THE IMMORTAL
Alberto,
We Hardly Knew Ye

Swan song, schman song: Everyone's favorite
lothario has plenty of Olympics left in him.
By Rob Story

Sadness will drench the closing ceremonies in Nagano this month. No, Lionel Richie isn't singing the finale. The globe will weep because 31-year-old Alberto Tomba is expected to hang up the Rossignols on his spectacular and highly entertaining Olympic skiing career. Sobbing loudest, perhaps, will be the media, who will lose the one slalom skier more colorful than snow. Who can forget La Bomba's explosion in Calgary in '88, when he earned two golds and an internationally televised spurning by ice maiden Katarina Witt? Fluent in the lexicon of himself, Tomba toyed with vowels and rechristened the host province "Alberto." He engaged in this viciously clever wordplay again in Albertville ("Albertoville") in '92, when he took slalom silver and GS gold. As years and girth gained on Alberto, he modified his behavior: "I used to have a wild time with three women until 5 a.m. Now I...live it up with five women until 3 a.m." This wiser, spunkier Tomba karate-kicked one pushy photographer and threw a crystal trophy at another. Police popped him for using his honorary police ID and flashing light (provided by the Bologna carabiniere) to skirt traffic jams. Despite his fondness for pasta, his otherwise dolce vita, and the excess kilos that ensued, Tomba won another silver in Lillehammer ("LilleTomba") and could repeat in Nagano. No doubt he'll skip Salt Lake in 2002. But don't expect a placid, Metamucil-hawking retirement. Tomba's the closest thing the Olympics have to a rock star. And as Kiss and Heart and countless others have proven time after time, rock stars always come back.

2006: Tomba makes a surprisingly successful return in Reykjavìk, winning the silver in the biathlon, despite killing a vacationing Brazilian businessman with an errant shot. He also provides the best gossip of the Games by persistently coming on to the new Olympic mascot — Harmony, Puffin of International Friendship — at one point presenting her with two dozen long-stemmed roses and a scented note that misspells "tail feather." Finally, Harmony responds to his repeated advances by beating the Italian senseless with a stubby, flightless wing.

2010: In what will forever be remembered as the "Miracle in Irkutsk," Tomba coaches the upstart Italian hockey team and its gutty overachievers to a gold-medal upset of the favored Jamaicans. Disney quickly hatches the plot for Mighty Ducks 6 and signs Barry Williams, TV's beloved Greg Brady, for the Tomba role. The fairy-tale scenario sours somewhat, however, when ABC's Al Michaels rasps out, "Do you believe in miracles?" to which Tomba replies, "I believe in the miracle that goes by the name Alberto!"

2014: Newly crowned curling gold-medalist Tomba — flying the B2 bomber he received as a gift from his adoring, ever-generous friends in the Bologna carabiniere — steals the show at the Sarajevo Games by quelling a Serbian uprising; he subsequently insists on UN recognition of himself as an independent nation.

2018: Tomba, now approximately the size of an independent nation, enters Vancouver's ice-dancing competition; he and partner Kerri Strug miss out on the bronze by a mere tenth of a point due to Tomba's ill-advised flying pirouette onto his partner's shoulder. Crushed — not literally, of course, although Strug was — Tomba vows that he will now contemplate retirement by soaking in a lukewarm tub, with either eight rubber ducks until ten o'clock or ten rubber ducks until eight o'clock.

2020: An impish and newly svelte Tomba makes a surprise splash at Berlin's Summer Games by donning a Lycra one-piece and upsetting the Chinese women in the 100-meter butterfly — a victory he credits to having shaved more closely than his opponents.

2022: Troubled by sagging TV ratings, the IOC hearkens back to a TV-blockbuster moment with the "Whack Nancy Kerrigan's Knee" exhibition event in Detroit. Now in his mid-fifties, Tomba declines to celebrate his silver with his usual pasta, claiming the garlic now makes him dyspeptic. He retreats instead to a Luby's cafeteria in Ypsilanti, where he enjoys triple helpings of creamed corn.

2026: In Gstaad's Olympic Spelling Bee, Tomba nails "Samaranch" and "Lillehammer" but stumbles badly on "Ueberroth," forfeiting the gold to the ice-water-veined automaton that is Bonnie Blair. Mixing his own metaphors now, a bitter Tomba invites two photographers to shoot him on the bidet around 4 p.m. (or is it four photographers about twoish?).

2030: At the games in seasonally frigid, El Ni˜o-ized Irian Jaya, a Brandoesque Tomba turns conventional luge wisdom on its head by winning the gold without the use of a sled. Afterward, he proclaims that the name of the island should be changed to "Irian Tomba." Natives promptly eat him.

Illustrations by Tim Bower