Kuchiki-Sand Gliding Swiftly Toward the Top : Figure skating: World championships launch Valley pair into contention for an Olympic gold medal.

Only 19 months ago, when Natasha Kuchiki was 12 and Todd Sand 25, they were the oddest couple in figure skating.

Today, they’re the hottest.

From virtual unknowns, Kuchiki and Sand have rocketed to pre-eminence among U. S. pairs and have made a rapid arrival on the international scene, placing a surprising third in the World Figure Skating Championships last month in Munich. “We would have been happy to be seventh,” said Denise Kuchiki, Natasha’s mother.

With a new world order in pairs figure skating--perennial world and U. S. champions have either retired or turned pro in the past few months--Kuchiki and Sand suddenly find themselves competing for the vacancies at the top.

The Soviets, dominant for the past three decades, appear vulnerable, and Americans are daring to speak the seemingly unspeakable: Olympic gold, an accomplishment that has eluded U. S. pairs for 12 years.

“I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility at all,” said Sand, now 27.

Their strongest rivals in the 1992 Winter Olympics, of course, will be the Soviet pair of Natalia Mishkutinok, 20, and Artur Dmitriev, 23, who won the gold in Munich, and Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler of Canada, who finished second.

Each of the three pairs is different. The Soviets stress style, taking advantage of Mishkutinok’s flexibility; the Canadians make up for their lack of artistry with acrobatic athleticism, and the Americans fall somewhere in between.

“The Russians’ lifts are simple and basic,” Sand said. “Ours are much more difficult. Our style is not as good as the Russians, but better than the Canadians’.”

For both Sand and Kuchiki, their improbable pairing--in the beginning, she cried at the prospect of skating with a man twice her age--has worked out remarkably well, but their sudden ascendance has been, Sand said, “kind of overwhelming.”

It does seem a little “unreal,” Denise said, to be talking about Olympic gold when just a few months ago they would have been satisfied to win the Pacific Coast Championships. “Everything has happened so quickly,” she said.

Considering the pressure, Natasha, 14, has performed beyond expectations for a girl her age--female figure skaters supposedly reach their prime between 16 and 20. At the world championships, she was virtually flawless, nailing a throw triple salchow in the long-program finals.

NBC, which televised the world championships, featured Natasha in an “Up Close and Personal” segment and concluded that “the little girl had grown up.” But from an emotional standpoint, it is difficult to overlook her youth. In the U. S. nationals in February, she cried in Sand’s arms after believing her lackluster performance in the long program had cost them the title (it had not).

“That week at the nationals, we had never skated better,” said Sand, a former Thousand Oaks resident who recently transferred from Cal State Northridge to Cal State Fullerton. “That four minutes in the long program was the only time we had trouble.”

Despite her youth, Natasha seems to have a more pragmatic attitude than Sand. She was down on herself for her performance in the nationals--”I don’t think we should have won”--and regards suggestions of an Olympic gold medal as overly optimistic.

“First place? I don’t think so,” she said, sitting in the den of her family’s Canoga Park home.

For Natasha, the past few weeks have been better than a trip to Disneyland. Thanks to their third-place finish in Munich, she and Sand were invited to go on the International Skating Union exhibition tour, 15 cities in three weeks, from Helsinki down to Rome.

Aside from a bronze medal, Natasha took something else home with her from Europe: a bad cold. She took a rare week off from figure skating to rest, but don’t get the idea that she is burned out.

“I could go out there now,” she said, “and do a long program.”