"Last year, he chastised me a little bit for taking so much risk and just never really thinking about what I was doing," he said. "I actually got stuck in a gondola with him. And he was telling me about his experience and how he spent maybe the first five or six years of his career just crashing into fences and blowing up until he finally figured out how to make it all work."

The first glimmer of his potential came in 2007 at the challenging Birds of Prey downhill in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

Skiing in just his seventh-career World Cup race, Weibrecht pulled off one of the most exhilarating Alpine runs in recent memory. He sliced through the treacherous Golden Eagle and Abyss sections that had doomed many others in a driving blizzard. Weibrecht's 10th-place finish was a mere 0.54 seconds behind the winner, Michael Walchhofer of Austria. The race remains his best World Cup result to date.

Weibrecht finally gained consistent results last year on the men's speed team. He scored top 15 results in both downhill and super G in nearly every start en route to making his first U.S. Olympic Team. Weibrecht credits his success to good coaching, and he has received a few other pointers regarding the Vancouver Games.

"I am one of the few new guys," he said. "I definitely have been able to get a sort of perspective of what to expect and what to look out for in terms of managing the added pressure and different situations that are above and beyond something that I have ever encountered."