Editor’s note, February 10, 2026: At the 1992 Winter Olympics, in Albertville, France, Italian skiing colossus Alberto Tomba was a favorite to repeat his gold medal wins in the slalom and giant slalom four years earlier, in Calgary, Canada. Powerfully built, dark and handsome, “Tomba La Bomba,” as the tabloids referred to him, had been cutting wide swathes through ski slopes and nightclubs around the world for years. (He famously — though unsuccessfully — pursued German figure skater Katarina Witt at the ’88 games.)
In the February 18, 1992, issue of the Voice, perhaps taking a cue from La Bomba’s combo of confidence, charm, chutzpah, and championship, the paper turned its Jockbeat section into a bombastic Italian sports sheet. This included, in addition to the below advice to the lovelorn column ostensibly written by the suave slalom star, an article on the New York Rangers, as well as Tom “Tomaso” Kertes’s regular basketball column, retooled as “Jam Sezzione” to cover the Italian league standings. (The other contributors to that ersatz Jockbeat, Chris Kelly, John McLaughlin, and editor Jeff Z. Klein, also had an Italian spin added to their names — Christoforo Kelly, Giovanni McLaughlin, and Gioffrido Z. Klein — but we’re not sure today who in particular masterminded the Tomba satire back then.)
This lampoon’s masthead, “Il Mondo Sportivo Della Voce” (which Google Translate informs our current, monolingual editor means “The Sporting World of Voice”), was, like Jockbeat’s logo every week, spread across the second inside back page, right after all of those classified pages brimming with apartment listings, myriad help-wanted categories, and the personal, escort, and phone sex ads.
One day, when the gods and planets (or at least the keepers of the corporate purse strings) align to finish the scanning and processing of all those hundreds of thousands of newsprint pages that comprise the Village Voice archive, all can rejoice. In that glorious future, readers will be able to revel in yet another piece from that 1992 sports satire, which was headlined “Cataclysmic Ignominy!” and told the sad tale of the U.S. men’s luge team at that year’s Winter games: “these buffons, these pantomime athletes, these purloiners of our manhood … lying immobile on their sleds as the snickers of the crowd turned to open laughter, as the great American luging tradition was transmogrified into one great guffaw.”
Until that PDF Liberation Day arrives, however, we must accept, from the yellowed pages of “The Sporting World of Voice,” only Tomba as our guide to a grander past. —R.C. Baker
SALUTE, TOMBA!
Advice from Alberto Tomba
Master of the Snows
by Jockbeat
February 18, 1992
Salute, Tomba! I love to ski but I’m worried about my expensive ski gear. I live in upstate New York and we don’t get the snowfall we used to. Last season I used my beat-up Rossignol rock skis all winter. What sort of coverage should I wait for before I strap on my K2s and fluid-filled boots?
Girardelli! You have plenty more skis where those came from! Have your press agent call for more. Don’t you know how to use the phone? Your problem is of little consequence.
Salute, Tomba! What kind of wax do you use?
Tomba has never asked.
Salute, Tomba! Where do you like to ski in America?
No.
Salute, Tomba! Was that my wife I saw you with at Piz Gloria last weekend?
Last weekend Tomba was at Val d’Aosta with the Hemingway sisters. You’re thinking of the week before last.
Salute, Tomba! If you’re such a big shot how come you don’t ski the Super G?
Tomba regrets he cannot answer your question, as he is driving his Lamborghini to Cortina d’Ampezzo with your sister.
Salute, Tomba! My girlfriend, or maybe I should say my ex-girlfriend, says she needs “more space.” We’ve been going out since the sheriff auctioned my family’s pick-your-own berry ranch and I thought things were okay. Every Tuesday we’d meet by the abandoned X-ray smelter at the railhead and eat beef jerky and compare job-hunting experiences. Sometimes we’d go to her mother’s place and watch black-and-white TV. Now she tells me her old boyfriend, I never even heard of the guy before, is moving back from Jrecksburg and he’s more “exciting” than I am. How do I win her back?
Bella donna, eh? We will see who she chooses after she sees you making the far figura at Val Bedia with Claudia Schiffer. Then she’ll come running back, take it from me. Hurry! Don’t pause even to open the door of your Alfa, jump in and go! That’s what Tomba would do.
Salute, Tomba! Last winter at Greek Peak, I accidentally ripped my kidney falling on my ski poles. What should I do?
Girardelli! Tomba scoffs at the inconsequence of your troubles. Enjoy life!
Salute, Tomba! I’m a graduate student in anthropology. I’ve always been sort of shy with women. Last week we got a new assistant at the major university where I work, killing goats with primitive stone tools, dissecting them, and comparing their bones to recent finds from digs in the Great Lakes region. Although I had never talked to the new assistant, a rumor started that I liked her and she walked up to me from out of the blue and said that she’d just like to be friends. I said I didn’t care, but now I don’t know. She seems very nice and now I think I’d like to ask her out. What should I do?
Tomba mentioned your problem to the princesses Sophie and Caroline at Verbier last Friday. They shared a healthy laugh at your expense. Tomba, a robust Bolognese, laughed the hardest and longest. ❖
