The Bolognese champion at the Trento Festival: “The first time was the victory at the Montagnetta di San Siro in 1984, but they didn’t write my name in the newspaper. When I won in Calgary I sent football to the second page. And those lines of people in front of the house…”
“I traveled six hundred kilometers to see it”, “I have been waiting for this day for ten years”. Two sentences from the audience are enough to understand that Alberto Tomba never really retired. At the Sports Festival, the Emilian champion returns in front of his fans and, after ten minutes of applause, begins the journey down memory lane: from the 1983 European Cup to his retirement. “I ended up in a newspaper after the victory at the Montagnetta in San Siro in 1984. I was in the B team, I had just turned eighteen. I won, but the newspapers only wrote ‘an Italian from B mocks the greats’. They didn’t put my name. Maybe they didn’t like me.” From there the climb begins: the training between Cimone and Cortina, the bronze at Crans Montana ’87, the challenges with Pirmin Zurbriggen. “In Pirmin I washed cars, in my time it was done like that. I was the youngest and I respected him. He stole an overall World Cup from me”, he jokes today. Then come the golden years. Sestriere 1987, the bloody hand from having “slashed the skis too much”, and above all Calgary 1988, the Olympics “which made football end up on the second page of the Gazzetta”. “There were queues of people outside my house. After the race they even stole my bib, so I wore 11 to remember the two gold medals.”
memories
—
Tomba forgets nothing, not even the faces in his photos. “But in this one I had a beard: you lose six cents with a beard, what an idiot I was”, he laughs, looking at the screen. Then he talks about his collection of 3,500 bottles of wine: “I left gloves and masks with the producers, in exchange they gave me the bottles.” Also in the audience is Loris, his number one fan and owner of Tombland, the largest Tomba fan club in Italy. “To see him in Sierra Nevada I traveled two thousand kilometres, I slept in a mountain hut the night before the race, but Alberto won the gold and I was rewarded”. “The most beautiful World Cup in history”, recalls Tomba almost emotionally. Deborah Compagnoni and the great days of Italian skiing also appear on stage. Then a look to the future: “The slopes for Milan-Cortina are ready, but the roads will be a disaster. A home race gives more tension to the Italian athletes, but it will be a great Olympics.” The last thought goes to his retirement, in 1998. “I was 31 years old, I was tired, too much training. But I retired after a victory. I finished the race almost naked, I gave everything to the fans, even my suit. I could have reached 40, maybe yes. At the farewell party the other skiers were very happy, I had never seen them so happy”, then he almost stops as if he regretted his choice: “Sport stays with you, especially World Championships and Olympics”. The public looks at him and understands: you can stop racing, not being a champion.