Five of her teammates on the women’s U.S. Alpine Ski Team had already this season appeared on a World Cup podium with a top-three finish, and Bend’s Laurenne Ross was feeling left behind.

After a disappointing 26th-place finish in the super-G at the world championships on Feb. 5, Ross, 24, finally realized she was putting too much pressure on herself.

“I didn’t want to feel sad or mad or bad about skiing anymore, I just wanted to go have fun, and almost just not care,” Ross said in an interview via Skype last week from Solden, Austria, the European training base of the U.S. team. “Just kind of go down the course as fast as I could and the result doesn’t matter as long as you feel that you gave it your all.”

That approach certainly worked on March 2, when Ross finished an unexpected second in a World Cup downhill race in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, for the first World Cup podium of her career.

“When I came through the finish I certainly didn’t expect to be in second,” Ross said. “It was quite the surprise.”

Ross, who was raised in Klamath Falls and grew up skiing for the Bend-based Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation, moved to Bend two years ago.

She recalled during the interview that she was coming off a solid offseason of training — after finishing last season ranked a career-best 22nd in the world in downhill — and came into this season expecting to reach her first podium. But she struggled early on, until her change in race mentality after the world championships. Relaxing and easing the pressure off herself led to faster skiing and less “freezing up,” she explained.

“I would get on the course and then it was almost like I blacked out,” Ross said. “I would go through the finish and I would have no idea how I skied. I would have no clue what happened. I was just losing my focus. That was something that I hadn’t really dealt with because I was sort of in denial about it. I think realizing that was really my first step to becoming a better racer.”

Fresh off her second-place downhill finish, Ross this week is headed into the World Cup Finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland, coming off some of the best racing of her career.

She is expected to compete in the World Cup Finals downhill this Wednesday and in the super-G on Thursday. Ross is going into the finals with a newfound confidence from her podium performance in Garmisch.

“I just gained so much trust in myself that I actually can put myself out there, put it all on the line, and still ski really well and push myself at the same time,” she said. “I hadn’t really gotten that feeling over the past couple months. I think that’s going to help a lot, just that little bit of confidence.”

Ross is an integral part of a U.S. women’s alpine team that is coming into its own with the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, less than a year away.

The Bend resident is the fourth U.S. woman to land her first World Cup podium this season, joining teammates Stacey Cook (Mammoth Mountain, Calif.), Leanne Smith (North Conway, N.H.) and Alice McKennis (Glenwood Springs, Colo.).

The up-and-coming skiers are picking up the slack since Lindsey Vonn (Vail, Colo.), one of the best female skiers of all time, suffered a season-ending knee injury in a crash at last month’s world championships.

“It was tough and it was sad,” Ross said of Vonn’s injury. “It’s always really hard to see one of your teammates go down like that. It was difficult for all of us. But that’s something that you have to look past … that happens all the time. That’s just ski racing.”

Slovenia’s Tina Maze won the downhill race in Garmisch in which Ross finished second. That victory allowed Maze to eclipse Austrian Hermann Maier’s single-season World Cup point record and become just the third woman in World Cup history to win in all five disciplines in the same season.

“She’s skiing on a whole other level,” Ross said of Maze. “Nobody can surpass her technically. She’s just so solid and so consistent. It’s really admirable to see someone pushing the sport like that. I feel honored to have come so close to her. It makes me feel good about my skiing. I’m insanely impressed by her.”

Like Maze, Ross likes to compete in multiple alpine disciplines, and she raced this past Saturday in a World Cup giant slalom in Ofterschwang, Germany, but she did not qualify for the second run.

Ross crashed during a downhill training run in Lenzerheide on Monday, but according to a U.S. Ski Team official, she was uninjured and was scheduled to participate in today’s training run and Wednesday’s race.

Ross — who designs helmets for Shred Optics and enjoys drawing as well as playing the guitar, violin and piano — said she feels confident she will make the U.S. Olympic team next season. But it is difficult for a ski racer to look that far ahead because circumstances can change quickly in alpine ski racing.

Ross said a skier could win World Cup races one season, then not even make the Olympic team the next season. Like most U.S. Ski Team members, Ross wishes the U.S. fans and media focused the same amount of attention on World Cup skiing as they do on the Olympics.

“It’s pretty tough to only have the attention every four years (during the Olympics),” Ross said. “There’s always the chance you’ll get injured or you won’t ski as well. Not very many Americans pay attention to World Cup ski racing, and I think that’s a little bit of a bummer, especially because over here it’s so huge. All the Europeans are just obsessed with ski racing, and it’s cool to see that and to have all the fans. That’s something that I miss back home.”

However, because Garmisch is home to a U.S. Army base, many Americans were on hand to cheer for Ross as she stood on the podium last week proudly sporting a Mt. Bachelor cap.

“There was a little piece of home, having those Americans at the finish,” Ross said. “That was something special.”