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Sired by a Hall of Fame steeplechase jockey, McKinney was raised on a horse farm but bred to be a ski racer by her stage mother Frances, who rented a winter house near Squaw Valley, Calif. "I remember wearing baby skis," says Tamara, the youngest and the second most promising of Frances McKinney's seven children, five of whom reached the U.S. ski team. Sheila, 25, the family's particular star, made the team at the unlikely age of twelve. But in 1977 she fell in a downhill run and was unconscious for a month. After relearning how to talk, walk and write, Sheila could possibly have skied on, but her taste for it was gone. "Mom's dis appointed that I'm not enthusiastic about racing any more," Sheila said a few years later. "She doesn't quite understand." A half brother, Steve, 30, turned to daredevil speed skiing (he once held the world's record of 124 m.p.h.) after an advertising transaction disqualified him from amateur competition. All family dreams were eventually handed down to Tamara. "I am out there trying to win, but I'm mostly trying to stay happy," she says, seeming even younger than 21. "When racing, I feel confident of every tenth of a second, of every curve and every rise."
At 5 ft. 4 in., 117 Ibs., McKinney hardly cuts the blocky figure of a woman skier. Actually, the entire women's team appears less robust than its regimen. At various boot camps from Hawaii to New Zealand, karate and pro football have been mixed into the exercises (Green Bay Packer Del Rodgers was a drill instructor). With the exception of three-time Olympian Cindy Nelson, a bronze-medal winner in 1976, they are extraordinarily fit. Nelson crashed a gate at Val d'Isere, France, last month and tore the ligaments in a knee. She returned to the U.S. immediately and has been working furiously to recover.
"Cindy knew every slope in Europe, says McKinney. "Her absence has hit us all pretty hard." The team's usual manner is joking and sometimes even throwing confetti. "The Europeans used to laugh at our crazy spirit," Cooper says, "but now that we've started winning, it drives them up a wall."
Nelson still hopes to be ready hi two weeks. "You have to be healthy and lucky," says Phil Mahre, who is near the end. "This is my last year. I'll still be connected with skiing, but I'd like to venture out and try something else." He expects to miss the excitement at the starting gate, the camaraderie hi the finish area and "even getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning." McKinney says, "It can't come together and it can't be good unless you're having a good time of it. I have to take a step back, breathe, have fun and do my best." Her success last year is sometimes a burden. "It's almost easier to get a little confidence in yourself quietly," she says. For the U.S. skiers, those days are over. —By Tom Callahan. Reported by Gary Lee with the U.S. women's ski team