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                                                                                1992 WINTER OLYMPICS, Page 44

Even In Alberto-Ville, Everyman Lives


The Winter Games close with a handful of global champions and a
host of local happy heroes

By PICO IYER/VAL D'ISERE


    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 Girar delli 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.

    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."

    Like many of the athletes from the smaller countries,
Teruel is painfully aware that his Olympic dream might be an
easy target for journalist jokes and nationalist resentments.
Born to Filipino parents in Buffalo, New York, he visited the
Philippines only once in his first 20 years, does not really
speak Tagalog and freely admits, "If I had grown up in the
Philippines, I probably wouldn't be here." At first, he says,
"I felt a little bit guilty, like I was a fraud." He was
embarrassed that a rich doctor's son from New York State should
be representing a country where more than 30 million live in
poverty. "Here we are," he says, "feasting in a Club Med, and
there are millions of people starving."

    But competing in the Olympics, for Teruel, is a chance to
combat the apathy he sees all around him and to make his small
voice heard above the fray. "You can't have a fair society," he
says, "but what else have you got to go for? The people who
really could do something don't feel like they can. And the
people who are really dangerous do everything."

    Two days later, exactly 100 places behind Tomba, Teruel
takes off. As he glides down the course, the announcer welcomes
"our first Philip pinian [sic] racer" and changes his name to
something unintelligible. Thousands of Italians waved flags for
Tomba; when Teruel completes his run, he looks around for cheers
and finds none. One French volunteer gives him a thumbs-up sign
and two others clap. Spectators in the stands by now are as rare
as daisies in the snow. The photographers have gone off for
lunch, and the TV crews are preparing their Tomba stories.
Still, the man now in 85th place hopes there will be more
watchers for his second run, if only to see Tomba come out to
collect a bouquet. If Alberto wins today," he offers gamely, "I
win too." Besides, he has had a chance to see his hero in
action. "The legend really fits," he says, after sideslipping
down the slope. "Tomba's almost spiritual, he's so relaxed."

    As Teruel begins his second run with the sun setting fast
behind the mountains, the public-address system, which had been
shouting "Absolutely superb! Incredible!" as other skiers took
the slope, simply announces, "Michael Teruel, from Buffalo, in
the Philippines." But Teruel, who finishes 71st -- 36 places
higher than where he started -- is exultant. "I can't wait to
go back to see the dean," he says. His friends won't see him on
TV, he says, but he feels something has been achieved. Moreover,
he adamantly opposes any official ruling that would limit the
number of competitors and so put a curb on the little man's
Games. Then the Philippine Olympic Committee ("my mom and dad")
comes up to present him with two bags of M&M's.

    A little later, at a Tomba press conference, the second --
and most successful -- Filipino athlete in Winter Games history
giggles with unstoppable delight at everything the champion
says. Teruel is thinking now, he says, of trying for the Summer
Games. "I know it's unrealistic," he adds with a sheepish
smile, "but when something's unrealistic, I really go for it."

    Teruel sounds almost like another young dreamer from
abroad who came here 200 years ago. When William Wordsworth
first visited France, the high point of his trip, he hoped,
would be walking across the Alps. But one day a peasant informed
him the climax was behind him; he had already crossed them.
Stunned, the young poet considered himself lost. Then, rallying,
he recalled that his true destiny lay with "hope that can never
die/ Effort and expectation and desire/ and something evermore
about to be." That is the kind of pep talk Teruel, if not Tomba,
is giving himself even now.