That's The Spirit!

She didn't want to ski; she wanted to go home. It was a cold Wednesday afternoon in the mountains west of Turin, and in two days U.S. Alpine skier Julia Mancuso was scheduled to race the Olympic giant slalom, the last of her four events at the Games and the one in which she had the best chance for a medal. But she wanted nothing more than to load up the 27-foot recreational vehicle in which she travels the World Cup circuit, leave the resort village of Sestriere behind and put the Olympics in her slipstream.

It had been a trying two weeks. First Mancuso had battled the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Ski Team when they would not help her with a power source for her RV. Then she had struggled to mediocre finishes in the downhill, the combined and the Super G on courses not suited to her strengths. Finally, on this day she was crushed when her boyfriend, fellow U.S. skier Steve Nyman, left Sestriere after an unsubtle shove from team coaches, who Nyman said told him, "You might want to give Julia some space."

Mancuso, 21, had come to the Games with live dreams. She had been a double bronze medalist at the 2005 world championships, and after a misplaced pair of custom boots sabotaged the first half of this World Cup season, she had podium finishes in three of her six races leading into Turin. Now her energy was gone. "So many things upset me here," Mancuso said. "I wanted to just leave. I lost the Olympic spirit."

She stayed, of course, and she found the spirit last Friday on an epic powder day like so many she had enjoyed as a child skiing with her family in the mountains above Lake Tahoe, in California. She found it with two full-gas runs of giant slalom down a gnarly mountainside overlooking Sestriere, winning a gold medal by the blowout margin of .67 of a second over Tanja Poutiainen of Finland. At the bottom she fell into the arms of teammate Stacey Cook and screeched, "I can't believe I just won the Olympics!"

Hers was the first Olympic skiing medal by a U.S. woman since Picabo Street won the Super G early in the 1998 Games in Nagano. It was also the first victory by an American woman in the giant slalom since Debbie Armstrong won the event at Sarajevo in '84, just weeks before Mancuso was born--a stark measure of long-term U.S. Alpine frustration.

Mancuso's gold pulled the U.S. out of a nine-day slide that followed Ted Ligety's victory in the combined on Valentine's Day. But any chance of adding to the team's two medals evaporated in the final Alpine race last Saturday, when Ligety was disqualified from the first run of the slalom for straddling a gate and Bode Miller completed an ignominious 0-for-5 Olympics by missing a gate and not even finishing the opening run. (At the other end of the spectrum, Benjamin Raich's second gold led Austria to a sweep in the slalom and a record 14 Alpine medals.)

It comes as no surprise that Mancuso would grind through blowing snow, the U.S. slump and her own angst. She has been blasting through challenges since the October morning in 1989 when she awoke to find her family's sprawling mountain home in Squaw Valley, Calif., surrounded by police cars and her mother, Andrea, telling her, "You don't have to go to school today, O.K.? We're going to go out to breakfast."

That was the day her father, Ciro, was pulled from the shower and arrested for running an international marijuana-smuggling operation dating back to the early 1970s. He eventually pleaded guilty to charges of operating a continuing criminal enterprise and tax evasion, and was released from a Reno prison after 17 months when he agreed to cooperate with investigators. However, when his testimony did not result in a conviction against a coconspirator in a 1995 trial, Ciro had to serve another four years in a federal minimum-security prison in Yankton, S.D. Now a real-estate developer in the Lake Tahoe area, Ciro sat in a Sestriere caf� two days before the start of the Games and said, "You do things when you're young, and they come back to haunt you when you're older."

Julia endured the turbulence, which included her parents' separation in 1992 and divorce in '94, on skis. "She took everything out on the slopes," says Andrea, "and look at the outcome."

Mancuso and her sisters, April, now 25, and Sarah, now 16, lived mostly with Andrea. "A great mom who did a great job with us," says Julia. Ciro was by Julia's side when she was a young racer, but they drifted apart while he was in prison. They have reconnected, however, and Julia has spent much of her summer vacations in recent years at his house on the north shore of Maui. "I was never mad at my father for going away," she says. Ciro, 57, joined his daughter for the last week of the World Cup circuit before the Olympics and followed her to Turin, he in a car and Julia in her RV with April.

There was no shortage of family supporting Julia at the Games. Andrea brought her parents and her fianc�; Ciro brought his wife, Katie, and their daughter, Taly, 2. Ciro also helped resolve the RV power-supply dispute, which ensued when Julia arrived in Sestriere on Feb. 9 and parked her rig next to Miller's RV and racer Daron Rahlves's tour bus in a small, heavily guarded parking lot behind the Miramonte Hotel, headquarters for the USOC. Miller and Rahlves were allowed access to the hotel's electricity, but Mancuso was not. The USOC says that was because the men had requested parking and power last summer, well ahead of Mancuso's request in January, and the hotel could not supply all three vehicles. So Ciro bought a gas generator to run the RV's electrical systems; the day after Rahlves left on Feb. 22, Mancuso finally was allowed to tap into the hotel's power. That was the night before she won her gold medal.