VANCOUVER - It is different now, the attention and the crowd and all of those questions that not so long ago seemed hypothetical, suddenly pretty darned real.

For the past year, Canada's men's alpine ski team - "The Canadian Cowboys" they branded themselves, before most Canadians had a clue who they were - have competed on the World Cup circuit with intimations of the coming Olympic Games playing like discrete background music.

No denying it was there, but months away, weeks away, with many mountains to climb and conquer in the interim.

Then suddenly they get off a plane, and photographers are waiting at the airport, they are hustled off to a press conference, with a full house in attendance, and the same old queries don't sound the same at all: How does it feel to be competing in an Olympics at home? What do you think it would be like to be the first Canadian athlete to win a gold medal in Canada? Are you burdened by the weight of a country's hopes and dreams and expectations? Are you trying harder, are you doing anything differently, given all that's at stake?

A few weeks back, sitting at a hotel bar in Switzerland, Manuel Osborne-Paradis, in the midst of the greatest season of his skiing life, which has transformed him into Canada's Olympic alpine poster boy, was pretty forthright on that last subject.

"It's not like the Olympics needs any more focus than (World Cup) races," he said. "I don't need to focus harder, because if I need to do that, why wouldn't I do that for these races? A lot of people are asking if I'm doing anything differently to prepare for the Olympics. Why would I do anything differently? It makes no sense, because if I could do something differently to be better, why the hell wouldn't I do it already? That's just a crazy question - like why aren't you resting up for the Olympics. Do you take a week off to get ready for your vacation? No you keep that fire lit underneath you and your drive along. The bottom line is if you're ready and your body is intact when you get to the Olympics, then you have a chance."

But with the first training run scheduled for Tuesday morning, with the men's downhill scheduled to open the Olympic competitions on Saturday (given that it's Whistler, one always has to append "weather permitting". As Osborne-Paradis said, "If you put a mountain beside an ocean in a rain forest, you're going to get a lot of different conditions.") the Cowboys couldn't help but understand that the big moment is indeed at hand.

Circumstances have diminished their numbers: John Kucera, who would have been guaranteed one of the four starting spots in the downhill, and Francois Bourque, who would have been in the mix, suffered season-ending injuries. So now in the first race, it's down to Osborne-Paradis, his housemate Robbie Dixon, who also grew up skiing Whistler, and who has fully recovered from a concussion suffered in early January, Jan Hudec, who babied himself through the season to protect his oft-injured knees (the other guys took to calling him "bubble boy") hoping that he could lay it on the line and take the necessary risks for one great run, and Erik Guay, who has had a puzzling, disappointing year, but who of late has been rounding into form.

"Once you have your skis on your feet, it's the same as any other race," Guay said, after acknowledging that in everything leading up to then, it's going to be fundamentally different.

It's not just Canada's team that has a few asterisks attached. Didier Cuche of Switzerland, the World Cup downhill leader, will be competing here with a metal plate holding together his broken thumb, and Austria's Michael Walchhofer, one of the favourites, is banged up from a fall in the last World Cup downhill in Kitzbuhel. Start positions, weather conditions, will play a big part on race day. And then, of course, there is the fact that Canada has tried to exploit its home field, much to the annoyance of some of the traditional ski powers.

An Austrian journalist asked Osborne-Paradis Monday about that advantage - "unfair" was implied - and for a moment, even the gravity and formality of the Olympics couldn't hold the real Manny back.

"I think," he said, "that I've got a big advantage because I'm skiing really fast right now."

That's the attitude that got him here, and that's the attitude he and his teammates are going to need, especially as that music grows loud.