This Wyoming mountain gal isn't expected to win a biathlon medal at the Nagano Winter Games.  So don't be suprised if she does.    Even before she got to the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Ntala Skinner had a pretty good idea of where her sport stood in the general scheme of things. A few weeks earlier, she’d overheard Olympic broadcast host Bryant Gumbel enthusing about it on one of the morning shows. “The biathlon?” Gumbel had cracked. “What’s that?” Not long after arriving at Lillehammer, Skinner ran into another Olympian from her home town of Sun Valley, Idaho: Picabo Street. “That was pretty funny,” says Skinner rolling her eyes. “I knew her a little from high school, so I went up to say hello, and she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was somebody else here from Sun Valley.’ I said, ‘Don’t you look at the local paper? ‘Cause your picture was right next to mine.’”

Skinner tells these stories with a certain twinkling merriment.  Vivacious and outspoken, with bobbed blonde hair and a fondness for denim shirts, she comes off as a kind of rough-and-tumble cowgirl.  Indeed, growing up in the mountains of Wyoming, part of a famously athletic and outdoorsy clan, she "probably would have wound up a rodeo girl, if I hadn't done so well at skiing."  Now, at 24, having qualified for her second Olympic team, she's proudly unapologetic about her sport.  And yet, all the same, there are occasional moments of wistfulness.  A few weeks after Lillehammer, Skinner and a teammate, Curtis Schreiner, found themselves sitting next to figure-skating silver medalist Nancy Kerrigan at a White House reception.  "She was saying, 'I am so tired of giving autographs,’” Skinner recalls, "and we were like, 'Wow, we don't have that problem.’” "It's different in the biathlon," she says. "We don't get rich, we don't get famous." She laughs. "We also don't get people trying to break our legs."

Let's face it: If you were to chart out each sport on the Olympic food chain, the biathlon would be down there swimming around with the plankton.  Even if an American were to win gold in the event--and that has never come close to happening--the public would no doubt continue to relegate it to the category of weird winter sports, out there with curling and two-man luge.  Which is a shame, because the biathlon is a unique and challenging sport, combining as it does the big-muscle, cardiovascular exertions of top-level cross-country skiing with the small-muscle finesse and mental focus of rifle marksmanship.  In its basic conflict, it harks back to the oldest Olympic ideal of all: integrating mind and body.  You could call biathlon a survival sport, a vestige of the days when Norse tribesmen sallied forth on the frozen landscape in search of warm meat.  Most biathletes, though, trace its origins only back as far as the early days of World War II, when the Russian Army invaded Finland in the infamous "Winter War."  On paper, the Soviets should have won an overwhelming victory, rushing 20 heavily armored divisions across the border.  But within a few days, most of their vehicles had simply frozen in the arctic conditions, and their underdressed foot soldiers proved no match for a Finnish guerrilla force that, while lightly armed, moved rapidly through the forest on skis.  "Soviet losses stagger belief," notes the Guinness Book of Military Blunders, "Over a million Soviet soldiers died against Finnish losses of 25,000."  The first biathlons were military' competitions organized in the cold-war atmosphere of the early 1950s; the sport made its Olympics debut at the Squaw Valley Games in 1960.  It was the Soviets, ironically, who dominated the early days of the sport.  Contestants used heavy rifles, up to 8mm, and shot at distances up to 250 meters. "It was pretty military'," says Skinner, "just this bad-ass event where you carried around a large-bore rifle."  The malevolent, Storm-Trooper image didn't really fade until 1978, when the sport's organizers switched to small bore (22-caliber) target rifles and 50-meter firing ranges.  "That really opened up a whole new, novice-friendly world" says Tim Derrick, assistant coach of the U S Biathlon Team.  "After that you could stage a biathlon pretty much anywhere it snowed.”  Lately, confronted with the realities of the television age, the sport's organizers have been contemplating even bigger changes: the adoption of laser rifles and a new event called the pursuit, where a handicapped starting order would have all contestants converging head-to-head on the finish line.

The dominant power today is Germany, followed closely by the various former Soviet Republics.  The U.S. has never been a factor, with one exception: a silver medal in the individual 20-kilometer race won by Josh Thompson at the 1987 World Championships in Lake Placid.  Although nine American biathletes--five women and four men--will attend the Games in Nagano, Japan, only two of them had strong enough results on last season's World Cup tour to "prequalify”: Skinner and Stacey Wooley.  It's interesting to compare the two rivals, if only because they've taken such different paths.  The 29-year-old Wooley, a Dartmouth grad, has immersed herself in German biathlon culture by moving to the training center of Ruhpolding, Germany. "She speaks the language and has a German boyfriend," says Derrick, "and approaches biathlon the way the Germans do--as a science.  Ntala, on the other hand, embraces the Western spirit of individualism. She's like, 'Dammit, I'm gonna do my own thing.'  It's less cerebral for her than it is for others, who learned it late.  She's a shooter, she's a hunter--the West is part of her, and who she is is all tied up with that."  The hard thing about the biathlon is not skiing fast, or shooting straight, but doing the latter immediately after the former. "Imagine sprinting the length of several football fields," biathletes like to say, "and then threading a needle.  That's our sport."  "People who aren't shooters don't understand, but I think hunters can totally visualize it," says Skinner. "You come into the range with your heart beating at 175, and you have to stop, and totally steady yourself and get your shots off fast."  Fast but also clean, because the penalties for missing are severe.  In the "individual" event (15 kilometers for women), racers stop at four points to fire five shots at targets 50 meters away, twice from a prone position, twice standing.  For every missed target, one minute is added to a racer's cumulative time.  (In relays and the 7.5-kilometer "sprints," contestants take a 150-meter penalty lap for each miss.)

Most biathletes come to the sport without ever having picked up a gun.  To the U.S. Biathlon Association, that's no big deal.  "You can't make a great skier out of anybody, but shooting is a trainable skill," says Derrick.  All the same, it's hard to imagine that Skinner's background hasn't given her something of an advantage.  After all, she got her first target rifle at the tender age of 13, and even before that was tagging along on family hunting trips.  At 14, she got her license and bagged her first antelope. It's a point of pride that no Skinner ever buys meat in a store.  So it came as something of a shock a year ago, in the fall of 1996, when the then-coach of the U.S. women's team asked Skinner to make an adjustment in her shooting technique.  She had always pulled the trigger in the middle of her exhale--exactly where, she wasn't sure.  The coach thought that was a mistake. "Your barrel will settle easier," he told her, "if you breathe in and hold your breath before shooting."  Skinner was dubious. It was only a month before the start of the World Cup season, a little late for experiments.  On the other hand, her coach knew a thing or two about shooting himself--as a member of the West German relay team he'd won a bronze medal in the 1984 Winter Olympics.  "Besides, after Lillehammer, he'd changed everybody else on the team," Skinner says.  "I was the only one left."  At first, things went well. Skinner shot better than ever on the range, just practicing.  But in race conditions, with her heart rate up, she couldn't get the barrel to “settle” in a predictable way.  Nevertheless, she headed off to Europe with the team, determined to follow through with her new technique.  "The first World Cup race was a little crazy, but I felt like it was something I could handle," she recalls.  "On the second weekend, in Sweden, things just fell apart.  In one race, I think I missed all my shots prone."  For the first time, Skinner found herself doubting her shot.  "Each race was different, and there were so many variables, I couldn't figure out which problem to handle first," she say.  Finally, she asked her coach if she should go back to firing on the exhale.  Absolutely not, he told Skinner. "You're not a rookie anymore," he said.  "You figure it out."

But if the coach thought his racer would eventually come around to his way of thinking, he was wrong.  (Perhaps not coincidentally, his contract was not renewed at the end of the season.)  "There are two things you should know about the Skinners," Ntala says. "one, we come from a long line of free spirits. And two, we're pretty stubborn."  Skinners, it seems, are to the mountains born.  Ntala's grandfather, Clem, came out from Wisconsin in the 1930s and started a dude ranch in Pinedale at the edge of the Wind River Range.  It's now a celebrated survival academy called the Skinner Brothers Wilderness School.  Two of Ntala's uncles have climbed Mt. Everest, and one of her cousins, Todd Skinner, was the first person to free-climb El Capitan.  Her father, Ole, the youngest of the six brothers, was a four-event skier at the University of Wyoming (he's now a Sun Valley contractor and seasonal hunting guide.)  After college, he joined the Peace Corps and went off to teach agriculture in Cameroon, in Africa.  That's where he came up with the name Ntala, which means “two days before market day" in the local language.  According to Ole, Ntala was "skiing right out of her diapers" and she herself remembers her bitter disappointment when her father told her she'd have to wait till she was in first grade to start racing.  "A lot of times she was the only girl skiing in the races she entered," her mother, Karen, says.  As it happened, a former Olympic biathlete, Darren Binning, lived in Pinedale and introduced Ntala's older brother, Ndi, to the sport.  When Ntala was 13 she got Ndi’s old biathlon rifle, cut down to fit her frame.  "It was amazing if I hit one target," she says.  "I spent a lot of time doing penalty laps because I never practiced."  She did, however, practice her skiing--Ole, a certified cross-country coach, made sure of that.  "He had us doing 100-meter intervals every day, and I mean every day," Ntala says.  "In Pinedale, I was a little strange.  I trained all the time, and people were like, 'What are you doing?’”  Finally, when Ntala was 15 and a sophomore in high school, the family moved to Sun Valley, where training was more accepted.  "That whole valley is sports-mad," she says.  "But even there my dad was, well, very supportive.  When I went out with friends, he'd wait up for me. 'What are you doing?' he'd say when I got home.  'Do you think this is how you get to the Olympics?"'

It's a brisk fall Saturday at the Ethan Allen Firing Range, a National Guard camp in the mountains behind Burlington, Vermont, and the hills are alive with the sound of gunfire.  "It's maneuvers this weekend," says Skinner cheerfully, stepping out of her Isuzu Rodeo.  She's looking almost glam in a sheer pink, yellow and white race suit and, over it, a leather jacket embossed with the Olympic rings.  Like a majority of the biathletes on the U.S. team, Skinner is in the National Guard, though thanks to something called the Army World-Class Athletes program she rarely has to put on fatigues.  She enlisted in 1993, not long after dropping out of the University of Vermont.  "It was ski or study," she says.  The Guard is a six-year commitment, but it pays for the Rodeo and a modest apartment in nearby Jericho.  "That's a lot of the reason I joined," Skinner says, "So I could say to may parents, 'Hey, you're not paying for this.’”  Camp Ethan Allen is the home of the U.S. Biathlon Association's main training facility.  Shedding her jacket, Skinner straps on her roller skis, slings her gun over her shoulders, and gives me a brief tour.  Several miles of cross-county trails that are both paved (for roller-ski workouts) and lighted (for night training) loop around a 30-position firing range.  Flopping down on a mat, she gives me a quick lesson.  "If you're shooting prone, like this," Skinner says, "then your bull's-eye is the size of a silver dollar. If you're standing, its bigger--about the size of a cantaloupe.  Still, prone is definitely easier.  She hands over the gun, an Anschutz 1827 Fortner target rifle (retail value, about $2600).  At eight pounds, it strikes me as a little on the heavy side, but it has to be, Skinner says, “so that the barrel doesn’t change shape at -20 Celsius.”  Bullets are loaded in clips of five, and finder pressure is a minimum of 500 grams--a pretty heavy trigger, for safety reasons.  I sight down the barrel, half expecting a mini-scope with crosshairs.  Instead there are merely two circular peep sights, the rear one adjustable by means of little knobs.  During a race, an assistant coach will stand a few hundred yards down the course from the range, and as the skiers come in he’ll relay the head coach’s estimate of the wind conditions: “two clicks left,” say, if there’s a breeze coming out of the left.  A 22-caliber bullet moves relatively slowly, so even a light wind will push it as much as an inch off line.  On a really blustery day a bullet can move a lot more than that. “Sometimes you have to take your sights completely off the target,” Skinner says.  “It’s called shading.”  It was in just such a situation that Skinner found herself last year in Oslo, during the third World Cup meet of the season.  After her miserable results in the first two events, her confidence was shot--and she had to deal with a bad crosswind to boot.  In the relay, too afraid to shade, she missed four of five targets, and the team finished last.  “That’s when I realized there were more ways to go about this than just my coach’s way,” Skinner says.  “The next day, I went out to range and started shooting the old way--on the exhale. It felt like I’d never left.”  Skinner spent Christmas in Alberta with the family of her boyfriend, Canadian biathlete Kevin Quintilio.  It was 40 below outside, so she didn’t shoot for 10 days.  Instead she did dry-fire drills, aiming at shots on the wall, and lots of “self-talk,” comforting herself.  A week later, at the nationals in Lake Placid, she made two mistakes in the sprint finals, but charged back to win the race.  The next day she won the individual title as well. “I had the eye-of-the-tiger thing going, I guess,” she says.  “I had to ski my rear end off, but I knew I could do it.”  Back in Antholz, Italy, for the end of the World Cup season, Skinner “cleaned” her first set of targets from the prone position, going five for five.  The second time around, standing, she missed one--a one-minute time penalty.  But in her next two rounds she missed only one shot and skied out of the range with a huge smile on her face.  In the end, she wound up 12th--the best finish by an American woman that season.

Will Skinner or Wooley medal in Nagano? Probably not.  “A top-three finish would have to be a truly inspirational performance,” admits assistant coach Derrick.  “But top ten is a definite possibility.” He pauses.  “Then again, anything can happen in this sport.  It’s like golf.  You get a little breeze, and all bets are off.  On a given day, any of 20 people can win.”   “I don’t just want to go to the Olympics,” Skinner says.  “I did that last time.  It would really make me feel like I accomplished something if I had my best performance in Nagano.”  She opens her leather jacket to reveal the message embroidered across the inside.  It’s the Olympic creed.  “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part,” it reads, “as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle...”  I still believe in that stuff,” Skinner says, “but this time I want more.”