There is something Ronaldo does that nobody else can do. Something quite miraculous that suggests he may be, well, not quite human. The millisecond before he scores a goal he smiles. The smile is innocent and fulfilled - almost saintly. And in that smile you can still see the goofy loser from the favelas.

Until the 2002 World Cup, Ronaldo was destined to play football's tragic prince. The young man who had everything and lost it all. World player of the year twice by the time he was 21, reduced to a football cripple by 22. We assumed that our last memory of Ronaldo would be the lost, sick boy-man wandering around a pitch in Paris wondering where he was and why.

But in 2002, against all the odds, Ronaldo rewrote history to give himself a happy ending. Now we can remember the man-boy with the crazy haircut who couldn't stop scoring goals. This was his year. Actually, it was his month. He did little in the other 11. But that is the measure of genius - he achieved more in the one than anybody else could in the 12.

Even when he wasn't playing, Ronaldo was the world's most talked-about footballer. We all wanted to know what made him such a winner and such a loser. His brilliance wasn't conventional - he looked too bulky on the ball, he mishit shots, he played with the naivety of a primary-school kid. But this naivety also explained his brilliance - he had no airs and graces. If the ball was there to be hit, he'd hit it. If the defence was there to be run at, he'd run at them. His game was entirely instinctive.

As for his tragic flaw, yes, there was injury, but there was something more. Whatever it was could be traced back to hours before the World Cup final of 1998. That was when he flipped. Even now, four years on, all we know is he had some kind of breakdown, probably a fit. Perhaps the pressure, the extraordinary expectations, had got to him. Perhaps he was psychologically flawed.

It was announced that he wouldn't play in the final. A few minutes later another team sheet was produced, this time with his name reinstated. Brazil were beaten 3-0 by France, and everybody wished he hadn't played. Ronaldo was a sick, dazed ghost that day. Before the 1998 finals, he had announced that he would like to break the record of 13 World Cup goals and score the winner in the final. It was an outrageous statement, but seemed matter of fact the way he said it. After he broke down, we could have laughed and thrown such hubris back in his face. But none of us did.

Questions were asked, everywhere and at every level. It was said that the sponsor of the Brazilian team, Nike, had demanded that he played. Ronaldo was not a footballer, he was a brand - and the success of Brazil and the World Cup final depended on the success of the brand. Perhaps that was his tragic flaw - he had been used and abused and and hung out to dry by big business.

Throughout his short career, he has been a victim of the corporate monster that is modern-day football. After all, this was the boy-man who had been fattened, like a battery chicken, until his legs could no longer support his body. He had always been strong - 5ft 10in and 11 stone by his late teens. But wherever he went - Eindhoven, Barcelona, Milan - they built him up some more. By the time he was at

Milan he was six foot and 13 stone.

After the World Cup, he broke down physically. His knee collapsed, and he hardly played a game in four years. Ronaldo, the world's greatest, was written off. We shouldn't have been surprised. After all, nothing had ever come easy to Ronaldo - except the game.

As a young woman his mother, Sonia dos Santos Barata, visited a witch doctor who told her that one day she would give birth to a boy with enormous skills, and he would transform her life. He told her that the boy would earn millions.

But life was tough for them. Look at photos of the wizened little boy Ronaldo. He looks like a boy-man. His eyes are creased and tired, as if they've already seen too much. According to his mother, he would cry out in his sleep: "Pass it! Let me score." For six hours at a time, he would kick the ball in the tracks between the hovels. Sonia wanted her son to study, to make something of himself. She had seen what football had done to her brother Pipico, who had played for Fluminense and could barely scrape a living after kicking his last ball. But she also remembered what the witch doctor had told her, and knew she had to respect the son who told her he had been put on earth to score.

Ronaldo had wanted to play for the great Brazilian club Flamengo, but he was too expensive for them

they were unwilling to splash out on the daily bus pass that would enable him to cross Rio de Janeiro to their training ground. So, aged

13, he signed for the second division club Sao Cristovao. From there he moved to Cruzeiro, in Belo Horizonte, and by the age of 17 was in the national side. When congratulated on his purchase Frank Arnesen, who as general manager of PSV Eindhoven brought Ronaldo to Europe in 1994, said: "Thanks, but a talent like that would have been discovered by my grandmother."

Most kids from the favelas had bad teeth because of their poor diet. But Ronaldo's teeth were something else. At 15, his teeth were so bucked that he could barely close his mouth. He was shy; inhibited. It wasn't easy to talk, let alone chat up girls. His old friend Calango, who started out at Sao Cristovao with him, once said: "Parties with him always ended with football. He just couldn't find a girl." The first thing Ronaldo did when he started earning money was get his teeth fixed better.

Girlfriends came with fame. Gorgeous, blonde models, all of them. He eventually married Milene Domingues, the keepy-uppy champion who had set a world record by keeping a football off the ground for nine hours. Ronaldo and Milene had a son, Ronald, and between 1998 and 2000 love was the only thing to keep him going. But by 2001 even their love seemed to be on the wane - there were stories that they had split up and the player's mother was looking after Ronald. Life had reached its nadir. It didn't look as if he would play football again. And Brazil were in such a mess that they looked as if they wouldn't qualify for the World Cup finals for the first time.

But they did. And in May 2002, a miracle happened. Ronaldo was named in Brazil's team for a World Cup warm-up game. He scored.

Then came the tournament proper. And Ronaldo was still fit. Against Turkey in the opening game, he scored a typical goal - an apparent mishit, a toe-poked halfvolley, but on replay supernaturally instinctive. Most great goalscorers (Best, Pele, Maradona, Greaves) score great goals or at least take them with great style. But Ronaldo is from the Shaun Goater school of finishing - as happy to tap it in off his arse as to beat five players from the halfway line.

Then he tapped one in against China, smiling as the ball came over from Cafu, scoring, saluting with one finger, and casting an eye to heaven. Against Costa Rica, he scored a goal so scrappy that it initially went down as an own-goal. A few minutes later, he held off a defender or two, twisted in no space, and poked it under the keeper. He defies gravity - a 13-stone ballerina.

Brazil had won all three games in the opening round, Ronaldo had scored four, and still we said he was slow and stiff and not the Ronaldo of old. Against Belgium, he put the ball through the keeper's legs from 20 yards out. Yes, the goalie should have saved it, but Ronaldo tends to shoot so early that they are often taken unawares - especially by his many mishits.

By now Ronaldo was wearing the most ludicrous haircut ever seen in the World Cup finals - shaved all over with a random patch at the front. He looked as if he'd undergone primitive brain surgery. Only Ronaldo could have got away with it.

In the semi-final he beat a Turkish player quite wonderfully, and just as he looked as if he was going to run through the defence, he shot - another early toe-poke helped by the goalkeeper into the corner of the net. His goals are often simultaneously prosaic and poetic; his instincts that of a child.

Brazil v Germany, the World Cup final. Ronaldo looked uncertain, and memories of 1998 flooded back. He lost the ball, then won it back, passed to Rivaldo, who shot. He collected the rebound and scored. A messy goal but audacious in its own way, as if he'd played the most intricate one-two with Rivaldo and the goalkeeper. For the second, he casually sidefooted the ball into the bottom corner.

The World Cup was over. Ronaldo's rehabilitation was complete. He was complete. Top scorer with eight goals, he won player of the tournament, his demons were behind him, and he signed for Real Madrid for £

29.8m. He looked beautiful in the allwhite kit - really beautiful, not just beautiful because he is the world's best playing for the world's best.

Last week he was voted World Soccer's player of the year, on Monday he won European player of the year, and yesterday he was named Fifa's world player of the year. And yet, despite everything, the snipers are already targeting him.

He missed the first few weeks of the season at Real Madrid - injured, of course. The club's honorary president Alfredo di Stefano has complained that he is overweight. Commentators have pointed out that Real have won more games without him than with him, and fair enough he only took 55 seconds to find the net on his debut but his goalscoring record since then has been none too clever.

Players have carped that, though he had a decent enough World Cup, he hardly did anything over the year in Europe to justify being European player of the year. Against Real Sociedad, he was booed off by his own fans. He has been condemned as a traitor to Internazionale's cause for quitting as soon as they had nursed his knee back to health. He has been condemned for spending too much time clubbing, too much time addressing global poverty with Unicef, too much time gossiping with the Pope, too much time pontificating about the virtue of "passive" sex a couple of hours before a match.

Any other player would have been allowed a little slack after such a World Cup. But not Ronaldo. Fine, you came back from the dead and won Brazil the World Cup with an astonishing display of strength and skill, but when are you going to do something worthwhile?

Somehow, Ronaldo remains every bit as vulnerable as he was four years ago, as he was 14 years ago when Flamengo wouldn't pay for his bus pass, as he was 24 years ago as a child of the favelas. But that, just as much as his naive genius for the game, is what makes him so special.