Man-Made Snow Rescues World Cup : Skiing: Artificial white stuff subs for nature’s own, assuring start of international tournament on Thanksgiving Day.

Despite an embarrassing lack of natural snow, Park City Ski Resort’s crews have piled up sufficient man-made snow to guarantee enough of the white stuff for the World Cup races beginning Thanksgiving Day, officials said.

“We’ve had more than 100 people on the hill and we’ve sprayed more than 15 million gallons of water on the course. We have a snow depth of 3 to 4 feet for the races,” said Park City spokesman Mark Menlove.

The four days of competition begin Thursday, with the men’s giant slalom. The women’s giant slalom is set for Friday, followed by the women’s slalom Saturday and the men’s slalom Sunday.

Menlove said Park City has 70 snow-making machines on the race course, with five huge snow-moving vehicles “pushing it around to cover the entire run” because the northern Utah resort in the Wasatch Mountains, 30 miles east of Salt Lake City, has not had any significant snowfall in three weeks.

These races are doubly important as a showcase for the Salt Lake City bid for the 1998 Winter Olympics. Should Salt Lake City be chosen over four other sites, these same slopes would be used for most Alpine events.

In the absence of natural snow virtually everywhere in the world, athletes from all nations have been training on artificial snow at several Colorado resorts, with the added advantage of getting used to the Rocky Mountain altitude.

The fight for the men’s overall title in the annual four-month World Cup competition will match two longtime rivals, Marc Girardelli of Luxembourg and Pirmin Zurbriggen of Switzerland.

On the women’s side, Switzerland is expected to provide the winner of the Crystal Globe for the seventh consecutive time.

Girardelli, the Austrian-born ace, and Zurbriggen, who is beginning his 10th and last World Cup season, are shooting for their fourth overall titles, a total reached only by Italy’s Gustavo Thoeni in the early 1970s.

Italy’s Alberto Tomba, who is hoping to recapture his sensational 1988 form after a sub-par season last winter, said he will be trying to derail Girardelli and Zurbriggen to preserve the record of Thoeni, who is a coach with the Italian team.

Defending champion Vreni Schneider, who won the slalom and giant slalom titles while leading a 1-2-3 sweep by the Swiss team in the overall standings last season, is the woman to beat.

The strongest challenge will come from her veteran teammates Maria Walliser and Michela Figini, both past World Cup winners, as well as Yugoslavia’s Mataja Svet and Austria’s Anita Wachter and West Germany’s Michaela Gerg, who won the opening women’s races at Las Lenas, Argentina.

The U.S. women’s team, without Pam Fletcher, who retired, and Tamara McKinney, who is injured, could be faced with one of its bleakest seasons.

McKinney, the only American woman to win the overall World Cup title, in 1983, is sidelined with a broken leg.