Skiing: Pointing for Innsbruck

The best skiers in the world have always come from the European Alps, where the first thing a boy learns is that he can parlay a little skill and rosy good looks into a career teaching rich American divorcees to snowplow. The angriest skiers in the world come, at the moment, from the U.S.. which has an old score to settle: in 24 years of trying. U.S. skiers have won just three gold medals in the Winter Olympics. Worse yet. all three were won by women—the last by Andrea Mead Lawrence in 1952—and no U.S. male has ever...