Schuuuusss!

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/KVITFJELL

More than a century ago, the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen hiked down the mountain range at Kvitfjell. It was, he recalled in his play Peer Gynt, akin to riding a wild buck through "the wide and dizzy void."

Last week Diann Roffe-Steinrotter could identify with that. Clad in skintight purple spandex at the starting gate of the Olympic course, the diminutive (5 ft. 4 in.) racer from Potsdam, New York, gazed down the ice- glazed slope to the distant valley below. In the Arctic chill, a kaleidoscopic blur of 40,000 snowsuits gazed back through a vast video screen. "I was sick-to-my-stomach nervous," she said. "I tried to drink water. My insides felt like California during the earthquake." But somehow as she zipped past red barns and sailed over moose and lynx paths down a sun-striped highway of snow, Roffe-Steinrotter summoned Olympian reserves. First in line among 56 skiers in the super-G, a cross between a downhill and a giant-slalom course, she had no one else's mistakes to guide her. "It's one day, one hill, 1 1/2 minutes," she told herself, "and whoever shakes and bakes the best is going to get the gold."

Ibsen she's not, but Roffe-Steinrotter was poetry in motion as the first American woman to win an Olympic Alpine ski race in a decade. It was the second surprise victory of the week for the U.S. Her countryman Tommy Moe had blasted off with a gilded glide in the downhill and followed with a silver medal in the men's super-G. "I've skied my butt off," said Moe, a square- jawed, square-talking Alaskan. "Now it's paying off." On Saturday Americans struck ore again with a silver in the women's downhill for the irrepressible Idaho daredevil Picabo Street. "I skied like a dirtbag," she said, "but I was charging down the mountain."

Not bad for a bunch only recently dubbed "Uncle Sam's lead-footed snowplow brigade," by Sports Illustrated magazine. Yet even U.S. ski officials seemed stunned by the team's sudden resurrection. "It's the most unbelievable thing I've seen in sports," said American coach Paul Major of Roffe-Steinrotter's win. The 26-year-old veteran's career was in a slump, and she had failed to place higher than eighth in any World Cup race since capturing a silver medal in the 1992 Albertville Olympics. As for Moe, he had not won a major downhill contest in five years -- and no American man had claimed an Olympic Alpine medal since 1984. None in history had won two in the same Games. But criticism galvanized the team. "I was really stoked," said Moe, who attributes the success to hard training. "We don't deserve to be ridiculed."

The unexpected U.S. triumphs left Austrian and Swiss favorites floundering in the powder. The two powerhouse Alpine nations, where World Cup races are routinely televised and schuss stars are celebrities, had dominated Olympic skiing for decades. Yet last week a Norwegian (the dynamic Kjetil Andre Aamodt) and a Canadian (the surprising Ed Podivinsky) won silver and bronze medals in downhill after Moe, while a Russian, Svetlana Gladischeva, edged Italian Isolde Kostner for silver in the women's super-G. In the men's super- G, Markus Wasmeier, a Bavarian who likes to play Mozart on his zither, won the gold, beating Moe and Aamodt, who captured the bronze. The French were despondent when their favorites failed to garner medals, and L'Equipe, the national sports daily, struck back by calling Moe -- who had been expelled from teams as an adolescent for smoking marijuana -- a "little truant" and describing Roffe-Steinrotter as looking like "an insomniac squirrel." But French skier Florence Masnada was more gracious. "The Americans have no complexes," she said admiringly. "They just throw themselves down the slope without asking any questions."

Few fans are likely to hold youthful sins against Moe. "I was not the smartest or the best student," he said of his marijuana-smoking days. "I was out having a good time, being a normal American kid." But when the ski team suspended him at 16, his father, a contractor, hauled him up to the Aleutian Islands for a summer of 16-hour workdays. "He shoveled gravel," recalled Tom Sr. "He crawled on all fours." Moe Jr. straightened out. Since then he has put in six grueling years on the World Cup circuit, racing from one mountain to another.

The mood at the Alpine races was exuberant. The frigid temperature -- down to 1 degree F -- seemed only to stimulate flag-waving, cowbell-clanking Norwegians. Before the race they bounced up and down to keep warm -- and to keep time with the weirdly appropriate golden oldies blasting from loudspeakers. One tune, Achy Breaky Heart, seemed a dirge for the brilliant career of Swiss veteran Franz Heinzer, whose bindings snapped as he leaped out of the downhill's starting gate. Heinzer whacked the snow with his poles in fury and three days later announced his retirement at 31.

Another heartbreaking moment was the failure of former Olympic champion Donna Weinbrecht, the 28-year-old New Jerseyan, who has dominated freestyle mogul skiing since it became a medal sport in Albertville. Weinbrecht had fought her way back from a crippling knee injury. But she finished seventh out of 16 in the competition last week. "I started getting this numb feeling and a real bad vision thing," Weinbrecht told reporters at the finish line. "It's one of those things where you're off. This course, I think I could have shredded it, as we say in freestyle. But when it counted, it was like an out-of-body experience." It was a sad parenthesis in the wacky competition that combines hotdogging exhibitionism with athletic zeal. American Liz McIntyre, a Dartmouth graduate, captured a silver medal by executing a Daffy Twister jump, while winner Stine Lise Hattestad of Norway performed a Cossack -- an aerial ballet split on skis, as did the men's mogul winner, Canadian Jean-Luc Brassard. Each race was introduced by a recorded rooster's loud "cock-a-doodle-doo."

Only Alberto Tomba, the madcap Italian slalomer, is a household name beyond the Alps. But Moe, 24, and Aamodt, 23, seem poised to become the Jean-Claude Killys of the '90s: glamorous derring-doers capable of focusing world attention on the Alpine sport. Moe, so easygoing that he was yawning at the starting gate of both races, has an outdoorsy charm that could earn him as much as $1 million a year in corporate-endorsement contracts, according to industry insiders. "He is already capturing the hearts and minds of the American public," says Jon Franklin, a vice president of the International Management Group, which handles Tomba and other skiers.

As for Aamodt, whose ski-coach father used to blindfold him on skis to teach him the feel of the snow, he is fast succeeding the Austrian Marc Girardelli, who competes for Luxembourg, as the world's best all-around skier. Leading in World Cup points, the charismatic Norwegian skis both downhill and slalom and could well rack up more medals this week. "In Norway we used to have the attitude that you should not do something special -- or at least you should not think you are special," Aamodt said. "But now we are developing a winner's attitude. In the U.S. you like to be No. 1. With the Olympics, the American Dream has come to Norway."