Twists that damage a champion's health;

OLYMPIC gold medals were never won without athletes putting their backs into it but for Kurt Browning the phrase has a more chilling meaning. Putting his into winning the gold tonight could cripple him.

Browning is the great innovator of men's figure skating, a three-time world champion and, in 1989, the first skater to complete a quadruple jump in competition.

But the pounding of those gravity-defying twists and turns has exacted a terrible price on his body. His spine now, say those who have examined it, would not be out of place in a man 30 years his senior and working on it has become a full-time occupation for the Canadian team's chiropractors.

Practising the jumps has left him skating on thin ice. Last year he was taking holidays between training spells to rehabilitate. When he arrived here, he was recovering from a slipped disc. Now, after a fall on a triple jump in the short programme on Thursday, he knows he can win only with a perfect execution in the free programme of a routine that will strain his spine to the limit.

Even then he will be dependent on Viktor Petrenko, from the United Team of the former Soviet republics, finishing no better than third in the free programme. But with the fabulous rewards of the professional circuit waiting, the risk must be taken.

'Until a year ago I was injury-free but all these injuries have made me give serious attention to what I do,' he says. 'I warm up a lot better now, and I restrict the number of triple-triple combinations I do in practice.'

Browning's reputation saved him from a more severe dressing-down by judges in the short programme. His fall should have cost him a mandatory penalty of six-tenths of a point from each judge but only one imposed it.

Their sympathy to an injured champion kept him in fourth place but their generosity did not extend to those whose fame does not go before them. Briton Steven Cousins was one of the sufferers.

'I've never been so pumped up in my life,' he said, and the French crowd rose to applaud a routine which contained the first two triple toe loops he has attempted in competition. Seconds later they were booing the marks of a set of judges who could not agree on anything during the evening beyond Petrenko's first place.

Their marks for Cousins' technique ranged from 4.5 to 5.3, and while one judge, a Finn, placed him as high as sixth and ahead of the US champion Christopher Bowman, another, a Czech, dumped him into 14th place. 'I could not understand those marks because they were miles too low,' his coach Alex McGowan said.