KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia —

There was no way to ask the question without sounding slightly creepy, but downhill skier Jan Hudec kindly answered it with cheerful Canadian candor. “Yes, I have an enormous butt,” he said.

He also has, now that we are being frank about it, enormous thighs. How enormous are his butt and his thighs? It is so hard for him to find jeans that can contain their bulk, he said, that when he does find them, he hangs on to them for as long as he possibly can.

“When they rip, I drive them across town and my mother sews them for me,” said Hudec, who, it is still worth noting, is 32 years old. Ripped jeans are apparently a common phenomenon for downhill skiers, much as it is routine for the Incredible Hulk to turn green and burst out of his clothes in fits of anger.

Different sports attract, and also shape, different physiques. Whereas swimmers have broad shoulders, figure skaters are strong yet willowy and curlers can get away with being kind of schlumpy, downhill skiers — and also speedskaters and hockey players — tend to have unusually well-built legs and rear ends, products of their perpetual crouch and also of lifetimes of leg presses and squats.

Watching the skiers come off the slopes after their runs here at the Winter Games is to see a parade of superconditioned lower bodies whose every powerful contour ripples graphically underneath what are essentially very expensive tights.

“Yes, we have derrières,” said Chemmy Alcott, a British skier. “We’ve got booties. I’ve spent 28 years squatting in that squat position, and I’m really proud of it. It would be a lot easier for me to be a skinny normal person. I have to work really hard to get this muscle.”

Skiers say that they need big legs and rears to get them down the slopes as quickly and forcefully as possible.

“This is where we get our power from,” said the U.S. skier Travis Ganong, who was fifth in the men’s downhill Sunday. “When you’re skiing 3 miles at 3,000 vertical feet over bumps and going off jumps, you need a solid platform. Otherwise — we call it stumping out — your lactic acid builds up too much and you have no energy left. You just collapse.”

Some downhill racers say they perform better when they are on the heavy side. “When you have more weight, you have the control to go faster and to push yourself downhill,” said Dominik Paris of Italy. “Also, in the flat you have the wind coming to you, so when you weigh more you have the power to push against it.”

That argument certainly applies to traditional downhill courses. But the ones in Sochi are shaping up to be more complicated, skiers say, involving varied terrains, jumps and turns, and requiring agility and nimbleness as much as power.

Under its new conditioning coach, a tough Austrian taskmaster named Tony Beretzki, the U.S. men’s team has a souped-up training regimen that focuses on full-body conditioning, with two endurance workouts a day, instead of emphasizing discrete body parts.

Beretzki said that size was less important than efficiency. His regimen focuses on what he calls intracoordination, where muscles work together, with an emphasis on balance, core work and strength.

He said modern downhill courses presented new challenges to traditional skiers. “The courses like the kind we see at Sochi — they have become more and more bumpy and icy and turny, with a lot of jumps and directional moves, and therefore it’s not only a question of being huge and heavy to hammer down fast,” he said. “Of course if you go down with a higher mass you can accelerate faster, but that’s not the only part of skiing downhill,” he said. “You can be a heavyweight champion, but if your endurance isn’t good enough, it’s useless.”

Meanwhile, Hudec, who said he was typically reduced to rummaging through racks of weird-size jeans to find decent pairs, is hardly the only downhill skier who faces pants-buying challenges.

“It’s a huge struggle for ski racers, finding a pair of jeans that fit right,” Ganong said. Either they fit around the thighs and hang off the waist, or they fit around the waist but cannot contain the skiers’ massive legs.

“We tend to tear the crotches in our jeans quite a bit,” U.S. racer Steven Nyman said. The introduction of leggings-style and elasticated jeans has been a godsend. “We have to buy stretchy jeans,” he said.

Work clothes are another matter. Some skiers say that while skintight pants would not necessarily have been their first choice as a job uniform — “I wouldn’t say I’m into it, but it’s our sport,” Ganong said — they were proud of their conditioning.

“I got a big butt, but I’m not self-conscious,” Nyman said. “Our bodies are our bodies,” Nyman said.