AT Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, today, Alberto Tomba, two days short of his 30th birthday, makes his seasonal debut. It is the third World Cup slalom event of the current campaign, but the first in which Tomba, injured at his Passeo di Tonale training camp in a fall on October 28th, will ski.
The season has started quietly. It is as if it has been waiting for him. Tomba is not the strong, silent type. As iron filings find a magnet, so Tomba will land in the spotlight. Only once, in a career that already spans It seasons, has the poor little rich boy been overshadowed.
That was in the Lillehammer Olympics two years ago, when Tonya Harding (born way across the tracks from Tomb a) had a skating showdown with Nancy Kerrigan. Even Tomba could not upstage that. By then, the Italian had already had two Olympics to himself.
Drafted into the national squad at just 16 (the suggestion was that the influence of his father, a millionaire textile importer, played a part), he was guided towards his first Olympic tilt by Italy's most successful World Cup skier, Gustav Thoeni.
In Calgary, with his style modified by Thoeni's coaching, but his confidence apparently needing no such tutoring, Tomba won both the slalom and giant slalom disciplines, suggesting mid-competition that he would relay the news of the difficult patches back to his opponents to help them out. That went down well.
Four years later, in Albertville, Tomba again won the giant slalom crown to become the first alpine skier in Olympic history to retain a title, but in the race he lost, the slalom, he established a trademark. So far adrift after the first run, the Italian was discounted from medal calculations. Yet his second descent on the Les Menuires slopes was bewilderingly fast and took him to within 0.28 seconds of the gold medallist, Norway's Finn Christian Jagge.
In Lillehammer, he effected the same trick; his second run easily the day's fastest and 1.79 seconds quicker than Austria's Thomas Stangassinger. A fourth gold eluded him, though. His first run had placed him a pedestrian 12th and the Austrian won the gold.
In 1995, Tomba won the overall World Cup title by 375 points, despite competing in only two of the four events - `La Bomba' will not ski the Super G or downhill disciplines - and last February completed the nap hand when he won, at long last, his first world titles, two, as it happened, in Spain.
Until last year, Tom ha had a day job as a sergeant in the cambinieri. This year, he left the force. It may have had something to do with the vengeance he took on a photographer, Aldo Martinuzzi. On the victory podium at Alta Badia, in March, Tomba dropped first a bottle of champagne on the photographer's head, then threw his third-place glass trophy at the freelance.
Martinuzzi's crime had been to take naked pictures of Tomba in the sauna. The pictures, taken in 1988, were not published until this year.
Tomba claimed he had only been throwing the trophy "to his sister" and Italy's ultimate sporting hero talked about not wanting to go on. Yet he does, patched up for the Madonna race, and committing himself to the World Championships in Sestrieres in February.
He is talking of staying on until the Winter Games at Nagano in 14 months time. Even then, he may not be able to walk away. Earlier this year, Tomba signed a three-year contract with the US skiing venue Vail and that venue will host the 1999 World Championships.
Money, he has never been short of. No, what Tomba is most likely to fret about is that nobody will bother to take naked pictures of him when he retires and that may be almost too much to bear.
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