An Olympic alpine ski racer from Saudi Arabia might read like a misnomer, but Fayik Abdi defied the odds by achieving just that on Sunday. Just a year after taking up racing, Abdi successfully competed in the men’s giant slalom at the Beijing Games in the first step to what he hopes will be an Arab revolution of the truly snowy kind. Abdi is the sole representative from theGulf kingdom, not known so much for its mountain pistes as the vast hinterlands of the Empty Quarter, the vast Rub’ al-Khali desert in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. The 24-year-old’s introduction to skiing, nee…