BEFORE most Americans knew a triple axel from a triple play, before Tonya Harding's life went from hard times to Hard Copy, before Nancy Kerrigan became America's victimized sweetheart and her attackers became America's most wanted, these Winter Olympics figured to be a placid gathering in Lillehammer, Norway, of familiar participants and redundant accomplishment.
Only two years have passed since the last Winter Games in Albertville, France. Many athletes have remained in training, not having to shelve their Olympic hopes for the customary four-year wait. Bonnie Blair and Alberto Tomba are back hoping to win their fourth and fifth gold medals; Dan Jansen is back, too, still hoping to win his first. The idea behind this Olympic restructuring, the separating of the Winter Games from the shadow of the Summer Games, was partly to give the smaller, quaint Winter Olympics their own identity. Now they have one. The wrong one.
The stories of Blair, Jansen and Tomba as well as the return to Olympic figure skating of the gold medalists Brian Boitano, Katarina Witt and Torvill and Dean have been overwhelmed by the Jan. 6 clubbing attack on Kerrigan. She was struck above the right knee after a practice at the national championships in Detroit and was unable to compete in the event. In her absence, Harding won her second national title and a spot on the Olympic team.
It is a story unlike any other that has contravened the tattered Olympic spirit of fair play and sportsmanship, the specter of one athlete's associates attempting to incapacitate another athlete for competitive and financial gain. Even as Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, has called for a truce from the fighting in Bosnia during the Games, he cannot guarantee peace in the genteel world of figure skating.
"This robs the Games of such an important ideal, fair play," said John Ruger, who represents athletes as a member of the United States Olympic Committee. "It happened with Ben Johnson. He was one person who screwed up, but he robbed the Games themselves of something. That's what hurts so much."
But in an odd, even perverse way, this is the best thing that ever happened to figure skating. The sport has gone from the sports page to the front page of every major newspaper and gained television time from tabloid programs to "60 Minutes." The women's competition in Norway, CBS officials say, may provide the highest rating ever for an Olympic program. Some television executives are even talking Super Bowl ratings numbers.
"I don't think anything could have done more for figure skating than this," said Tom Collins, a skating tour promoter from Minneapolis. "It's too bad it had to happen this way. But it has."
Michael Rosenberg, an agent from Palm Springs, Calif., who formerly represented Harding, said: "This has got all the elements of soap opera, Shakespeare and fairy tales. You've got a villain, you've got a heroine who looks like Snow White, and you've got this incredible drama. The kingdom is at stake."
Kerrigan has become the most visible, sympathetic female athlete in the world. Two years ago, nervous, painfully inarticulate, she struggled to answer simple questions put to her at news conferences. Eleven months ago, at the world championships in Prague, she skated a disastrous long program, finished fifth and was caught by the television cameras saying, "I just want to die," as she awaited her scores in the kiss-and-cry area. She had a fragile confidence and had never skated a clean program in practice, much less in competition, winning a bronze medal at the 1992 Winter Games only because Harding, who finished fourth, fell in both her short and long programs. But this attack has drawn Kerrigan out of a skater's sheltered life, has imbued her with a certain awareness, eloquence and, according to her coaches, intractable determination.
"She might have fragile emotions on the ice, but she doesn't have fragile emotions about things like this," said Mary Scotvold, who coaches Kerrigan with her husband, Evy. "She's a very tough little girl. She's a fighter."
Can she win a gold medal? Yes, but the women's competition is wide open. Even healthy, Kerrigan will not have skated before judges in nearly three months. She will not have competed against any of her Olympic opponents in four months. Surya Bonaly of France, the European champion, is a more skilled jumper; Oksana Baiul, the 16-year-old world champion from Ukraine, is a more elegant skater. Chen Lu of China is another formidable rival and potential medalist.
"I have to skate the performance of my life," Kerrigan has said.
If she does, and wins a gold medal, her comeback would earn Olympic immortality, as well as $10 million to $15 million in endorsements, appearances, tours, clinics, skating camps, even movies. By mid-January, some 35 movie-of-the week offers had come through the transom, producers eager to tell the story of her blue-collar upbringing, the daughter of a welder and a blind mother from Stoneham, Mass., who overcame all the odds to become Rocky on skates.
"If she wins, she will be the biggest thing in the history of figure skating," said Collins, the promoter. "She'll do better than Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming combined."
Whatever happens at the Olympics, figure skating will never be looked upon the same. Its delicate porcelain world has shattered. A glamour sport has been exposed for its pettiness and vicious one-upmanship.
The host country, Norway, has not entered a single figure skater in these Games. At the recent Norwegian figure skating championships, only 100 people attended. But the Olympic ice hall will be full, and the rest of the world will be watching the figure skaters, if for all the unintended reasons.
"It takes us down to the wrestling league," said Claire Ferguson, president of the United States Figure Skating Association. "That's too bad."
Photo: Will the British ice dancers, Torvill and Dean, have enough substance in Lillehammer in 1994 to go with their 1984 gold-medal winning style? Will Boitano, one of two reigning men's Olympic figure skating champions in the 1994 event, have enough stamina and charisma to turn Lillehammer 1994 into Calgary 1988? Will he acrobatic, high-jumping Bonaly have enough style to go with her substance? A vicious blow to the knee turned Nancy Kerrigan into the athlete to watch and the women's figure skating competition into the focal point of these Winter Games. Will she be able to stand up to the heat? (pg. 1); Tonya Harding used to be known as the only American woman to cleanly perform a tripple axel. (Associated Press)(pg. 8)
