COLUMN ONE : Norway’s Return to the Peak : Proud of their winter sports heritage, Norwegians dominated decades of Olympic Games. After an embarrassing slump, the revitalized national team is primed to ice the competition again.

To stunned Norwegians, the humbling events of the 1988 Winter Olympics were as hard to imagine as having to stand on a table in a crowded cafe and sing the Swedish national anthem.

It was bad enough that they had to listen to the Swedish anthem four times from Calgary, while their athletes--for the first time since the Winter Games began in 1924--won zero gold medals.

While the tabloid headlines screamed “disaster,” the more thoughtful newspapers pondered whether elite sports were still as important in a modern, egalitarian society as they were in the days when Norway’s winter athletes were kicking the rest of the world’s collective behind.

It seems the country’s sports leaders, with encouragement from the government, concluded the answer to that question was “yes.”

Six years ago, they established a program called Olympiatoppen to improve Norway’s standing in world sports. Olympiatoppen (loosely, “striving to reach the Olympic summit”) created the financial backing and centralized training system needed to make a national sports program successful.

When the program’s director, Thor Ole Rimejorde, a career military officer, reviewed the results from Calgary, he saw no gold medals. But he did see a golden future.

“We won only five medals in 1988, but we had many young athletes in places four through 10,” Rimejorde said recently in an interview in his Oslo office. “I knew we were about to move ahead of other countries.”

Rimejorde needs only three seconds to name one of those countries--Sweden, whose relationship with Norway is the geopolitical equivalent of a sibling rivalry. Swedes sometimes even refer to their Scandinavian neighbors as “little brothers,” which Norwegians do not find especially endearing.

“I was very pleased I was not responsible for Swedish sport because their four gold medals were largely the work of two men,” Rimejorde said. “What has happened since is exactly as I forecast in ’88. We are the success; the Swedes are the fiasco.”

Norway’s slide from Olympic prominence started in 1968 but hit bottom in goldless ’88.

Not even Rimejorde expected success to be so clear so soon. During the 1992 Winter Olympics in the French Alps, Norwegians won 20 medals, nine of them gold, to finish third behind Germany and the since-disbanded Unified Team of former Soviet republics.

And now, with the Olympics coming to Lillehammer, which, town leaders frequently remind visitors, edged out a Swedish candidate for the right to stage the Games, Norway could top the medal standings for the sixth time--the first such coup since 1968.

How are characteristically reserved Norwegians handling the anticipation of an avalanche of gold?

Like backslapping, yahooing Dallas Cowboy fans. Forty-eight hours before Saturday’s opening ceremony at Lillehammer Olympic Park, they are arriving here by the trainload, sporting Viking helmets, Norwegian flags painted on their faces, clanging cowbells and flasks of the national bellywarmer, a potent tonic called aquavit.

Norway’s rediscovered athletic prowess has bred a new concern. “We have to be nice to the world and let them win some gold medals or they will have not such a good time,” said Gerhard Heiberg, an Oslo industrialist who serves as president of the Lillehammer Olympic Organizing Committee. “The people of sport in Norway say I should shut up.”

Those people of sport acknowledge that their team’s resurgence in part arises from the dismantling of the ultra-efficient, state-supported medal machines in the former Soviet Union and East Germany. But they also give themselves credit for forming Olympiatoppen after disappointing results in the 1984 Winter and Summer Olympics.

They add, however, that the goal was not just to climb in the medal standings but to combat a national malaise borne of the oil boom in the late 1970s and early ‘80s that enriched many Norwegians financially, putting two cars in every garage, televisions in every bedroom and potatoes on every couch.

Norwegians fancy themselves rugged outdoorsmen, the snowier and colder it is the better. They argue with the Swedes over whose country should be known as “the cradle of skiing” and like to say that their babies are born with skis on.

After winning three gold medals in cross-country skiing in 1992, Vegard Ulvang, 30, said: “I am always amused to read in the foreign press how a Russian or Italian athlete can recall the precise day he was given his first pair of skis. We in Norway can never remember this because we are too young when it happens.”

But in recent years, teen-agers have forsaken their skis for MTV and video games.

“I can remember when skiing was a mode of transportation, then our most popular recreation after it became so easy to travel by car and bus,” Rimejorde said. “Our concern was that it someday would become only a spectator sport and we would become a lazy people.”

One aim of Olympiatoppen, he said, was to create new ski heroes, whom the program’s leaders hoped would become role models for the nation’s youth.

The government shot even higher, hoping that the success of the skiers would serve as an inspiration to the entire country. Star athletes can serve as models of “team spirit and cooperation,” Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland said during the 1992 Winter Olympics.

“We must learn from our sports heroes because we are going to need more of their initiative and perseverance,” she said. “Excellence must become typically Norwegian both inside and outside sports stadiums.”

Her message, however, was intended not only for Norwegians but also for the 12 nations of the European Community. Although Norway is divided over whether to become a member, Brundtland wants desperately for the country to be wanted.

John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has written extensively about the Olympic movement, criticized her in a syndicated column for exploiting sports for political purposes.

“She played the Olympic card very cleverly,” he wrote. “Her message was that Norwegian businessmen could play with the big boys in the economic major leagues, that sheer self-confidence could accomplish wonders.”

Norway’s sports leaders know that the secret of their success is not that simple.

Tradition, of course, was part of the mix, particularly in sports such as cross-country skiing, ski jumping and speed skating that provided most of Norway’s medals when it topped the medal standings in five of six Winter Games between 1924 and 1952. (Except for speed skating, most of those sports originated in Scandinavia.)

Passionate about cross-country skiing, Norwegians ordered so many tickets for this year’s events that the 31,000-seat Birkebeiner Stadium could have sold out six times over. Of the unlucky losers in the ticket lottery, up to 40,000 are expected to line the course each day.

Ulvang is Norway’s most popular athlete, and not just because he won three gold medals in ’92. He personifies the image many Norwegians have of themselves as a people, an explorer-adventurer who has hiked across Mongolia, canoed across Siberia, skied through Greenland and climbed the highest peaks on five continents.

While Americans have been following the daily saga of figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, Norwegians have been transfixed by Ulvang’s lonely treks into the wilderness in an attempt to find his brother, who disappeared during a snowstorm last October.

On almost as many magazine covers, however, are the alpine--or downhill--skiers, whose discipline until recently was so little respected in Norway that their results were not even listed in the sports pages under skiing. They were listed under alpine, which as far as most Norwegians were concerned, had more to do with sipping hot wine in front of a fireplace in France or Switzerland than actually skiing.

But Olympiatoppen embraced alpine skiing because it attracted the Nintendo generation, which was enthralled by the speed and danger. In the 1992 Olympics, Norway won four alpine medals, including its first since 1952.

The Norwegian Olympic Committee’s annual spending budget of $7.2 million, much of it contributed by corporations and the remainder by the government, has increased by almost 250% in the last six years. But officials said that how much money is spent is less important than how it is spent.

“Knowing we are a small nation with only 4.3 million people, it’s not wise to spend our resources on many sports,” said Arne Myhrvold, president of Norway’s Olympic Committee. “We have to concentrate on a few people in a few sports.

“This has led to discussions, for instance, with the athletics (track and field) federation, which wants to back all disciplines. We say: ‘It would be a waste of money to spend it on the 100 meters. The Africans and Americans have too much talent for us.’ But if you are an individual in long-distance running, we are willing to help you.”

Norway’s love for the winter sports is so great that its Olympic committee spends half of its budget on five winter sports and the other half on 39 summer sports.

Those in the favored sports are encouraged to trade information with each other. And athletes are expected to participate in numerous pursuits outside their primary sports--including rock climbing, parachute jumping, karate and ballet--in order to have a well-rounded training base. It’s Norway’s version of cross-training.

“We are considering bungee jumping,” said Ola K. Bakke, head of the alpine skiing federation.

As a mental exercise, one of Norway’s leading violinists, Arve Tellefsen, meets with athletes to share his method of collecting himself after a disappointing concert.

Myhrvold said Olympiatoppen has achieved so much so soon that the Japanese want to use it as a model for their athletes leading to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.

Infinitely more satisfying for the Norwegians: Even the Swedes--who won only one gold medal in 1992--have copied some of their training methods.

Medal Madness

Norway’s Olympic team won no gold medals in 1988, triggering that has had striking results.

NORWAY’S PAST PERFORMANCES (From peak in ’68 to low in ‘88)

Year Gold Silver Bronze Ranking 1924 4 7 6 1st 1928 6 4 5 1st 1932 3 4 3 2nd 1936 7 5 3 1st 1948 4 3 3 1st 1952 7 3 6 1st 1956 2 1 1 7th 1960 3 3 0 3rd 1964 3 6 6 3rd 1968 6 6 2 1st 1972 2 5 5 7th 1976 3 3 1 4th 1980 1 3 6 8th 1984 3 2 4 6th 1988 0 3 2 12th 1992 9 6 5 3rd

Source: Randy Harvey, Los Angeles Times