Albertville

* CABLE CAPER: Saboteurs tried to black out television coverage of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony by cutting a transmission cable, the French state telecommunications company said today.France Telecom said the fiber optics cable was cut Saturday between Albertville and the city of Chambery.Coverage of the ceremony, broadcast live around the world, was only slightly affected because emergency back-up facilities took over immediately, France Telecom said in a statement. The cable was later repaired.

HAMAR, Norway -- Dan Jansen's latest Olympic catastrophe was useful in one sense. It enabled us to finally and conclusively identify his problem.Whoops, there it is.Jansen is a speed skating champion with a gremlin lurking somewhere inside him. A nasty little sucker.It lays low when Jansen is skating anywhere other than in the Olympics, which, of course, is just about all of the time. But when it is time for Jansen to skate for a gold medal, it starts stomping and hollering and shouting whatever it is that gremlins shout when they want to get their point across.

ALBERTVILLE, Ala. -- To Christy Alldredge, 17, France is a place she never has seen or thought much about. Still, she has definite ideas when asked if there is anything French she fancies."

ON AND OFF THE AIR:* Two of the more compelling stories from the recent Olympic Winter Games are given another look tonight at 10 on Maryland Public Television, with "Olympic Skater: Kurt Browning."Mr. Browning, you may recall, was the Canadian figure skater who was favored to win a gold medal in Albertville. Instead, he fell to a sixth-place finish.Yet among the losers at the games, he came across on television as one of the classiest -- disappointed, but blaming nobody.Tonight's special was actually filmed before the Olympics in the skater's home region of mountainous Alberta.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- Ninety days to go . . .Armando Cintron of the South Bronx and Puerto Rico is dressed in boots, jeans and an overcoat, preparing to ride his second-hand luge down a sheet of ice carved into the side of the mountain."

ALBERTVILLE, France -- In the village of Val d'Isere, they knew of the special grace and stubborn individualism of an 8-year-old child named Jean-Claude Killy.It was a different place seven years after German occupiers were routed in World War II, a slow-paced town still awakening to the world beyond the next mountain. There were no boutiques stuffed with $400 fuchsia-and-black ski outfits, no restaurants with $40 lunch specials, no $200,000 condos.There wasn't even a television set.In the hard-bitten hamlet in the Savoie region of France, shepherds worked sunup to sundown, grazing cattle on wind-swept land nestled in the Alps.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- If you get past the speed-skating oval that doesn't freeze, the bobsled-luge track that blights a mountain like a rusted appliance, the roads that wind beyond nausea to the top of the world, the sex-test controversy, the condom giveaway, the taxi drivers' strike, the dancers' strike, the snowplow drivers' strike, the $300 tickets, the $8 set of paper napkins and the free "be-nice-to-foreigners" lessons, what you are left with is...

New Jersey?Isn't that the place with the shore, not the slopes? Isn't that the state with a turnpike, a bunch of oil refineries and a native son named Bruce Springsteen?So how do you explain that the only sure-shot gold medalist the United States will bring to the Winter Olympics comes from that great Alpine state of . . .New Jersey?Donna Weinbrecht, a 26-year-old native of West Milford, is the reigning world champion in mogul skiing. The freestyle event, sort of the ice dancing of snow, will be making its first appearance as a medal sport in the Winter Olympics in Albertville.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- He was stuck outside a grimy speed skating oval talking about his week and his career. A cold wind whipped in the twilight, and Dan Jansen's blue eyes darted, but his voice remained steady and firm.He had come to the Winter Olympics in search of a happy ending. He carried the emotional baggage around the ice. So when he raced, fans roared. And when he finished, no matter the place, they cheered."Of course it was worth it," he said. "I didn't win a medal, but I came here saying that winning a medal wasn't my only goal."

Tourists seeking a break on prices at the 1992 Winter Olympics will have about as much success in France's Savoie region as Great Britain's Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards will have in the ski-jumping competition.Tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies in Albertville are on sale for $61, $143, $204 or $305, but one should not count on being able to purchase them because 60 percent of the seats in the 35,000-seat stadium are reserved for media, sponsors and VIPs. Tickets for the figure-skating competition, also in Albertville, will cost $61, $143 or $204.

Reading Time, two minutes: Tell you what's special about the Winter Olympics in case you didn't pick up on it the last couple of weeks or decades: The Games are too small and out of the way to become a platform for world politics. Look, we sent Dan Quayle and it didn't even turn out to be a funeral with our athletes picking up 11 medals.Truth to tell, that Us vs. Them mentality has never been eviden at the Games unless, when the hockey teams met, media types wanted to read something extra into it. After all, during the height of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union always had a team over here looking to pick up rubles and blue jeans, and no one boycotts the February Frolic.

Alpine skiingMEN SlalomGold: Finn Christian Jagge, NorwaySilver: Alberto Tomba, ItalyBronze: Michael Tritscher, AustriaCombinedGold: Josef Polig, ItalySilver: Gianfranco Martin, ItalyBronze: Steve Locher, SwitzerlandDownhillGold: Patrick Ortlieb, AustriaSilver: Franck Piccard, FranceBronze: Guenther Mader, AustriaSuper-GGold: Kjetil Andre Aamodt, NorwaySilver: Marc Girardelli, LuxembourgBronze: Jan Einar Thorsen, NorwayGiant slalomGold: Alberto Tomba, ItalySilver:...

ALBERTVILLE, France -- Two years to go. Two billion dollars to spend. Enough light to spare.There is a hockey arena being created inside a cave. A 27,000-seat cross country stadium spreading along the countryside. An indoor speed skating oval soon to resemble a viking ship.And there will be light, plenty of light, even in a country that is sliced by the Arctic Circle.Today, the world of winter sports bids farewell to the Savoy region of France. But in February 1994, the athletes, bureaucrats and corporate fat cats will reassemble in Lillehammer, Norway, site of the 17th Winter Olympics.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- The U.S. women's 3,000-meter relay team in short track skating produced a wholly unexpected medal in the Albertville Olympics yesterday, the silver, and missed the gold that Canada won in a world record time of 4 minutes, 36.62 seconds by 1.23 seconds.It was the eighth medal won by the American team at these Games, matching the total of eight years ago in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. At the 1988 Calgary Games, the United States won just six medals.For a sport in which teamwork is critical and mistakes potentially dangerous, the U.S. effort might easily have been forgettable, or even disastrous.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- The U.S. women's 3,000-meter relay team in short track skating produced a wholly unexpected medal in the Albertville Olympics yesterday, the silver, and missed the gold that Canada won in a world record time of 4 minutes, 36.62 seconds by 1.23 seconds.It was the eighth medal won by the American team at these Games, matching the total of eight years ago in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. At the 1988 Calgary Games, the United States won just six medals.For a sport in which teamwork is critical and mistakes potentially dangerous, the U.S. effort might easily have been forgettable, or even disastrous.