LILLEHAMMER / ’94 WINTER OLYMPICS : For This Italian Star, It’s No Contest : Skiing: One day after Tomba stumbles, Compagnoni easily wins women’s giant slalom.

Ten minutes after winning the gold medal in Thursday’s giant slalom, Italy’s Deborah Compagnoni took the customary phone call of congratulations from a dignitary.

In America, the President usually handles the task. Bill Clinton phoned Tommy Moe after his downhill victory last week.

Compagnoni picked up Line 1 in the finish-area corral after dominating both runs and defeating runner-up Martina Ertl of Germany by 1.22 seconds.

Compagnoni’s two-run time of 2:30.97 was two seconds faster than Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider, who took the bronze. Eva Twardokens, sixth, was the top American finisher.

Hello?

“Tomba here,” Alberto Tomba said.

The conversation between the king and queen of Italian skiing was brief.

“He was very happy,” Compagnoni said. “Yes, we will celebrate together. But I said we would also celebrate the medal you will make.”

Tomba, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, has struck out once here, in Wednesday’s giant slalom, but will be among the favorites in Sunday’s slalom.

Though reportedly not romantically involved, the link-up between Tomba and Compagnoni, even if it was only through the magic of fiber-optics, rekindled memories of Feb. 18, 1992, the date both skiers won gold.

It was so momentous an occasion that, for the first time in anyone’s recollection, soccer was bumped to the inside pages of Italian sports sections.

At face value, the 23-year-old Compagnoni’s return to the Olympic podium two years after winning the Albertville super-G would seem a natural progression, the superstar expanding her skiing horizons. Yet, this was not merely a matter of connecting the Olympic dots.

The day after her gold-medal run at Albertville, Compagnoni crashed in the giant slalom and tore left knee ligaments. It took a year for her to recover, another year to reclaim Olympic form.

Safe to say, she’s back.

In boxing vernacular, Compagnoni scored a knockout.

She recorded the fastest time on the morning course: a tight, technical gate-set that bounced Pernilla Wiberg of Sweden, the defending Olympic champion, out of the race and prompted American Heidi Voelker, a reputed medal contender, to ski timidly. Voelker stood 18th after the first run, a whopping 2.71 seconds off the pace.

Compagnoni, with a 0.63-second first-run cushion over her nearest challenger, oversaw the second run with understandable confidence.

“I knew I would win,” she said.

Germany’s Ertl, skiing 11th, took the lead and held it through three more racers, but she knew Compagnoni had nearly a full-second advantage on her before she stepped out of the starting gate.

“I knew if she had no mistakes in her second run, that I cannot win,” Ertl said.

Germany’s Hilde Gerg, with the second fastest first-run time, had a fast second run going before she crashed, four gates from the finish.

Up next, Compagnoni didn’t ski like someone trying to protect a lead. In fact, she nearly lost everything when she lost her balance in a troublesome area near the bottom as Italian fans gasped. But she recovered in time.

U.S. medal hopes were dashed early and often with poor first runs.

Twardokens, 13th in the morning, welcomed a straighter second-run course that allowed her to take advantage of her speed. She moved up seven spots and took home a credible Olympic finish.

“I don’t think I broke 20 clicks (kilometers per hour),” she said of her first run. “The second run, I had nothing to lose.”

The United States has placed at least one skier in the top 10 in each Olympic Alpine event. Yet, after winning four medals last week, Americans have developed a craving for the podium.

“People came up to me and said, ‘You’re next,’ ” Twardokens said. “And I’d say, ‘It’s not that easy.’ I thought maybe it could happen to me. But sometimes you can get unrealistic. I think I lost some focus.”

Twardokens, 28, added a sixth to her seventh- and eighth-place finishes at Albertville two years ago.

Diann Roffe-Steinrotter--a surprise gold-medal winner in super-G last week and the defending Olympic silver medalist in the giant slalom--could barely get out of the gate because of flu.

She was 27th after her first run and was too ill to compete in the afternoon.

Voelker followed up her miserable first run by crashing head-first into the snow on her second, an embarrassment referred to in skier talk as “a face plant.”

The warm support Voelker received from relatives in attendance did not soothe her disappointment.

“Sometimes hugs make it all the worse,” Voelker said.

She began the Games red-hot, with top-10 finishes in her last five World Cup races.

“She choked,” Paul Major, the U.S. Alpine director, said. “She knew it. She felt that way too. But she’s also had the best season of her career.”