Forget-Moe-Not

Tommy Moe won the downhill skiing gold medal at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics and the silver in super-giant slalom only days later, on his 24th birthday, driving a ski pole through the hearts of Alpine-crazed fans all across Europe.

Moe then did a very un-American thing.

Unlike teammate Picabo Street, who turned her silver medal in downhill into Picabo Inc., Moe all but disappeared.

Poised to make a fortune from his unexpected gold-silver strike in Norway, Moe finished a successful 1994 World Cup circuit and vanished like D.B. Cooper, leaving behind a host of unrealized business opportunities: Tommy Moe-Soap-on-a-Tow-Rope?

Not that Moe didn’t get rich. He did. It’s just that he did not get filthy, isn’t capitalism great, “Show me the money!” post-Olympic Mary Lou Retton rich.

In fact, Moe’s exile was self-imposed.

“I didn’t feel like doing the full rubber-chicken tour,” he said. “I was tired after that year. I just wanted to go back to Alaska, do my own thing. I didn’t even have a phone. I wanted to escape reality. It was my choice.”

You could say his career has gone downhill since.

Moe had planned to return to the world stage but didn’t get the chance, tearing his right anterior cruciate knee ligament in March 1995 during a super-G race in Kvitfjell, Norway, on the same course of his Olympic glory.

America quickly lost interest, dismissing Moe as a one-hit Olympic wonder.

“American people are into winning,” he said recently. “They remembered Tommy Moe for three, four months, then all of a sudden it’s ‘95, and people were just like, ‘Oh,’ then they’re into some other sport. That’s just the way it is.”

It was Moe’s every intention to prove that his Olympic performance was no fluke. He had, in fact, been ranked in the top 10 in downhill and super-G before the Lillehammer Games, and followed his double-medal Olympic performance with his first--and only--World Cup victory, in super-G at Whistler, Canada.

He finished eighth in the 1994 World Cup overall standings, third in super-G.

Yet, four years removed from Olympic greatness, Moe, 27, begins the Nagano Games as a far greater underdog than he was in Norway.

He was 33rd in a training run Thursday.

“He’d really be a surprise now,” U.S. men’s Coach Bill Egan said here the other day.

In the seasons since Lillehammer, Moe could have been the cover boy for Misfortune magazine.

The knee injury alone plagued him for two years.

“I had never been injured before crashing,” Moe said. “It was just the worst. I never really thought it would happen to me. It’s something you have to deal with. It took me a year to heal, and the second season wasn’t as strong as I should have been.”

Moe appeared to be rounding into shape in January of ’97 when, after skiing the famed Kitzbuehel downhill in Austria, he severed tendons in his right hand while tending bar during a post-race party.

“It was just kind of a fluke,” Moe said. “Bad luck. It was really frustrating for me, because every year I go to the Hahnenkamm, and after the race we go to this certain bar and have a great time. It’s very traditional. You actually have to go there to experience how ugly it really is. I was actually stepping out of the bar, climbing over this counter, and my hand slipped on broken glass.”

He missed the rest of the season.

Moe started this Olympic season with raised expectations, yet his World Cup results do not bode well for one intent on defending his downhill title. He has not registered a top-10 finish, although he did fire a warning flare with a recent 11th-place finish in a two-run downhill at Kitzbuehel.

“I’ve had moments where I’ve been as fast as anyone on certain sections,” Moe said during a Nagano news conference for the U.S. Alpine team. “It’s just a matter of going all the way down.”

There are few true miracles in ski racing. Moe acknowledged before the season that you could gauge his Olympic chances by his ranking in late January.

“You just have to look at the World Cup results to see who’s going to be good,” he said. “If somebody’s winning, they’ll be the favorite for the Olympics.”

Moe has not come close to winning.

Yet, there is an Olympic X factor that cannot be discounted. Because expectations are far greater for Europeans, Americans tend to be more relaxed in the Olympics. That certainly was the case in Norway, when Moe was seen stifling yawns minutes before breaking out of the gate.

American Bill Johnson shocked the world with his gold medal in the downhill at Sarajevo in 1984, and Moe did the same a decade later.

Despite the odds, Moe still says he is the man to beat.

“I always rise to big occasions, and I love big races,” he said. “Regardless, I’ve had that title the past four years.”

Despite Moe’s longshot odds, Egan says it is unwise to sell Tommy Moe short.

“This guy is a formidable opponent,” Egan said. “He is not afraid to do great things. He is unique in that respect. I don’t know of another World Cup racer that can do that. He can focus like nobody’s business. He is a legitimate defender.”

Egan likes Moe’s chances on the Nagano downhill course in Hakuba because the snow in Japan tends to be soft, and Moe is a great soft-snow skier.

Still, Moe needs to recapture the recklessness that made his gold-medal run in Lillehammer possible.

“I have to dig deep in order to find the level of confidence I had before,” he said. “It’s something you just have to really want from inside. I don’t like being mediocre. If you have the opportunity, and you feel healthy, then lay it on the line, don’t save anything.”

Moe remembers how it felt standing in the start gate on that ice-cold morning in Norway, gazing out at destiny below.

“I was like, if there’s a time to take the most risk it’s now,” he recalled of his famed run. “I might never have this opportunity again. I was skiing well that year. I said, ‘I’m either going to have a great run or I’m going to crash.’ That’s the mentality you have to have, and I pulled it off. I thought I was going to crash at one point at the bottom. I was just holding my tuck, flew off this jump and landed and the gate was right there, perfect. I pulled it out.”

Moe defeated Norway’s Kjetil-Andre Aamodt by .04 of a second.

One week after the U.S. ski team had been skewered by Sports Illustrated, the writer referring to the squad as the “lead-footed snowplow brigade,” Moe graced the magazine’s cover.

“It said ‘Golden Boy,’ ” Moe recalled with pleasure. “I was like, ‘Right on!’ I’m still signing those things.”

Moe admitted he was initially uncomfortable with celebrity. He was, after all, raised in relative isolation in Alaska.

At 16, Moe was caught smoking marijuana and was kicked off the local ski team. As punishment, Moe’s father took Tommy to a construction job he was working on a barren patch of land called Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands.

Moe has always been comfortable with himself, and by himself. He now lives in Jackson, Wyo., whiling away the summer months kayaking.

But fame has its allure.

“I’ve learned to like it,” Moe said. “You’ve kind of got to grow into it. At first I was kind of naive. I’ve had to mature into the position.”

Moe says it’s strange when people approach him and ask him why he still races, as though winning a gold medal at 23 was enough for anyone in one lifetime.

“I say, ‘Well, I’m only 27 and I’m having a good time and I feel like I’m in the middle of my career.’ ”

Moe’s career, great as it has been, is still incomplete. Although he is the defending Olympic downhill champion, he has never won a downhill on the World Cup circuit, finishing second once and third three times.

“It’s very important,” he says.

But even if Moe falls on his face in Nagano and never wins another Olympic medal or World Cup race, he will always know that, once, he was king of the mountain.

“My career hasn’t been super consistent, as compared to Phil Mahre, who had 27 World Cup victories,” Moe said. “But I’ve got five national titles, a couple of Olympic medals, and that’s a lot more than I expected growing up.