SKIING: Schuuuusss!

More than a century ago, the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen hiked down the mountain range at Kvitfjell. It was, he recalled in his play Peer Gynt, akin to riding a wild buck through "the wide and dizzy void."

Last week Diann Roffe-Steinrotter could identify with that. Clad in skintight purple spandex at the starting gate of the Olympic course, the diminutive (5 ft. 4 in.) racer from Potsdam, New York, gazed down the ice- glazed slope to the distant valley below. In the Arctic chill, a kaleidoscopic blur of 40,000 snowsuits gazed back through a vast video screen. "I was sick-to-my-stomach nervous," she said. "I tried to drink water. My insides felt like California during the earthquake." But somehow as she zipped past red barns and sailed over moose and lynx paths down a sun-striped highway of snow, Roffe-Steinrotter summoned Olympian reserves. First in line among 56 skiers in the super-G, a cross between a downhill and a giant-slalom course, she had no one else's mistakes to guide her. "It's one day, one hill, 1 1/2 minutes," she told herself, "and whoever shakes and bakes the best is going to get the gold."

Ibsen she's not, but Roffe-Steinrotter was poetry in motion as the first American woman to win an Olympic Alpine ski race in a decade. It was the second surprise victory of the week for the U.S. Her countryman Tommy Moe had blasted off with a gilded glide in the downhill and followed with a silver medal in the men's super-G. "I've skied my butt off," said Moe, a square- jawed, square-talking Alaskan. "Now it's paying off." On Saturday Americans struck ore again with a silver in the women's downhill for the irrepressible Idaho daredevil Picabo Street. "I skied like a dirtbag," she said, "but I was charging down the mountain."

Not bad for a bunch only recently dubbed "Uncle Sam's lead-footed snowplow brigade," by Sports Illustrated magazine. Yet even U.S. ski officials seemed stunned by the team's sudden resurrection. "It's the most unbelievable thing I've seen in sports," said American coach Paul Major of Roffe-Steinrotter's win. The 26-year-old veteran's career was in a slump, and she had failed to place higher than eighth in any World Cup race since capturing a silver medal in the 1992 Albertville Olympics. As for Moe, he had not won a major downhill contest in five years -- and no American man had claimed an Olympic Alpine medal since 1984. None in history had won two in the same Games. But criticism galvanized the team. "I was really stoked," said Moe, who attributes the success to hard training. "We don't deserve to be ridiculed."