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Yet even the Italian matinee idol could not, in the slalom, eclipse the reigning country of the Games, Norway. The Norwegians, who won not a single gold in 1988 at Calgary, raced away with nine this time. At snowbound events, scores of Norwegians sang, waved flags and formed rings around their winners, while King Harald V looked on from the stands. Norwegians in the Olympic Village dined on smoked salmon and fullkornbroed from home, slept on wooden laths and consulted oracular weather forecasters in Oslo for amazingly accurate predictions of snow. They also seemed entirely human. When CBS tried to find some way to dramatize three-gold winner Vegard Ulvang, it dubbed him "the Terminator." Then the champion obligingly stood before the cameras and intoned, "Hasta la vista, baby!"
In the aesthetic section of the Games, the lingering memory will be that of Kristi Yamaguchi's iron-tipped delicacy as she sang without words across the ice. Meanwhile, her main rival, Midori Ito, followed the long line of favorites whose dreams of gold were defeated by expectation. Ito eventually won a silver, though three-time world champion figure skater Kurt Browning came away without any medal. Franz Heinzer and other skiing top guns were confounded by the course at Val d'Isere, and American speed skater Dan Jansen's shoulders were too frail for the weight of a country's hopes.
But while half the world was following the sometime tragedy of Ito, the operatic comedy of Tomba and the pastoral romance of the Norwegians, there were a hundred other stories in the Games, most of them like that of Teruel. In his event, the giant slalom, there were skiers from India, Swaziland and Costa Rica; from Bolivia, Brazil and Lebanon; three Taiwanese who had practiced on grass and one of three Moroccans with the name of Brahim. In all, skiers from 47 countries, many of which never see snow, came down. Runners-up in the event outnumbered medalists 132 to 3.
The great pleasure of the Games is that mortals and immortals converge here -- Tomba and Teruel stand in the same frame. Yamaguchi, in between talking of her prom and her sister's high school football games, confessed her excitement when she saw football superstar Herschel Walker in the village. The Irish bobsled team -- the first squad from Ireland ever in the Winter Games -- talked about the thrill of running in the same line as the champions 31 places ahead of them. The Olympics lifts all even as it levels all.
For athletes such as Teruel, however, the road to the Games is lined not with waving flags but with warning signs. "When I said I wanted to go to the Games, the dean at my school suggested I see a psychiatrist," he says. "My father said I was a Don Quixote." Winners, he finds, get to play by different rules. "Tomba's a bad boy," he says wistfully, "but no one's going to tell him to give up skiing and get a real job."