Welcome to a Winter Wonderland...Right

As if it couldn’t get any chillier, these two words were certain to perk up the spirits of every snow-weary athlete, journalist and Olympic official who logged onto the electronic bulletin board here Tuesday morning:

Avalanche Advisory.

They weren’t talking about the imminent arrival of Patrick Roy and Peter Forsberg, either.

Yes, these Olympics are finally kicking into gear, progressing from mere inconvenience to potential natural disaster.

What next?

Beware of runaway glacier?

Rabid snow monkey alert?

The CBS transmitter freezes up the night of the women’s figure skating short program?

The Games of Doom moved forward gingerly Tuesday, stepping lightly, taking care not to make any sudden loud noises. There would be no landslide, thankfully. There would be no women’s Alpine super-G, either, because what would these Games be without their requisite daily ski event cancellation?

Men’s combined slalom actually made it out of the gate, an historic occasion. Day 4 of the Olympics: A skier finally makes it down the hill! Although this was not slalom skiing in the dashing Jean-Claude Killy shoosh-right, shoosh-left, powder-spraying tradition.

This was men’s combined slalom snowplowing. “Chaos,” Austrian star Hermann Maier called it. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Maier is running away with the men’s World Cup overall championship, the world’s top-ranking skier at the moment, but he nearly fell during his first run and finished the day with an aggregate time of 1 minute 35.90 seconds--more than four seconds behind leader and Austrian teammate Mario Reiter.

The three-man American contingent was a complete washout, none of them able to finish both runs. Jason Rosener and Chad Fleischer bailed out on the first run. Matt Grosjean of Aliso Viejo was a shocking third after the first run, but with visibility lessening by the minute, he missed a gate his second time down the slope and skied off the course and out of the competition with his head in his hands.

A few frozen peaks to the east, the women’s snowboard giant slalom, rescheduled from Monday, finally opened for business, with another warning sign planted atop Mount Yakebitai:

Watch out for falling Americans.

All four U.S. women wiped out during the morning run, and only Sondra Van Ert qualified for the finals--in 16th place.

Rosey Fletcher and Lisa Kosglow crashed and failed to finish. Betsy Shaw missed a gate and was disqualified. Van Ert, among the favorites for the gold medal, fell once but righted herself to complete the run in 1:17.89--more than 8 1/2 seconds behind first-round leader Karine Ruby of France.

Ruby won the first Olympic gold medal in women’s snowboarding; France will forever remember this day as Ruby Tuesday. Van Ert, meanwhile, finished a disappointing 12th, more than 10 seconds off the pace.

A course littered with rock-hard ice chunks--”death cookies” snowboarders call them--made for treacherous boarding. Fletcher wondered if the race should have been held at all.

Thus, the Games are four days old and the United States is still looking for its first medal, of any color. In the overall medal standings, Team USA is tied for 14th, with about 70 other nations. That places the United States behind Belgium, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine . . . and Bulgaria. Biathlete Yekaterina Dafovska produced Bulgaria’s first-ever Winter Olympics gold medal when she won the women’s 15-kilometer event Tuesday.

It has been tough sledding all around for the Americans, even when they stay on their feet and turn in personal bests. Speedskater KC Boutiette set a men’s American record at 5,000 meters--and finished in 14th place. Speedskate teammate Casey FitzRandolph set an Olympic record during the first round of men’s 500-meter competition--only to have his record immediately broken by Hiroyasu Shimizu of Japan and Kevin Overland of Canada.

At least there’s always ice hockey. The U.S. women beat up on another frozen cupcake, pounding Sweden, 7-1, and the U.S. men, amid much pomp and circumstance, swaggered into Nagano for their first official Olympic act, a sit-down with the international media.

Michelle Kwan also arrived, getting in her first Nagano workout--and fell on her first jump, a triple lutz. A hundred reporters were on hand to report the mishap . . . and, yes, it is going to be a very long eight days until the women’s short program.

In the meantime, U.S. skier Picabo Street spoke for everyone here when she stood on the women’s super-G course in Hakuba, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up at the heavens, “You want snow because it’s a winter event, but it’s, like, ‘We’ve got enough now, thank you! ‘ “