As a toddler, Jhonny and his elder sister Karina were adopted by an Italian couple who brought them up in their village home near Turin. And took them skiing.

On Tuesday, with Brazil “in my heart,” the 22-year-old Longhi will make his Olympic debut in the giant slalom race.

“I'm happy to compete for Brazil,” Longhi told The Associated Press on the eve of the race.

“It's like when you meet a beautiful girl and you say, 'Wow.' It's the same for me,” he said of choosing to represent the country of his birth instead of his adopted home.

It did not mean rejecting Italy.

In fact, his adopted father Lorenzo suggested it.

When Longhi was 15, his obvious talent meant he had to pick a sporting nationality according to International Ski Federation rules.

“His father sent us an e-mail and Jhonny came to the Brazil national championships,” Stefano Arnhold, president of the sun-baked nation's snow sports federation, told the AP. “We were very impressed.” Those championships were held in neighboring Chile because Brazil doesn't have much in the way of snow, or skiers. The federation has about 60 registered Alpine skiers including Longhi and 18-year-old Olympian Maya Harrisson, Arnhold said.

It's meant Longhi's achievement in reaching Olympic qualifying standards has won him plenty of media attention in Brazil, which has sent Alpine skiers to the Winter Olympics since 1994 but has just five athletes in all sports at the Vancouver Games.

“For this, I want to do a great race,” Longhi said.

However, he doesn't expect Olympic fame to connect him with the family which gave him up for adoption 20 years ago in the city of Americana, Sao Paulo state.

“I have my family in Italy and this is all for me,” he said. “The life is very good in Italy. We eat very good, we train very well and it's good weather.” The couple who changed Jhonny's life, Lorenzo and Maura Longhi, were in Vancouver to see him parade at the Olympic opening ceremony. Maura has since returned home to Invorio but Lorenzo will be at Whistler on Tuesday, and for the slalom scheduled for Saturday, to watch the boy he introduced to skiing aged five.

“He's a very good man and I'm happy he made me ski,” Jhonny said.

Aged 17, Longhi represented Brazil at the first of his three World Championships. But his low ranking confined him to qualification runs held separately from the elite medal races.

At Whistler he will compete on the same course with Bode Miller and around 100 other skiers entered in Tuesday's giant slalom.

Longhi wants a top-30 finish from the two-run event.

“It's very difficult but if I ski like in the training, it's possible,” he said. “The snow's very hard, like I like it. The slope's a little bit long, maybe.” Longhi takes confidence that conditions are similar to his famously steep home slope at Alta Badia, where he works with Italian coach Max Toniut and is friends with Olympic medal contenders Max Blardone and Alex Ploner.

Three of Longhi's four career World Cup races have been in the Alta Badia giant slalom.

Those efforts did not register in Brazil where the national obsession with football means there is only one World Cup that counts.

“I don't like football too much,” says Longhi. “I prefer beach volleyball.” This week he hopes to turn his people back home on to skiing.