One Last Chance

HAMAR - The form book makes for grim reading.

Albertiville, 1992. Oakland, 1992. Hamilton, 1993. Edmonton, 1994. Crash. Oops. Thump. Gulp.

Prague, 1993. Hey, look what I found!

It has come to be the most dramatic moment of any figure skating competition in which Kurt Browning has taken part for the last few years, and it will be again, today, in Hamar: The moment, very early on in his short program, when he turns to face the monster - the one jump a skater must look in the eye, going forward on liftoff.

And with only last year's world championships in Prague to prove the exception to the rule, the triple Axel combination has won the staring contest, again and again and again, since 1991.

Back then, Kurt Browning was pretty much thought to be bulletproof. Nerves of steel. Guts of a burglar. At the 1991 world championships in Munich, Browning was 24, and at the peak of his powers. The very idea of a mental block developing between those ears seemed preposterous.

Three years later, as the so-called experts sit ringside at the Olympic Ampitheatre in Hamar, watch practices and build their own form chart for the 1994 Olympic Games, it's a roll of the dice. It has actually reached the point where a clean short program by Browning - or anything close to one - would rank as a pleasant surprise.

"My percentage in practice has been pretty good, it's around 50-50," Browning said. "That's all you want, right? It's only the Olympics."

He was kidding, of course. Ninety-five percent would be a lot more comfortable.

But he picked up a sinus cold earlier in the week, and his success rate has plummeted along with his spirits. He has kept up a chatty front, but this close to an Olympic short program, everyone's insides are a tortured mess.

Only Elvis Stojko seems completely oblivious to the pressure - Wednesday, he came off the ice to sit with American reporters who were enthralled by his friendly, open personality.

"There are too many variables to control in a competition like this to predict what will happen," Stojko said, "but I feel very, very good right now. Some of these guys have built reputations that are very much in the minds of the people who'll be watching them, but I feel I'm still in the hunt."

The 1988 Olympic champion, Brian Boitano, also has had a low-key week, content to hide in the large shadow cast by the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan pie-throwing contest, but the silky-smooth 30-year-old emerged Wednesday to pronounce himself ready and feeling good about his chances, even though he skates first out of 25 competitors tonight.

"It's going to let me go right out from the warmup and perform. You put everything out there and then it's up to the judges," he said.

Browning, who skates last, has been relentlessly optimistic in all his public comments, but despite coming here happy and healthy - two things he was not in Albertville - his form has looked spotty, as it did in France.

Right now, of the five leading contenders for the men's gold medal, the four-time and defending world champion from Caroline, Alta., gets the majority of votes as the man most likely to blow himself out of the competition opening night with a fatal error. And nothing is more fatal than missing the triple Axel combination.

"Kurt's had a few problems in practice," said Paul Martini, the former world pairs champion who has been handling Browning's technical training this week, with coach Louis Stong only returning Wednesday from Oslo where he has been working with Canadian womens' champ Josee Chouinard.

"His percentage has been pretty good on the Axel combination, but when he gets in trouble is when he lets himself float. It's easy to do on a big ice surface like this. He's used to skating at the (Toronto Granite Club, where the rink is maybe 180 by 80 feet. This sucker is huge, it has to be 200 by 100.

"So we have to keep reminding him: You don't own that last 10 feet on the sides or the ends. You don't want any part of it. You have to skate the program the way it's drawn up.

"I'll tell you right now, if you see him within six to eight feet of those side boards, he's going to have problems. If he's 10 to 15 feet away, you know he's doing it right. But the guy is a helluva competitor. You never know."

This is true. Browning has confounded his doubters many times before, and he has improved the artistic side of his game to such an extent that if the long program were first, he'd be laughing. But no amount of cuteness can overcome a big missed element in the technical program.

A rut, a missed edge, an infinitesimally small miscalculation of rotation, or just a momentary failure to correctly focus the attention on the right thing - so many things could go wrong. And one is all it takes.

That's why the five-man race for the gold among Browning, Stojko, Boitano, defending Olympic champion Viktor Petrenko and American champ Scott Davis figures to be less cluttered come Friday.

Someone's going to make the big mistake.