‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : NOTEBOOK

Norway’s Harald Christian Strand-Nilsen may have the longest name of any Olympic medal winner.

But it doesn’t end there for the bronze-medal winner in Alpine combined skiing.

“My family calls me Christian,” he says. “At school they call me Harald. The team calls me Harry or Boris. New friends call me Brother, because that’s what my sister calls me. Choose from that what you want.”

Anything else?

“My family calls me Harald Christian when they’re mad at me.”

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After Norway had received the Olympic bid in 1988, the government underwrote $100 million to the country’s sports program, hoping to increase its medal chances. The plan afforded Norway the chance to hire former Austrian coach Dieter Bartsch to run the Alpine program.

It paid off. Norway won its third, fourth and fifth Alpine medals Friday.

Now, there is talk that the Alpine budget will be cut after the Olympics.

“I think the training will not be so good anymore,” Strand-Nilsen said. “There are not so many people (Alpine) skiing in Norway. We need the racers we have.”

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You won’t hear any complaints from the Norwegians about the new rules in scoring the combined, weighing the slalom more heavily than the downhill.

“It makes it easier for the public to understand what’s going on,” Lasse Kjus, the combined gold-medal winner, said. “And to make it exciting to look at.”

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After posting the second-fastest time in the combined downhill, Kyle Rasmussen gave it his best shot in the slalom, but missed a gate on the first run, hiked back up to re-ski it and finished in 1 minute 8.24 seconds, 17 seconds off the pace. He finished 31st.

“You can’t be conservative to win a medal,” said Rasmussen, from Angels Camp, Calif. “In the Olympics, the only thing that counts is the top three. That’s what I was going for.”

Rasmussen, who had not raced a slalom this season, admitted he was ready to return to downhill.

“After five days on slalom skis, I’m ready to go straight again,” he said.