Simply taking to the skeleton track has Zach Lund feeling like a winner

Zach Lund has grown. His hair has not. The two are related.

This should be Lund’s second Olympics as a member of the U.S. skeleton team. Instead, he’s a rookie with a lot to prove.

Four years ago, when he was at the top of his game -- ranked No. 1 in the world -- he was banned from the Turin Games for using finasteride, a drug that fights baldness but also was thought to be a steroid-masking agent. Its use was legal until 2005, then banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and Lund insisted he never knew about the switch.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Lund wasn’t trying to cheat, but it suspended him for a year for his oversight. Finasteride was removed from the list of illegal substances last year.

Stripped of his World Cup silver medal, Lund checked out of the athletes’ village in Turin and sat at home as Eric Bernotas, his teammate then and now, slid to a sixth-place finish.

Lund earned the World Cup overall title the year his ban ended, winning four of eight races, “but I had a chip on my shoulder,” he says.

His sliding suffered as he moped around. He sat out the 2007-08 season. A good friend told him to get over it.

Now Lund is bald and back, perhaps the best shot for a U.S. medal in the event he loves again. His rivals include overall World Cup winner Martins Dukurs of Latvia, world No. 2 Frank Rommel of Germany and Canada’s Jon Montgomery.

“2006 allowed me to grow,” says Lund, 30. “I’m here for a medal, but I feel like I’ve already won.”

Like Lund, Noelle Pikus-Pace watched the Turin Games from the sidelines.

“Going into 2006, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to get that gold,” says Pikus-Pace, the World Cup overall champion and silver medalist in the 2005 world championships.

But three months before the Winter Games, she was injured in a freak track accident that shattered her right leg. A bobsled did not stop and plowed into Pikus-Pace and a teammate standing along the outrun. With a titanium rod in her leg, she tried to accumulate enough World Cup points to qualify for the Olympics, “but I ran out of time,” she says.

Pikus-Pace, 27, known for dying her hair on whim or superstition, will race with blond tresses streaked in red, white and blue.

Standing in her way: Germany’s Marion Trott, the world champion, and her teammate Anja Huber, who has four World Cup wins this season. Canadian Mellisa Hollingsworth, the Turin bronze medalist and this season’s overall World Cup winner, knows this track better than any other woman. Britain’s Shelley Rudman is trying to upgrade her 2006 silver medal.

Pikus-Pace isn’t worried.

“I know that on any given day, my best could beat the rest of the world,” she says.