THE OLYMPICS: WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : Koch Fills a Void in His Life : Skiing: He missed competition and, at 36, the former silver medalist is back.

Bill Koch, Bill Koch, Bill Koch. Hmm, sounds familiar.

Oh, sure. Used to be a skier. Won a medal in the Olympics once, didn’t he? Wonder what he’s doing now.

Skiing in the Olympics, actually. Nearly six years after his second retirement, the cross-country skier whose last name sounds like the soft drink is back.

He’s 36 now and not quite sure about his endurance. But he’s here, he says he’s in a competitive frame of mind and he’s going to race Monday in the 30-kilometer classical-style event.

It’s skied differently now, but it’s the race in which Koch, in 1976, won his silver medal, shocking the European skiing community. He is the only American to have won an Olympic cross-country medal, and he showed it was no fluke in 1982 by winning the World Cup.

After Monday? Well, he will wait and see how things go, then decide if he has another race or two in him.

Actually, when Koch decided last April that what was missing in his life was competitive skiing, he really wasn’t planning on being at these Games. He got back into training with 1994 and the Lillehammer Olympics in mind.

“I never knew what to expect,” he said Friday. “Right from the beginning I kind of saw this as about a 50-50 proposition, whether I could make this cut or not here. It’s really nice to be able to. It really helps to jump-start the whole thing, because it’s going to tell me right away, this year, exactly where I do stand. I’ll know where I am and be able to go on from there.”

Koch is here without benefit of recent international races and, had the Olympic team not been expanded after the team trials, he wouldn’t be here at all, because he did not qualify.

“I knew it was going to be tough to make the team, with the limited training I had,” he said. “It turned out to be just that way. I had to really scratch my way back.”

But he is pleased with his skiing.

“(I’m skiing) fairly well,” he said. “I had a little head cold when I arrived here, but I’m over that and feeling strong again, so I only missed a couple of workouts. . . . Mentally, I think I’m tougher than ever. Physically, I’m sure I’m not all the way back where I can get. . . . Although I’m certainly ready for anything here, and I’m very excited and very up, I think probably ’94 will be a little better odds. I really won’t be surprised, wherever I am. I think it’s possible I could be in the top 20, and I think it’s just as possible I might not be in the top 50.”

Koch is back in the love-hate relationship he has had with competitive skiing ever since he struck stardom at Innsbruck, Austria, in 1976. He suddenly discovered then that people often attach expectations to Olympic medal winners, and he didn’t like that. So he quit. But he came back after a year, skied unimpressively at Lake Placid in 1980, won the World Cup in ‘82, skied unimpressively at Sarajevo in ‘84, then retired again after the ‘85-86 season.

He bought into an Alpine skiing resort on Mt. Hood in Oregon--they are just now putting in cross-country trails--did some coaching, conducted some clinics and made some videos, all of which sounds like a pleasant, comfortable way to live.

So what brought him back?

“Missing that challenge, that’s what it was,” he said. “Having something to go for that totally consumes you, both physically and mentally, and something that’s almost impossible to attain but just barely possible, so you have to stretch. I missed that.”

And he even will put up with others’ expectations, although he figures he has been away so long that there are no expectations.

“I haven’t felt much of that,” he said. “I think most people realize that right now I’m just trying to get back on my feet, and I’m about 11 months into this and I’m on a real steep curve as far as improvement. In an endurance sport like this, normally it does take a few years to get all organized.”

But Koch has surprised the world twice now. Who’s to say he can’t do it again?