"It was a very quiet voice, and it was just, 'Daddy, Hi it's Laura. I made the team,'" her father, Jesse, recalled. "It was just like that. It was that quiet, from this 5-foot, 100-pound kid. It was probably a very emotional three to five seconds because her voice sounded as though, 'Dad, I didn't make the team.' But she was so composed. It had its own-I don't know-moment is the only way I can put it."

Spector will be the youngest American woman vying in the biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing with target shooting. She is also one of five athletes measuring in at 5-feet tall-the shortest members of the 2010 U.S. Olympic team.

A student of genetics and Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, Spector is among a handful of American Jewish Olympians headed to Vancouver for the 21st Winter Olympics.

Chicago native Ben Agosto, a 2006 Olympic silver medalist, will return to compete in the ice-dancing pairs. Steve Mesler, a bobsledder from Buffalo, N.Y., will be competing in his third Olympics.

Spector grew up on a farm in Lenox where her family keeps llamas, alpacas, goats, horses, sheep, turkeys and chickens. She does her academic work during the spring and summer to free up the fall and winter for training and competition.

In high school she would wake before the sun to make tracks on her skis in a field behind the family home. Her parents describe her as unusually precocious and passionate.

"She's not a frivolous kid," said Spector's mother, Patty, herself a national champion in marathon canoe racing. "Even when she's on the road and traveling, she reads books that most people her age would never go near or pick up. She just finished 'The Gulag Archipelago.'

From a young age, her parents said, Spector was adept at meeting challenges.

When she became a bat mitzvah at the Conservative Congregation Knesset Israel Synagogue in nearby Pittsfield, where her family has been members for 30 years, Spector conducted the entire Shabbat service, in keeping with the synagogue's tradition of lay-led services. Spector also attended the synagogue's Hebrew school.

"They do everything," Jesse said. "They don't just get up there and do a haftarah and say a few words. She just was-I guess like everything else she's done-a very exceptional kid."

Though generally considered a minor sport by Americans, biathlon is wildly popular in Europe and is said to be the continent's top-rated televised winter sport. Patty Spector compares it to NASCAR racing in the United States.

The Spectors have watched their daughter perform in stadiums packed with thousands of fans in Europe and will be in Vancouver for most of the Games to cheer on Laura and the other American athletes.

"What Jewish mother would not go see their daughter?" Patty said.