THREE FOR ALL . . . : Women’s Skating Doesn’t Get Much More Competitive : Trenary, Thomas, Kadavy Are the Best, but in What Order?

They are a premed student from California, a ballerina’s daughter from Pennsylvania and a defending champion from Minnesota who still has something to prove. Except that they all are women figure skaters who train in Colorado, they have little in common.

Two of them, Jill Trenary and Caryn Kadavy, train at the same rink for the same coach but seldom speak to one another. The other, Debi Thomas, will speak to anyone about anything until she is asked about being a black in an overwhelmingly white sport.

“I thought I got rid of that question two years ago,” she says, sighing.

As a group, they are providing much of the suspense for this year’s national championships, which will end Saturday night with the women skating in prime time for a national television audience.

Will it be Trenary, Thomas and Kadavy, as was their order of finish in last year’s nationals at Tacoma? Or will it be Thomas, Kadavy and Trenary, as they were ranked after last year’s world championships? Or will Kadavy finally move to the forefront?

Individually, all three are capable of winning. Collectively, they are so strong that another world-class U.S. skater, Tiffany Chin, decided to turn professional rather than confront them. So strong that two junior world champions, Cindy Bortz of Tarzana, and Kristi Yamaguchi of Fremont, Calif., are given virtually no hope of finishing among the top three and earning berths on the U.S. team in next month’s Winter Olympics at Calgary, Canada.

“I’m not saying that Jill, Caryn and I are going to be the team because I know how I felt in my first nationals when everybody said they already had the team picked out,” Thomas said. “It can go any way.”

Do not believe that for one moment.

Asked if he has a favorite among the three, ABC’s Dick Button, a two-time Olympic champion, said, “Absolutely.” Pause.

“Who might that be,” the interrogator asked, coaxing him.

“Oh,” Button said, “that’s my bad ear.”

“Really, it could be any one of them,” he continued. “It’s the best competition in ladies’ figure skating at the national championships since 1956. That year in Philadelphia, Tenley Albright, Carol Heiss and Catherine Machado skated against each other.

“Tenley was the Olympic champion, Carol was the world champion and Cathy Machado was sensational. It was one hell of a competition, I’ll tell you that. This one is equal to that.”

Thomas, 20, generally is considered the more equal of the three. After winning the national championship in 1986, she also won the world championship, becoming the only person since 1983 to beat East German Olympic champion Katarina Witt.

But, suffering from tendinitis in both ankles and overloaded with class work at Stanford, Thomas, who is from San Jose, finished second to Trenary at the 1987 national championships and, despite improvement within the next month, was unable to successfully defend her world championship, finishing second to Witt.

“Tacoma was really hard to deal with,” she said this week, referring to last year’s national competition. “My attitude was lousy. I felt like I didn’t want to be there and my feet hurt. I felt like, ‘Why do I have to be here?’ But I did have to be there.

“At the worlds, I wanted to prove that I could still stand up on my feet and skate. I came pretty close to winning, even though I didn’t skate my best.”

Thomas said that she believes she is skating her best this year. After her coach, Alex McGowan, lost his Redwood City rink because of financial problems, Thomas moved with him to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she is taking three courses. She said that she plans to return to Stanford after the Olympics to complete her premed studies.

For the time being, however, she said that she is concentrating entirely on skating. Besides working on her freestyle program with former Olympic champion Robin Cousins, she also has spent several hours with Spanish ballet choreographer George de la Pena and has even conferred with ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov.

About the only disappointment for Thomas this week is that she appears to be the favorite, at least among the media. “I was kinda hoping that I would be the underdog,” she said. “I mean, Jill is the defending champion.”

Defending champion or not, Trenary, 19, said that she also wants to be the underdog.

“I don’t feel like everyone is expecting me to win,” she said. “I like that role.”

She has been playing it since 1985, when her calf muscle was severed by another skater’s blade. There was a fear that she might not walk normally again, much less skate.

“I had to decide how much I wanted to do this,” she said. “I had just won the junior national title. A lot of people said, ‘That’s great. You can quit as a winner.’ But I wasn’t ready to quit. It was hard sometimes, but I knew that I wanted it.”

She graduated to the senior level in 1986 and finished fifth in the nationals, then stunned everyone by winning last year.

“As soon as I won, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, what’s happening here? This wasn’t the plan,’ ” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be the national champion, but I didn’t expect it. The odds of me winning were practically nothing. Figure skating is the kind of sport where you have to wait your turn.”

A month later, in her first world championship, she had a disastrous first figure in the compulsories, left the arena in tears and finished seventh overall. She has been on the defensive ever since.

“Just because I finished seventh at the worlds doesn’t mean I didn’t deserve to be the national champion,” she said. “All I’ve heard is that Debi wasn’t in good shape and that it was a fluke that I won.

“That makes me mad. People shouldn’t say that because when I get mad I try harder. I’m going to do my best to prove that I can beat Debi two years in a row.”

Trenary is from Minnetonka, Minn., and Kadavy from Erie, Pa. For the last four years, though, they have been training at the Broadmoor World Arena Club in Colorado Springs under Carlo and Christa Fassi, who also coached Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. Trenary and Kadavy both graduated from Cheyenne Mountain High School.

Although they once were closer, their relationship has cooled since they became world-class skaters.

Kadavy, 20, was the prestigious Broadmoor’s star after finishing second to Thomas in the 1986 nationals, but she had to bow to Trenary after last year’s nationals. Kadavy had to struggle to finish ahead of Chin for third place and earn a berth on the World Championship team.

Once she got to the World Championships, however, she reasserted herself, winning the bronze medal behind Witt and Thomas.

The daughter of a former dancer for the Pittsburgh Ballet, Kadavy is not as athletic as Thomas or Trenary but is perhaps the world’s most artistic skater. If Kadavy had come along earlier, before there was so much emphasis on triple jumps, she would be considered one of the country’s greatest skaters.

“She has to be compared with a Peggy Fleming,” said veteran judge Monty Hoyt, favoring her with the highest accolade in women’s skating. “She probably has the most elegant, balletic, graceful style--maybe of all time. When Peggy Fleming watches her, she gets tears in her eyes. I know that.”

But in this era, when figure skating competitions resemble flying circuses, Kadavy is often considered the odd woman out.

“I don’t think about what other people are saying,” Kadavy said. “I have to go out and skate for myself. Having those two being talked about by everyone means that I don’t feel the pressure.”

The pressure may be on the judges. McGowan, Thomas’ coach, already has been accused of attempting to influence them. He was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that Thomas has the best chance to beat Witt in Calgary but must win here to be in a position to do so. McGowan later denied that he was sending a message to the judges.

“I just said that if she won here, it would give her a great psychological boost,” he said. “We would go back to train with a strong feeling.

“But I don’t feel the placing here will decide the placing in Calgary. I’d be crazy to say that if Debi doesn’t win here she won’t win at the Olympics. But it is important for her to win psychologically. I don’t think that there’s any argument there.

“I don’t do anything to influence the judges. I didn’t know that judges could be influenced.”

Figure Skating Notes Three-time national champion Brian Boitano of Sunnyvale, Calif., won all three figures in Wednesday’s compulsories and leads going into tonight’s short program. Christopher Bowman of Van Nuys is second, improving over his fifth-place finish in last year’s compulsories. Denver’s Paul Wylie, who is majoring in social studies at Harvard, is third. The women’s compulsories are scheduled for today.

Defending champions Suzanne Semanick and Scott Gregory of the University of Delaware Skating Club retained their lead through the original set pattern of the championship ice dancing competition Wednesday night. Susan Wynne of the Philadelphia Skating Club and Joseph Druar of the Seattle Skating Club are second.

In an unpredictable freestyle program, in which the leader fell from first to seventh place, Dena Galech, 17, of Seattle improved from fifth to win the junior ladies’ championship.