I still like Jay's idea of just sending kids to Europe to live and ski
a few years. When someone is in early 20's they don't have too many
ties. If they have Oly ambition it would seem to just be a great thing
to go live/ski over there. Nothing sweeter!

OK, Scandi skiers come here for their NCAA/college education. There's
probably a parallel where US skiers could do there for their 20's.
--Like that Community College thing that Pete V. did.

Isn't this how our core of top bike racers do it? We have quite a few
bike racers going to Europe and getting used to the hard life. They
maybe work crap jobs, then race their bike. No biggy. If they got
talent, they gotta do it. They gotta leave the nest behind. The serious
ones seem to do it readily enough.

OK, we have a lot of Jrs. Fast forward to Oly-time. How big is our pool
of contenders living in Park City at any moment? Offhand, I'd guess
THREE. Like, we didn't have a couple dozen each of brawny, healthy,
rangy skiers of guys, gals, youngsters, to work on and see who rises
up, even over time. Now, I recall a Pete article where he was inspired
by the German model: they support a bunch of skiers and just throw em
to the sharks and whoever doesn't explode ends up being fast. Well, it
doesn't seem like we have enough depth to do that---we have it in Jrs
but not in Srs. We have huge fall-off after college, basically. When
Becky S. was placing 50th was she part of a pool of potential top
Canadian skiers who were all placing 50th? Basically it seems like the
US only has a couple guys and maybe one gal who could place top 50 WC.
You can't rely on that few of skiers to make breakthrus to the podium.
You need maybe two dozen who could be at the 50th level to have one who
maybe pops up and out. Maybe. Of course that would only be once a
decade at that. Canada hasn't had a Becky in a long time, right?

Just ruminatin'.