Conditional sampling techniques are utilized to investigate the relation between the wall skin-friction and stream wise velocity fluctuations in a turbulent boundary layer. Conditionally averaged results using a peak detection and the VITA (variable-interval time-averaging) technique show that a high skin friction is associated with high frequency components of the wall skin-friction fluctuations. The conditionally averaged wall skin-friction fluctuations obtained by using the VITA technique have a positively-skewed characteristics compared with the conditionally averaged stream wise velocity fluctuations. It is confirmed that there exists a phase shift between the wall skin-friction and stream wise velocity fluctuations, which was also found from the long-time averaged space-time correlations. The amount of phase shift between the wall skin-friction and stream wise velocity fluctuations is the same as that from the long-time averaged space-time correlations and does not change despite the variation of the detection threshold.