Skaters Compete at Tacoma

It’s time for Debi Thomas and Brian Boitano to skate down from Olympus and defend their national figure skating championships.

Thomas and Boitano won those titles last year in New York, then rode their personal hot streaks to world championships. They will hold those world crowns at least until March, when the international stars gather in Cincinnati.

This week, Thomas and Boitano will be the headliners at the Tacoma Dome for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The competition begins Tuesday and runs through Saturday.

Thomas became the first black to win a major individual event in the sport when she triple-jumped her way to the national-world double. Boitano has won successive American titles since four-time U.S. and world winner Scott Hamilton retired.

Thomas is a rare athlete who can combine a heavy load of schoolwork--she is a pre-med major at Stanford--with excellence in competition outside the classroom.

“I will not give up school and I will not give up skating,” the 19-year-old from San Jose said. “I need both, they relieve the pressure on me from the other. I can’t do either of them full time and nothing else. If I just skate and focus on one thing, I get all messed up. I need a break from each.

“People say it can’t be done, but it can. It has. I can do it.”

Alex McGowan, Thomas’ coach, likes what he has seen from his student.

“She keeps getting better and better,” McGowan said. “In every aspect -- figures, free skating, the physical strength is there. And there is an innate quality about her approach and feeling for the sport that can’t be taught.”

Thomas clinched her national crown last year with a sensational freestyle program, which counts for 50 percent of the scoring. She beat Caryn Kadavy and 1985 champion Tiffany Chin, who once more will be Thomas’ staunchest foes.

When she won the world championship in Geneva last year, Thomas credited Boitano with helping her to the top.

“Brian’s win the night before was an inspiration to me,” she said. “It lifted me and the whole team.”

Boitano is going for a national championships hat trick. Although he has not dominated the sport the way Hamilton did, Boitano’s performances have improved steadily since the 1984 Olympics.

“I’m on a good road right now,” the 22-year-old native of Sunnyvale, Calif., said. “But I’ve been told the third title is the hardest and I believe it. There are a lot of skaters who could be very tough to beat.”

Those skaters include Scott Williams, Christopher Bowman and Daniel Doran. But Boitano, who won last year despite a painful foot injury, is a solid favorite.

Two more world champions, junior titlists Cindy Bortz and Rudy Galindo, will compete as seniors. They won their world crowns in Kitchener, Ontario, last December.

Bortz won the American junior championship last year and Galindo became the first skater ever to win two medals in the world juniors when he took the men’s event and earned a bronze in pairs with Kristi Yamaguchi.

Also favored this week is the ice dance couple of Renee Rocca and Donald Adair, who will be pushed by Suzanne Semanick and Scott Gregory. Semanick-Gregory outskated Rocca-Adair at the 1986 world championships.

The pairs competition is wide open, with three couples given a good chance of unseating incumbents Gillian Wachsman and Todd Waggoner, who haven’t skated nearly as well since teaming for their U.S. crown.

Jill Watson and Peter Oppegard, Natalie and Wayne Seybold, and Katy Keeley and Joseph Mero are the main challengers for the pairs title. Watson and Oppegard won in 1985 and were heavily favored to repeat last year, but didn’t come close to the performance of Wachsman-Waggoner.