US Edition
Meet Alberto Tomba: the former bad boy of ski racing
The 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary saw the birth of a new skiing star – brash, bold and the bearer of a headline-grabbing nickname. Not our own Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards, who flopped into last place in the ski jumping, but Alberto Tomba, “La Bomba”, who lived up to his nickname and blew the competition off the mountain to take two gold medals, in giant slalom and slalom.
Never shy of delivering a sound bite, after taking his first gold the 21-year-old Italian requested live on air that his father keep his promise of a new red Ferrari as reward, then promptly asked gold medal-winning ice skater Katarina Witt out on a date. Fans of slalom and giant slalom (GS), known as the technical events, were used to the quiet and unassuming Swede Ingemar Stenmark, who had dominated the sport for a decade. With the arrival of “La Bomba”, it was clear that technical skiing would never be the same again.
The son of a textile magnate, Alberto and his older brother Marco did not grow up skiing in the Alps like the great Italian skiers before them. Franco Tomba would drive his boys from his 16th-century villa on the outskirts of Bologna to the small ski resort of Sestola in the Apennines.
“My father was fundamental to me,” Tomba says. “He had loved skiing ever since he went to college in Switzerland. He would drive Marco and me to the mountains at 6am and we would ski all day. Marco is one year older than me and was pretty fast, but for us skiing was only fun.” Marco did not continue ski racing after he was 14, but Alberto persevered with the help of his family. “I deeply believe that support of your parents is crucial for the growth of a young athlete.”
In the early 1980s, convention held that technical skiers needed to have a light and agile build. At 6ft and 90kg, Tomba was far from that. However, slalom technique was changing, and in 1982 spring-loaded gates were introduced into the World Cup. This meant that racers no longer needed to duck around a solid gate, but could take a straighter route down the mountain. Weight and momentum became an advantage, provided you could control the additional speed.
Alberto learned to ski aged three and was racing by the time he was seven. In 1980, at 14, he qualified for the Italian team at the unofficial children’s world championships known as the Topolino. But it wasn’t until 1984 that he started to make his mark, coming fourth at the World Junior Championships in Sugarloaf, Maine. Then a win at an invitational Christmas parallel slalom at the San Siro stadium in Milan gave him the boost he needed. “I always raced to win. I just needed to mature physically to reach my full potential. In the San Siro I beat racers who had been winning for years, and at that moment I understood that winning was not just a fantasy.”
For three seasons, Tomba’s increasing power and bulk made his skiing fast but unreliable. In 1985 he won three European Cup events, and the following season he raced his first World Cup at 18 in Madonna di Campiglio, although he failed to make the finish. When a competitor crashes out of a race it’s known as a Did Not Finish (DNF), and after many more DNFs, he made a significant breakthrough in the 1985/86 season. At the World Cup in Åre, Sweden, racing from a challenging start position of number 62, he skied into an incredible sixth place.
He then scored his first World Cup podium at the age of 19 at the start of the 1986/87 season, coming third on the brutal Alta Badia giant slalom course. That qualified him for the World Championships in Crans-Montana, where his penchant for publicity also became apparent – he was famously found outside the hotel washing his teammates’ cars. “It kept me related to real life, helping me to put the ski racing into perspective.” Tomba’s bronze in the giant slalom was the only medal won by the Italian team.
The fact he could escape the mountains also helped him deal with the pressure. “Coming from Bologna helped me to grow up with a sense of humour, and an ability to de-dramatise situations. To have some days disconnected from skiing gave me time to recharge to face new challenges.”
The following World Cup season, in 1987/88, Tomba’s winning streak gathered momentum and the legend was truly born. In the first race weekend, on home snow in the Italian resort of Sestriere, Tomba won the slalom comfortably, shouting “I am a beast!” as he crossed the line. He followed this up in the GS with a victory over his idol, the great Ingemar Stenmark, by a mere 0.09 seconds.
A win in the next GS in Alta Badia was followed by a massive victory by 1.34 seconds in the Madonna di Campiglio slalom. This time, as he crossed the line for his fourth straight victory, he shouted, “I am the new messiah of skiing!” Reminded of this, he laughs. “Did I say that really? I don’t remember, but when you arrive in the finish area, sometimes your mouth is not too well connected with your brain.”
Tomba raced the Kranjska Gora World Cup GS on his 21st birthday, and recorded his first DNF of the season among rumours that he’d overdone the celebrations the night before. It did not stop him recording his fifth win of the season in the slalom the next day. It was an Olympic year, and Tomba notched up seven wins in the run up to Calgary, in February 1988. His preparation could not have been better. “I was confident about my physical shape, and I was full of enthusiasm and joy, like a child in front of fireworks. Imagine, my first time at the Olympics, it was my childhood dream to race against my idols. I was determined to do my best and enjoy the moment.”
In the Calgary GS, Tomba achieved a 1.14 second lead on the first of the two runs, enough for the normally reserved Swiss downhill gold medallist Pirmin Zurbriggen to remark, “the race is over, no one can catch him.” No one did, and Tomba won by over a second.
In the slalom, the leader in the first run was German skier Frank Wörndl who, although he was World Champion, had never been on a World Cup podium. In third place and 0.63 seconds down, Tomba needed to produce what BBC commentator David Vine coined as the “Tomba charge”, a blistering second run that gave him victory by a mere 0.06 seconds.
Returning home after Calgary was a special moment for Tomba. “Italy welcomed me back as a hero. It was not easy to face the pressure and maintain a normal profile, but I was also the same person that washed my colleagues’ cars and ate my mum’s pasta. This helped me to remain focused on what I love most – sport, skiing and competition.” After the 1988 Olympics Tomba notched up two more World Cup victories, but DNFs in the GS and slalom in the finals in Saalbach meant the overall World Cup title went to Pirmin Zurbriggen.
Tomba scored just one World Cup victory in the 1989 season and left the World Championships in Vail empty-handed. The season after that, in 1990, injury sidelined him when he crashed in the Val d’Isère World Cup, breaking his collarbone. “Super-G was not my favourite discipline and that crash confirmed what I was feeling. It was the only bad injury in my career.”
But in 1992 he was back with a bang, producing seven World Cup victories prior to the Albertville Olympics. His fans said that the Games should be renamed Albertoville. At a pre-Olympic press conference he stoked the flames, saying, “I used to have a wild time with three women until 5am, but I’m getting older. In the Olympic Village here, I will live it up with five women, but only until 3am.” Now he says, “Obviously it was a joke, a flippant answer to a banal question. If you don’t sleep and recharge you are not able to race at high levels, and it’s almost impossible to win.”
And win he did. In the Albertville giant slalom, held on the brutal Face de Bellevarde piste, Tomba set the fastest time on both runs. Down 1.58 seconds in the first slalom run, the “Tomba charge” produced the fastest second run time, but it was only enough to take silver, and he missed out on the overall title to the Swiss Paul Accola.
The next Olympics were in Lillehammer in 1994, and four World Cup victories in the run up made him favourite for gold again, but in the giant slalom he missed a gate. He was 1.84 seconds down in the slalom first run, but the “Tomba charge” leap-frogged him to silver.
In the season that followed, Tomba was almost unbeatable. What made him so good? “A journalist once said I had a four-wheel style of skiing,” he says. “Maybe it was my muscle power, maybe it was my capacity to memorise the course during the inspection, maybe it was the way I attacked the gates, without calculation, only focused on victory, maybe it was my capacity to face victories and defeat with the same light spirit.” Whatever it was, Tomba won the Overall World Cup title in 1995 by a massive margin.
Tomba mania was in full flow. He was the most famous sportsperson in Italy and thousands of fans flocked to each World Cup race. Then a photographer called Aldo Martinuzzi decided to cash in on his fame by publishing a naked sauna picture of Tomba taken in 1988. When Tomba spotted the photographer again, from the podium in Alta Badia, he threw his trophy at him.
The controversy continued into the 1996 Sierra Nevada World Championships in Spain. “I had been misquoted in a German magazine as saying ‘we are going to race in Africa’, so when I arrived in Sierra Nevada I was greeted with a chorus of boos. But during the first run the tone changed and everybody started to support me.” Cue another Tomba charge, and he took gold in the giant slalom, followed a couple of days later with gold in the slalom, after which his fans broke the fence down to lift him on to their shoulders.
The pressures of celebrity were clearly getting to Tomba. “In Italy, they love me too much. They want to kill me. Now Alberto is tired. More than tired,” he said at the time. After a few months off, he decided to make the 1997/98 season his last.
At the 1997 World Championships in Sestriere, under huge home pressure, he crashed in the GS and needed a spectacular charge to snatch bronze in the slalom. He then failed to secure a medal at the Nagano 1998 Olympics, crashing out of the GS, and withdrawing from the slalom after posting only the 17th fastest first run time.
Three weeks later, at the age of 31, Tomba drew the curtain on his ski racing career, in Crans-Montana, where he won his first World Championship medal 11 years before. Blasting down the rutted, slushy slalom course, he beat the new Olympic champion Hans-Peter Buraas and 1992 Olympic champion Finn-Christian Jagge into second and third. Hoisted aloft at the finish by the two Norwegians, he launched his gloves, poles and goggles into the crowd in a clear message that there would be no comeback.
Looking back, Tomba says he would change nothing about his ski racing career. “Every experience, good or bad, is a lesson and makes you who you are. If life is a house, then each brick is important.” Since retiring, Tomba has dedicated his life to promoting the value of sport, helping to organise junior ski races like the FilaSprint and the Tombatour in America. He has been an ambassador for the Olympic committee and was a founding member of the Laureus Academy, an organisation that uses the power of sport for social change.
Now 50, Tomba has never married. His three-year engagement to a former Miss Italy, Martina Colombari, ended in 1996 after press intrusion became too much. He is still a sporting icon in Italy, arguably the greatest ski racer of all time, and unarguably the sport’s greatest showman.
Yet for such a larger-than-life character, Tomba’s pleasures take very modest forms. “I enjoy my family and friends, travelling, running and skiing. I try to help people and pass on my passion for sport to a young generation. I watch my old races and enjoy memories. And, of course, I eat, dress and drive Italian.”