I'm here at the Loco Lizard in Park City, Utah, to hang with the U.S. Ski Team, freestyle aerials division, at a Sweet 17 birthday dinner for Jana Lindsey, one of the development team members. I'm grateful for a weekend in the mountains, away from the grief and devastation. But as I ask the potential Olympians about terrorist attacks and tightened security in Salt Lake City, I feel like I'm foisting my New York City paranoia upon them, my nightmare visions seeping into the Park City air like a persistent cloud of fiberglass and asbestos.

But people here have their fears -- fears that remain largely unspoken, almost necessarily so. There are only five months until the Winter Olympics, and thoughts of the Games being postponed, canceled or under attack can't be entertained. Especially not with the winter season of competition only a month or so away.

Of course, they don't want to shut out the outside world entirely. They couldn't if they wanted to. Several aerialists sit at the bar, as President Bush looks down upon them from a couple screens. Emily Cook, one of our best medal hopes for women's aerials, cocks her head, trying to hear above the beer-bottle clinks and low evening banter. Dubya's repetitive rhetoric leaves her restless. "I wish he would just come out and say, 'We are at war,'" she says. During these highly stressful days, the simpler the statement, no matter how unsettling that statement is, the better.

See, Emily lost a family member on September 11. The wife of her mom's first cousin, whom she thinks of as her aunt, was on one of the fateful flights. So Emily plans to head home to her aunt's funeral on Monday, the day after training camp ends.

I tell her airport security doesn't seem to have changed much. Even at La Guardia, where I flew from at 6 a.m. Thursday morning, they've returned to random bag checks, instead of mandatory hand searches. Despite the presence of cops and the national guard, I tell Emily, I found little comfort in the relative ease with which I fly through the checkpoint.

"I know," says Cook. "My roommate, Vanessa, is a flight attendant, and she refused to go to work, because she didn't see drastic changes in security. I'd worry about flying, but I'm going to have to do it at some point soon anyway. And what's happening now only makes me want to train harder."

Yes, these Olympians have their fears. But they know they represent America. So they swallow their fears of flying. They stuff their concerns about bomb threats at their training facilities. And they move on with their lives in the only way they know how.

E-mail Anne Marie Cruz at anne.marie.cruz@espnmag.com.