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"The training. The guts. The hat hair! These women&amp;amp;#8212;part of a record wave of female Olympians descending on Sochi, Russia, this month&amp;amp;#8212;will change the way you go after your dreams. Skier Mikaela Shiffrin is expected to dominate the Games. Oh&amp;amp;#8212;and she&amp;#x27;s just 18. Mikaela Shiffrin doesn&amp;#x27;t remember a time in her life when she wasn&amp;#x27;t skiing, and no wonder: She started &amp;quot;racing&amp;quot; on plastic skis in her driveway at age two. But three years ago, after tenth-grade math class, she got a call that changed everything. &amp;quot;All I heard was &amp;#x27;World Cup&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;you&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;in a week,&amp;#x27; &amp;quot; she remembers. &amp;quot;I was frozen for a good 30 seconds.&amp;quot; At 15, Shiffrin had been invited to join the professional World Cup ski-racing circuit. Within five days she was on a plane to the Czech Republic to compete; within two years she had snagged her first world championship slalom title, the youngest American in history to nail that prize, and had become the World Cup slalom champion, the first American woman in nearly 30 years to do so. Meteoric rise? You bet. But Shiffrin&amp;#x27;s not slowing down. In November she beat her closest competitor by more than a second&amp;amp;#8212;an eternity in her fast-paced sport. The victory sent a clear message: Sochi will be all about Shiffrin. Interestingly, it&amp;#x27;s the Vail, Colorado, native&amp;#x27;s unorthodox training that gives her the edge. For years Shiffrin&amp;#x27;s coach actually held her back from some of the races her peers were competing in, having her spend the time practicing instead. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#x27;re racing, you get two runs in a day,&amp;quot; Shiffrin explains. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#x27;re training, you get up to 15. Anybody can do the math. You get more mileage, and you improve more.&amp;quot; Her dominance in the sport has led to a whirlwind of media attention, including an appearance on David Letterman and coveted sponsorships by Oakley and Pantene. (What&amp;#x27;s in this busy girl&amp;#x27;s beauty bag? Waterproof mascara, a tinted lip balm, and, naturally, Pantene Touchable Volume Hairspray to ward off helmet hair.) And now commentators are comparing her to Olympic greats Lindsey Vonn and Missy Franklin. Still, Shiffrin&amp;#x27;s not worried about the hype. &amp;quot;I have a really awesome family and a great team supporting me,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So when I get in the gate, I have all the confidence in the world.&amp;quot; NEXT: Lindsey Van: Breaking Up the Boys&amp;#x27; Club &amp;amp;#187; Lindsey Van, 29, waged a fearless battle to open Olympic ski jumping to women. And now she wants her gold. Ski jumping is not for the faint of heart. The ramps are massive&amp;amp;#8212;up to 26 stories high&amp;amp;#8212;and skiers barrel down them at 60 miles an hour, finally lifting off and flying more than a football field&amp;#x27;s length before touching back down to earth. Lindsey Van was hooked when she was seven. It happened when, as a junior ski racer, Van (not to be confused with Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn) watched towering jumps being built on her home mountain in Park City, Utah, as part of a bid to host the 1998 Games. After one of her first lessons, she announced to her mom and dad, &amp;quot;This is what I want to do. I want to go to the Olympics.&amp;quot; There was one problem: Only male jumpers could compete in the Games. Why? &amp;quot;We&amp;#x27;ve never gotten a good answer,&amp;quot; says Van, &amp;quot;and it&amp;#x27;s always changing.&amp;quot; For years ski jumping had been deemed too dangerous for women&amp;amp;#8212;athletic officials even theorized that the sport would harm the uterus and cause infertility. (No one seemed concerned about sperm count, and men&amp;#x27;s baby-making organs are on the outside of their body, but never mind.) Then others argued that women&amp;#x27;s ski jumping wasn&amp;#x27;t established enough yet as a sport to be included. But Van would not give up. After years of speaking out about the International Olympic Committee&amp;#x27;s decision to exclude the sport for women in the Games, she helped spearhead a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee in 2008. She ruffled feathers, but in April 2011, after more than five years of &amp;quot;just not going away,&amp;quot; as she puts it, Van and her teammates got good news: Women&amp;#x27;s ski jumping would debut at the Sochi Olympics. And while this political drama unfolded, Van had been busy racking up victories. In 2009, the first year women jumpers were allowed to compete in the world championships, Van made history by winning the gold, the first American ever&amp;amp;#8212;male or female&amp;amp;#8212;to do so in her sport. She now has 15 U.S. national championships and nine international wins. So how will Sochi feel? Naturally, Van hopes to bring home a gold, but she says having the chance to experience the Olympics&amp;amp;#8212;to walk in the opening ceremonies, to be allowed to compete, and to show the world what women can do&amp;amp;#8212;will mean more than any medal. &amp;quot;Fighting for women&amp;#x27;s ski jumping wasn&amp;#x27;t something I set out to do,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I wanted to create opportunities, not just for me but for the next generation of women. Hopefully, I&amp;#x27;ll leave the sport better off than I found it.&amp;quot; NEXT: Amy Purdy: Courage&amp;amp;#8212;and Two New Legs &amp;amp;#187; After a double amputation, all Amy Purdy wanted was to get back to snowboarding. Everyone said it couldn&amp;#x27;t be done. They didn&amp;#x27;t know Amy. Amy Purdy fell in love with snowboarding in high school. &amp;quot;I absolutely found myself through it,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It wasn&amp;#x27;t just something I did; it became who I was.&amp;quot; But at 19, she contracted bacterial meningitis, her symptoms so severe she spiraled into a coma. Doctors put her on life support and believed she had less than a 2 percent chance of survival; by the time she did recover, after two and a half months in the hospital, she&amp;#x27;d lost her kidneys, her spleen, the hearing in her left ear&amp;amp;#8212;and both of her legs below the knee. Her biggest question: Could she board again? &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#x27;t want my snowboarding to be cut short,&amp;quot; Purdy, now 34, says. &amp;quot;I was on a mission to figure out a way.&amp;quot; And she did. Seven months after leaving the hospital, Purdy tried to get back on the snow. But because no prosthetics existed for snowboarding, &amp;quot;my ankles couldn&amp;#x27;t bend; it felt nothing like before,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I asked every adaptive ski school, prosthetics shops, my doctors, if they&amp;#x27;d ever seen an amputee snowboarder before. They all said, &amp;#x27;No. You should just try to ski.&amp;#x27; I was like, &amp;#x27;No. I&amp;#x27;m a snowboarder; I&amp;#x27;m going to figure this out.&amp;#x27;&amp;quot; She set out to design her own prosthetics&amp;amp;#8212;the first pair had rusty bolts and neon-pink duct tape&amp;amp;#8212;and now she&amp;#x27;s the only double-leg-amputee snowboarder in the world competing at the Olympic level. (&amp;quot;My actual legs are a foot off the ground at all times,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So if you think about it, I&amp;#x27;m kind of floating down the mountain.&amp;quot;) She&amp;#x27;s won three World Cup gold medals in snowboard cross, become the top-ranked para-snowboarder in the U.S., and is a favorite to win gold at the Paralympic Games in Sochi. Purdy is also a motivational speaker (google her TED talk, &amp;quot;Living Beyond Limits&amp;quot;) and the cofounder of Adaptive Action Sports, a nonprofit to help youth and veterans with disabilities. (Oh, in case she looks familiar, Purdy was also a contestant on The Amazing Race in 2012 with her boyfriend, Daniel Gale.) &amp;quot;We all sometimes hit a point where you think, I can&amp;#x27;t do this anymore, I can&amp;#x27;t go any further,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But the majority of the limitations we have are ones we put on ourselves. If you can just push beyond them, you realize how much more you have in you. You realize how capable you are.&amp;quot; For more from Glamour&amp;#x27;s February issue, pick up a copy on newsstands January 14 or download the digital edition now."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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