Tamara McKinney - A Family Affair

Skiing runs in McKinney's family. Her mother, Frances, worked as a ski instructor in the Lake Tahoe area when McKinney was a child. McKinney, the youngest of Frances's seven children, was often left in the lift shack in the care of the lift operators and of her brothers and sisters while her mother taught. "I had skis on my feet before I could walk," McKinney told Deirdre Donahue of People Weekly. "My family strapped them on and toddled me around."

Three of McKinney's siblings skied on the U.S. ski team before she did, including her brothers Steve and McLane. Steve, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1990, was the first man to go faster than 200 kilometers per hour on skis, and he held the world speed-skiing record seven times. Sister Sheila McKinney first made the national team when she was 12 and skied in her first international race at 13. Her competitive skiing career ended at age 18, when she crashed into a pole during a World Cup downhill race at Heavenly Valley, Nevada, in 1977. She spent weeks in a coma, and although she did eventually recover, she did not return to skiing.

Skiing was not the only sport practiced by the family. McKinney's father, Rigan, owned and operated the Stony Point horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and was a championship-winning jockey in steeplechase before he died following a stroke in the mid-1980s. McKinney herself was an accomplished rider as a child. Her sister Laura now owns Stony Point, and McKinney and her daughter Francesca often return there for visits.