the Winter Games could breathe their own air, and so organizers could more easily raise corporate sponsorship money. It seemed a rational financial decision, but the outcome robbed the Olympics of perhaps their most attractive quality — novelty.

Now that a Winter or Summer Games arrives every two years, their freshness and feeling of uniqueness have gone the way of amateurism and compulsory school figures.

"I understand the logic behind it," said Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. Yet, he added, "splitting those two has taken away the sort of monumental special nature of the whole thing."

The Vancouver Games face an additional burden, starting five days after the Super Bowl, risking that a football hangover could resist the Bloody Mary curative of the Olympics.

"You barely have time to digest the high-sodium, high-cholesterol snacks from the Super Bowl feast, and here comes the opening ceremony," Thompson said. "When two rituals fall close together, one always suffers. Christmas and New Year's are a week apart. The first of those got the better end of the deal."

In moving host cities to lower-lying urban areas like Turin, Italy, and now Vancouver, the International Olympic Committee risks holding a Winter Olympics with few signs of winter.

A temperate climate in Vancouver has already forced snow to be trucked in like spectators to freestyle skiing and snowboarding sites. Temperatures have reached the 50s in downtown Vancouver in recent days. Organizers may be forced to rename these the Early Spring Olympics. At least I.O.C. delegates should get to play their favorite sport — golf.

In fairness to the I.O.C. and to NBC, technology made the diminishment of the Winter Games inevitable. Once, any host network had a captive television audience for two weeks. Now that audience has been atomized by cable, satellite and Internet viewing habits. Consumers have grown impatient for results in real time, not necessarily prime time.

The Winter Olympics suffer more than the Summer Olympics because their main audience is more curious about than devoted to daring, unfamiliar activities like snowboard cross and luge. NBC is expected to lose $200 million to $250 million on the Vancouver Games.

Four years ago, the Turin Olympics on some nights lost in the ratings medal count to "American Idol" and "Desperate Housewives." A Winter Games in North America will allow NBC to broadcast live events in prime time; on the other hand, the two most important gold medals in Vancouver — women's figure skating and men's hockey — are not expected to be placed around the necks of athletes from the United States.

Still, for a couple of weeks, the snowboarder Shaun White and the skier Lindsey Vonn will give NBC cover from the late-night fiasco that was Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien — a knee-whacking that would make Tonya Harding proud. With the lift in ratings, the fourth-place network can win prime time, and women are certain to watch the Games in large numbers.

"It's not as though we've turned our backs completely," Thompson said. "I don't think we've suddenly found the Winter Olympics less interesting or relevant. The biggest thing is, there's so much other stuff to attract our attention. It's a wonder they're still doing as well as they are."

To its credit, the I.O.C. has sought a younger, hipper audience by adding sports like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. Yet these events seem tamer — or lamer — versions of the big-air wonder found in the Winter X Games on ESPN. Interviewing White last week, David Letterman lamented, "This is what the Olympics need more of."

It was a convenient shot at NBC, his former employer, but Letterman had a point. The halfpipe seems only half-radical beneath the Olympic rings, more permissible than renegade.

"I still think the Olympics holds a special place for me," said Casey Puckett, a former Olympic Alpine skier who is scheduled to compete for the United States in ski cross in Vancouver. "ESPN has a lot of freedom to do what they want. It is an experimental ground to try new things to get ratings and see what people are interested in. The Olympics is more traditional and set in its ways."

Once, cold war tensions gave us galvanizing moments like the 1980 Miracle on Ice, but that narrative crumbled with the Berlin Wall two decades ago. The United States' current political adversaries — Iran and North Korea — are not Olympic powers. Other threatening enemies are stateless, with no Taliban bobsledders or Qaeda biathletes to spur our nationalistic fervor.

So how to raise sagging interest?

Start by switching basketball to the Winter Olympics.

Who wouldn't love to see a triple Shaxel?