After collecting the silver medal in the individual nordic combined event (two jumps, a 15-kilometer race) at the 2007 World Championships March 3 in Sapporo, Japan, Demong won the individual event less than a week later at the Lahti Ski Games in Finland, one of the top competitions every season.

“That other one’s always bugged me a little,” Demong said after that March 9 World Cup triumph. “I’m glad I won but I wish everyone had been there. Everyone was here for this one, so it’s pretty tasty. This is a real win.”

In 2002, in the lead-up to the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Demong won a nordic combined World Cup event in Liberec, Czech Republic. The only problem was that, yes, they held an event, and, yes, he won, but there was a protest from the German and Finnish teams, claiming jumping conditions were unsafe. They pulled their athletes, who are some of the best in combined, from the cross-country race.

So, Demong --a native of Vermontville, N.Y., near Lake Placid in the Adirondacks --was pleased to have won, but mentally he considered it a victory with an asterisk. A hollow victory. Maybe it’s still hollow, but he’s got a real win now and it’s one reason he’s looking toward becoming a four-time Olympian in Vancouver in 2010.

Perhaps the springboard was what might have been the darkest time of his career, what might have curtailed his promising career.

In summer 2002, after competing in his second Olympic Games, Demong fractured his skull diving into what turned out to be an empty swimming pool at the team’s hotel in Germany after a Summer Grand Prix event. He was sidelined for the winter –no ski jumping--but doctors agreed he would be okay cross-country skiing. So he worked on his stamina and his skiing skills and figured he’d pick up jumping again--always his strong event until the mishap--when he was cleared.

Eventually, however, Demong’s cross-country got stronger. The jumping was good, but no longer great. Nordic combined is a mix of the two sports and sometimes, when one’s off, the other can carry an athlete.

Demong missed the 2003 World Championships and World Cup season. He stayed in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and took some classes at Colorado Mountain College. He also spent some time slinging a hammer, working as a carpenter. He skied in a few cross-country races, most notably the fabled 52K American Birkebeiner in Wisconsin, the biggest race, with 7,000 entries, in North America. He placed was a respectable 14th (certainly the highest placed nordic combined skier).

What Demong really missed was simply competing. The mishap, he said, “may have been the best thing to happen to me because it kept me out for a year and that really made me hungry to get back to competing. If I hadn’t had the year off, I might have burned out on the World Cup and, well, who knows? But it gave me time to catch my breath and re-fired my love of skiing.”

Demong, his coaches will tell you, is a bone-deep competitor. In 1998 at Nagano, Japan, when he was racing in his first Olympic Games at 17 years old, coaches told him to ski the first 5-kilometer loop in the 15K final stage of the competition and pull over; he didn’t have a lot of distance experience and they were concerned he might get overwhelmed at dropping back through the pack as the race went.

Demong skied the loop and as coaches readied for him to stop, he kept on motoring and finished 34th. “He went right by us--just said, ‘I’m feeling fine’ and kept on going,” said Coach Tom Steitz.

Demong’s rationale? “I’m healthy, it’s the Olympics and I can ski 15K’s. What’s the big deal?”

Fast-forward to the 2007 season. Demong’s cross-country skiing is the best of his career. His jumping is a little ragged, but with cross-country as his trump card, he kept punching his way into the top 10. He was among the five fastest in six of the nine events he entered, and he was sixth- and seventh-fastest in the other two.

“Billy’s been on fire in cross-country all year. And it’s all because of the coaching; that’s really the key,” Coach Lasse Ottesen laughed. “Seriously, though, I think that medal from Worlds could make him that much tougher now. It shows he wasn’t just a one-time-lucky guy in Liberec. He is that good and he knows it and, really, the others know it, too. I don’t see any reason we won’t see Billy winning more comps. He has that kind of talent and determination.”

Demong, born in Saranac Lake, N.Y. in 1980--not far from Lake Placid, where the 1980 Olympic Games had just closed, got an early start on skiing. Hi father, Leo, is an independent environmental biologist and had his son on skis in the woods with him when he was 3 years old; He started racing in the Bill Koch Ski league at 5 years old. Then he learned about ski jumping from Larry Stone, the longtime development coach in Lake Placid. Dad got him skiing, “Stoney” introduced him to jumping, and Demong made his own connection between the two and lurched into nordic combined.

Cross-country has become a source of pride for Demong. “It’s so much fun to move through the pack, picking off someone here, someone there and keep moving forward,” he said.

It dovetails nicely with his own philosophy: keep moving forward. “I haven’t thought at all about retirement,” Demong said. “As long as I’ve been improving every year, I’ve kept going. I plan on skiing in Vancouver.”

If  he does that, Demong will climb onto a different podium. Although combined has been around since the first Winter Games in 1924, only two other Americans have competed in four Olympic Games--Todd Lodwick, who retired a year ago, and Mike Devecka, who retired after reaching his fourth at Lake Placid in 1980.