Finally, Smooth Sailing for This Pair : Figure skating: After a rough start, partnership produces the nation’s best hope for an Olympic medal in the sport.

For a couple of seconds that seemed frozen in time, Natasha Kuchiki wondered if all the doubters had been right. The bond she was forging with figure skating partner Todd Sand seemed on the verge of being ripped apart.

It hardly had been a match made in heaven, after all. Kuchiki was 12 when she first skated with Sand, who was then 25, and she cried and refused to get out of the car for one of their first practices.

Now, during their free skating program in the U.S. National Championships less than two years after they met, it all seemed to be unraveling.

It started when Kuchiki “popped” a jump. (That’s ice skater lingo for failing to execute a complete maneuver.) An intended double axel became a single axel. It was only a small miscue, but she was thinking about that mistake and anxiously anticipating the next big jump when she forgot about the present and slipped.

With Sand’s help, she did not fall down. She was close to breaking down, though.

“I just wanted to stop and find a way to get off the ice,” Kuchiki said.

Her mother, Denise, a former Canadian figure skating champion, saw it all on her daughter’s face. “At that moment, she thought she had ruined everything.”

But Sand, who usually says little during a competition, talked Kuchiki through the rest of the program. “I never stopped talking,” he says, forcing a smile. “I normally say very little unless we need to make an adjustment, but I didn’t want to turn around and be skating alone.”

They finished second in the free-skating portion of the competition, but their outstanding first-place performance the night before in the original program was enough to carry them to the U.S. title.

Then last month, less than four weeks after the shaky finish in the national championships, Kuchiki and Sand wowed the international skating world with a strong bronze-medal finish in the World Figure Skating Championships in Munich.

No one believed they could have come so far so fast, not even John Nicks, the former world champion skater who paired the little girl from Canoga Park with the young man from Costa Mesa.

Not Sand. “I had my doubts,” he said. “After we skated together a few times, I thought we had potential. But it’s incredible that it happened this fast.”

Not Kuchiki. “Let’s just say I had a temporarily negative attitude,” she said. “I cried. I wouldn’t get out of the car. After a couple of days of practice together, I took a three-week break. I had to think.”

Not Nicks. “The beginning certainly was not all that auspicious,” he said. “Todd was quite cooperative, but Natasha didn’t want to even try it. I was quite concerned, really. But looking back, I guess her reaction was very normal for a girl her age.”

Not even Denise Kuchiki. “I liked what I saw from the beginning,” she said. “The strength was there. The elegance was there. But to have this happen this fast? It’s like a dream.”

It’s called pairs skating, but the Kuchiki/Sand/Nicks team will fail or triumph as a triumvirate.

Nicks came to the United States from England 30 years ago at the request of the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. after a plane crash near Brussels, Belgium, killed 73 people, including the entire U.S. team and its coaches.

He has coached the JoJo Starbuck-Ken Shelley and Tai Babilonia-Randy Gardner teams. Nicks knows figure skating. He has discovered that adding another sole to your boots every few months is the best way to keep your feet warm during hours of standing on the rink. And by now, he looks like the lead guitarist in a ‘70s rock band.

But when he speaks from this platform, people in skates listen and believe. A wealth of experts--including U.S. and international skating officials and judges--told him he was wrong about the unlikely union of Kuchiki and Sand, though.

“I’ve known both skaters for a long time,” Nicks said. “Natasha’s father, Sashi, was a soloist with Ice Capades for years and she’s been skating since she was 2. Todd had been with another partner, who had suffered a serious injury, and Natasha had been having personal problems with her partner.”

Natasha’s parents were open to the idea of this arranged marriage of sorts. Sand was willing to at least give it a try. Natasha, well, she had locked herself in the car. But after that three-week “think” break, she decided to risk a few workouts.

“On the fourth day, we threw a triple salcow,” said Kuchiki, obviously still awed by the feat.

Sand smiles. “Something just clicked,” he says.

Still, they were a long way from the kind of team that can sometimes make you forget you’re watching two people skate. Pairs skating may have evolved to a point that athleticism is as important as grace, but it’s the balance of power and finesse that wins titles.

Sand, 6 feet and 170 pounds, says he and Kuchiki (5-1, 111) are a “perfect match.” However, while some of the more difficult maneuvers might be easier to perform, the aesthetics can suffer.

“I’ve never had a team that was so physically different,” Nicks said. “The girls were always about 5-5 and the guys about 5-8. But here we’ve got almost a 12-inch difference in height and a 60-pound difference in weight.

“They’re a very physical pair, but the challenge for me is to help them create the right lines. And the even bigger challenge is to remember that you’re talking to a 28-year-old in one sentence and a 14-year-old in the next.”

So Nicks has pushed his proteges as hard in the ballet room as on the ice, juggled his motivational techniques and somehow managed to pull off a coup.

“It’s been rewarding because of the success they’ve had,” he said. “I’m very happy for them. And there’s the satisfaction I feel because of all the so-called experts who told me I would live to rue the day I started all this nonsense.

“They’ll be going into nationals (which will serve as the Olympic Trials) next January as the clear favorite and they’re the only American team with a chance of medaling at the Olympics.”

Nicks won the world pairs title in 1953, skating with his sister, Jennifer. Kuchiki and Sand have taken very different routes to the spotlight at center ice, however.

She started skating before she was 2. He started at 10. He’s a student at Cal State Fullerton who played on the baseball and golf teams in high school. She’s taking correspondence courses so she can concentrate on skating.

And yet they’ve managed to establish a big brother-little sister rapport that seems to work on and off the ice.

On one recent morning, they waged a playful yet clearly competitive battle over half of a hockey stick that looked like something out of a martial arts movie. Later, she needled him about his passion for Elvis and he responded with a jab about her naivete.

“At least we both like Supertramp,” Kuchiki said, “and I bought the tape before he did.”

Sand: “I already had the record. You know, from way back when they had record players.”

Both admit that it took a while for them to feel this comfortable together off the ice. At the outset, simple conversation was difficult. But flying camels, choctaws and salcows came easy.

In fact, the new team caused a bit of sensation in Southland ice skating circles when they easily won a local Arctic Blades competition after skating together just a few months.

Kuchiki and Sand were still a long way from world-beaters back then, but they were committed to training.

“Things always go swimmingly when you’re winning,” Nicks said.

So they started showing up at Nicks’ Ice Capades Chalet rink in Costa Mesa at 9 a.m. every weekday, training until 1 p.m. in a regimen that includes ballet and aerobics. Sand also lifts weights three times a week to increase his upper-body strength.

Denise Kuchiki drives her daughter from Canoga Park and back each day. They leave at 7 a.m. “The kid sleeps and I listen to tunes,” she says.

Obviously, Natasha is not the prototypal Valley girl. When her friends wanted her to come over for a slumber party, she always had to say, “I have to go skate.” Heck, she can’t walk blindfolded through the mall yet.

But she says that the travel involved with her sport--they just returned from a three-week exhibition tour of Europe after the world championships--provides a form of education you can’t get in the classroom. And her mother isn’t too worried about what she’s missing at public school.

“There’s no gangs or drugs in here,” Denise says, hugging herself for warmth as her daughter and Sand glide by on the ice. “And I bet she’s getting as good an education as she’d get in public school.”

She also is getting the chance to live a dream. Or, as Denise says, “It’s more like a fairy tale.”

And, if Kuchiki and Sand could somehow wrest the gold medal from the Soviets during the ’92 Olympics next February, it would be an upset that would make Cinderella look like a shoo-in for belle of the ball.