A J Kitt

The long, snowy trail to Albertville starts in Park City, Utah, where the opening Alpine World Cup ski competition will be held this weekend. These races are for men only--including longtime rivals Alberto Tomba of Italy and Marc Girardelli of Luxembourg--so there probably won't be any Americans on the podium after either Saturday's giant slalom or Sunday's slalom. Park City is the U.S.

American ski racers returned to Europe Wednesday, less than a week after they flew home to avoid any potential terrorism and two days after the start of the World Alpine Ski Championships. Apparently satisfied with the additional security precautions being taken by the International Ski Federation, U.S.

Diann Roffe, America's leading ski racer, will be examined today by Dr. Richard Steadman in Vail, Colo., to determine the extent of damage to her left knee, which she injured Wednesday in a downhill training spill at Morzine, France. One of Roffe's teammates, Kristin Krone, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying: "The doctor (in France) examined her, and there is a problem with the ligaments of the left knee but he doesn't know how serious.

The ski lift goes up, goes up, goes up, past the internal checkpoints, past Anxiety, by Butterflies, beyond Gut Churn, over Don't Look, into Nausea, above Nosebleed, approaching Adrenaline, ascending toward Euphoria, easing into Serenity. The car seat sways, like a Ferris wheel's. All around you: beauty. Down below: Death. Your life. Hanging by a cable. Your prayer: Save me, Lord, and from now on, I'll be a good boy, stick to safer sports on Sundays, maybe go bowling. Shut your eyes.

Bill Johnson, the only American to win a gold medal in an Olympic downhill race, will retire from international ski racing later this month, a few weeks short of his 30th birthday. Johnson, who called his shot in the 1984 Games at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, has been hampered by knee and back injuries and failed to qualify for the U.S. team at either the 1988 Winter Olympics or the 1989 World Alpine Ski Championships.

Stein Eriksen sat nobly, like a marble statue, in a downtown hotel lobby recently. One look made you want to sign up for ski school. It wasn't just the turtleneck sweater, or the lilting Scandinavian accent, or the way he ordered a glass of Chardonnay, or that you swore you saw this guy in the movies once chasing Sean Connery down the Alps with bullets flying out of his ski poles. It was more that Eriksen, who turns 65 on Dec. 11, looks 50 if he looks a day. He is skiing's walking billboard.

Swiss skiers overcame extremely high winds to post three of the five fastest times in Friday's training run for the Olympic men's downhill race. Italian Danilo Sbardellotto was the quickest, flying down the slightly shortened course in 1 minute 47.84 seconds. Then came Switzerland's Franz Heinzer, .14 behind, followed by Austria's Guenther Mader, .17 back, and two more Swiss--Pirmin Zurbriggen and Peter Mueller, who were .31 and .67 slower than the leader, respectively.

It's only about three months late, but a full-fledged ski season seems to have arrived in California. The first of an anticipated series of storms dumped up to two feet of snow on Southland ski areas and at least half that amount on High Sierra resorts from Mammoth Mountain to Lake Tahoe by late Thursday. For skiers, limited mainly to slopes covered by man-made snow or diverted to Utah and Colorado in search of powder, it's about time.

Bill Johnson proved beyond doubt that he is the 10th-fastest downhill skier in America Thursday. Unfortunately for the 1984 Olympic champion, this did nothing to support his contention that he should have been named to the 1988 U.S. team, which will compete at Calgary starting a week from Saturday. The winner here in the first race of the National Alpine Championships, a kind of winter carnival that excludes those mean old spoilsports from Europe, was Jeff Olson of Bozeman, Mont.