ONE APRÈS-SKI GOLDEN HOUR LAST MARCH, Daron Rahlves, three-time Olympian and retired U.S. Ski Team star, was standing in the middle of Squaw Valley's Le Chamois bar in his underwear. Another fallen sports hero? It's as good a guess as any. But Rahlves, it should be noted, was sober, and he had stripped only as a favor for a camera crew from ABC Sports, which needed footage to promote his latest high-speed, adrenaline-fueled pursuit, skiercross. An X Games favorite heavily influenced by motocross, skiercross sends four to six skiers at a time down a swerving, jump-studded, wildly ramped Alice's rabbit hole of a course. Elbows fly, and if you cut off your enemy and send him careering off the course—hey, bonus.

This was not what Rahlves expected when he retired from World Cup racing following the 2006 season. With 28 podium finishes, 12 wins, three world championship medals, and a reputation as America's best downhiller, Rahlves, 34, planned to leave racing behind and try big-mountain freeskiing—those helicopter adventures to the steeps of Alaska that supply each year's new crop of ski porn. "It's nice not dealing so much with edges," he explains of the switch from racecourses to powder. "Nice not having to try to hang on to the ice all the time."

It's a transition no major racer has nailed, though. Sure, other U.S. Ski Team members have morphed into great freeskiers. Big-mountain heroes Jeremy Nobis and Wendy Fisher each raced at one time for the Stars and Stripes. But they all found their new mojo early. None enjoyed Rahlves's success or longevity on the World Cup circuit.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the chopper: The International Olympic Committee, to everyone's surprise, added skiercross to the 2010 Winter Games as a full medal sport. Then came the 2007 launch of the Honda Ski Tour—a well-funded, heavily promoted four-event series billed as "the Loudest Show on Snow." The Ski Tour combines skiercross with terrain-park competitions, surrounds it all with fashion shows and rock concerts, and multi-platforms the bejesus out of its imagery. Rahlves hasn't abandoned his big-mountain plans. Now, though, between waiting for weather windows in Alaska, he's found another way to stay in the spotlight and on sponsors' payrolls. "Skiing doesn't pay nearly as well as during my World Cup career," says Rahlves. "But the only sponsors I lost after leaving the U.S. Ski Team are 24 Hour Fitness and Oroweat bread. My Austrian sponsors, Red Bull and Atomic Skis, especially love the new exposure I give them."

This explains his lack of pants. Squaw Valley was hosting the final stop of the 2007 Ski Tour, and Rahlves was enduring a made-for-TV costume change. After first modeling his old skintight World Cup downhill wear, he stripped and put on skiercross apparel: same helmet and goggles but with softer boots, back and knee pads, baggy black pants, and a lime-green miracle-fabric windbreaker with RAHLVES embroidered on the back. The purpose of all this haberdashery, the racer deadpans, was "showing schoolkids how to get dressed."

The purpose might also have been to lift his Q rating higher than ever. While Rahlves hopes to shoot this winter with Matchstick Productions—the biggest seller of freeskiing DVDs—the Ski Tour, which has since acquired the Jeep King of the Mountain tour, will expand in 2008 under a new name, 48Straight, and will try to ride the buildup toward 2010, when America will renew its quadrennial love for winter sports, and skiers will become media "gets." If Rahlves can polish his 'cross skills a bit more—that is, if he can stop crashing in the finals—his could be the face you see on late-night TV. The reinvented stud whose post-skiing career ... is a skiing career.