Michael Teruel slips into view with a tiny Canon Sure Shot in his hands. He stops three young Moroccan skiers, waving flags, and asks if they'll pose for a picture with him. Athletes are role models, he tells a passerby, and should speak out more about the environment, the nuclear threat, the depletion of our energy sources. Last night, he goes on excitedly, he not only went to an ice- hockey game but even got two pretty Swiss girls to autograph his ticket! Teruel, a Philippine-American, seems like any other voluble, idealistic 22- year-old student with braces on his teeth and a hundred dreams at home. He is also the entire Philippine Olympics team in the 1992 Winter Games.
Teruel, of course, is as integral a part of the Olympics as his hero and the hero of the Albertville Games, Alberto Tomba. But no one asks the student from New York State what he ate for breakfast, and the difference between 71st and 72nd does not register on many TV screens. Teruel is, in his way, an embodiment of the little man's Games. The little man reads his results not in the newspapers but in other people's eyes, and he hears applause mostly when alone.
Like many of the people in the little man's Games, Teruel is as much a fan as a participant, enjoying a front-seat view of the lions of a sport he took up 20 years ago. One day, he says happily, he found himself at breakfast next to downhill champion Patrick Ortlieb. Downhill combined winner Josef Polig shared an elevator with him the day before the Italian won his gold. Teruel dreams of meeting Jean-Claude Killy or even just wearing clothes from the "Killy Sport" store in Val d'Isere.
But his ultimate role model, both on and off the slopes, is Tomba. "He's so energizing," says the Philippine team. "Every time he races, I know he's going to win or fall. Romantic to the end!" At one point, Teruel pointed out to Tomba that they were wearing the same kind of gloves, and Tomba offered to trade. But the banter never got to barter, and Teruel did not obtain a relic from his hero. "I think he didn't know what to make of me," Teruel says cheerfully.
All the world knows what to make of Tomba, not least because Tomba has told us what he makes of Tomba. He came to "Alberto-ville," he expounded, on a training program even more attractive than Jane Fonda's (pasta and sleep and plenty of female company); he predicted success, and for a while he transcended his predictions. By the time he accelerated through the final five gates of his second run in the giant slalom to ease past archrival Marc Girardelli and became the first Olympian skier to defend a championship, Tomba had left his signature in capital letters on the Games. Afterward, unshaven, in a baseball cap, with balloons around his neck, making comments about his prowess that his interpreter decided not to translate, "La Bomba" all but ensured a transition from the small screen to the big.