THE OLYMPICS WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : Cutting a Fine Figure : Skating Pair’s Once Rocky Relationship Now Smooth as Ice

Natasha Kuchiki cried after the first time she skated with Todd Sand. She so adamantly refused to leave her mother’s car for their second session at the Ice Capades Chalet in Costa Mesa, there almost wasn’t a second session.

To Sand, then 25 and more than twice Kuchiki’s age, his prospective new figure skating partner was “that little girl,” a talented kid, from what he had seen, but hardly a suitable match for him.

After their first unpromising encounter, Kuchiki took three weeks off to dry her tears and contemplate her skating future. The two decided, with some misgivings, to try again.

“I think we were both a little doubtful at the beginning. Neither one of us knew what to expect from each other and of course, there’s the age difference,” Sand said. “Once we came back after the break, things really started to click. After two, three days, we knew we had the potential there.”

Their potential proved enormous, carrying them to a second-place finish at the 1990 U.S. championships after a mere six months together. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before,” Kuchiki said. “It usually takes a year to get into the system and for the judges to get to know you.”

They finished 11th in the world championships that year, a remarkable result because Kuchiki was only 13 and had needed the International Skating Union to waive its minimum age requirement of 14. Progressing with astonishing speed, they won the 1991 U.S. pairs title and a bronze medal at the 1991 world championships, a list of honors they hope to extend next Tuesday by winning an Olympic medal.

Although they faltered at last month’s U.S. championships, dropping to third place behind Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marval and their Costa Mesa training mates, Jenni Meno and Scott Wendland, Kuchiki and Sand’s international record will probably give them the best chance among the three American pairs here in Albertville.

Figure skating is a highly subjective sport, and judges often award marks based on skaters’ previous accomplishments and not on how they skate that day; before Kuchiki and Sand perform their original program Sunday, many judges will already have them ranked no lower than third. Urbanski and Marval were ninth in the 1991 world championships, one place ahead of Meno and Wendland.

“From the American point of view, third in the nationals is not particularly promising. But the Olympic judges are predominantly European and didn’t see the nationals. If they have prejudgments, they’re looked at as bronze medalists,” said their coach, John Nicks, who coached JoJo Starbuck and Ken Shelley to three U.S. pairs titles in the 1970s and Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner to five consecutive titles from 1976-80. “I’m sure Todd and Natasha have a chance at a medal.”

No computer would have predicted such success when Kuchiki, then a 5-foot-tall dynamo, was paired with the 5-11, 165-pound Sand, a good skater who often emphasized style over substance. But Kuchiki’s mother, Denise, a former ice dance competitor and show skater who teaches figure skating on weekends, thought Sand’s maturity and muscle would further her daughter’s Olympic hopes.

Natasha had teamed with Richard Alexander to win the 1989 Pacific Coast regional junior pairs title and finish second in the junior national competition, but Denise felt their future was limited. Believing the 5-8, 150-pound Alexander wasn’t powerful enough to lift and throw her growing daughter in the daring moves required of world-class pairs, Denise engineered their breakup. She knew Sand was a solid singles skater--he twice won the national championship of Denmark, his father’s homeland--and that he had skated with Lori Blasko to an eighth-place finish in the 1988 U.S. senior pairs event.

“The age difference didn’t bother me,” said Denise Kuchiki, who braves the freeways every morning to drive Natasha to Costa Mesa from the family’s Canoga Park home. “Natasha mentally, she can handle it . . . Natasha tends to act older. She has an older look about her.”

Natasha, who has grown to 5-3, looks as if she were born to wear blades. Besides inheriting her mother’s skating talent, she was blessed with the muscular legs and jumping ability of her father, Sashi, who performed with the Ice Capades for 19 years and now teaches skating. Natasha and her sister, Tamara, were on skates as soon as they could stand, but Natasha paid little attention to pair skating until she tried it.

“My former partner asked me to skate pairs and I didn’t really follow pairs. When I started to do pairs, I started watching pairs,” said Kuchiki, who is now 15 and no longer frets about the age difference between her and Sand. “It’s more fun. In singles, all you have to do is just jumps and choreography and stuff. With this, there’s a whole variety. There’s lifts, throws, death spirals and pair spins and jumping and stuff. There’s more technical things to do when you’re skating together.”

Sand, who was born in Burbank and lives in Costa Mesa, had casually considered pair skating as a youngster. “I always wanted to try it,” he said. “There came a point in my life where I decided I might be better suited for pairs. It’s a lot more interesting for the skater. There’s a lot more interesting things to do, and it’s not just jumping.”

Mistakes by Sand on two side-by-side double axel jumps, and by Kuchiki on a double flip during their long program cost the pair the chance to repeat as U.S. champions last month in Orlando, Fla.

They skated exceptionally well in winning the original program, which counts for one-third of the final score, but their missteps in the final part of the competition dropped them to third overall. Instead of being dispirited by that shaky performance, they took it as incentive to train more vigorously before the Olympics. “After we lowered a couple of places, it gives us more of a push to get back up there,” Kuchiki said.

In the three weeks between the U.S. competition and their departure for Albertville, they smoothed some awkward sections of the long program, which runs 4 1/2 minutes. They also increased the tempo of the routine, in hopes of earning higher marks for technical merit.

“It was really the first time we put that program out on the ice and were skating it in full competition,” Sand said of the Orlando mishap. “While we were disappointed--and I was particularly disappointed because I had a rough night--we learned a lot. We saw what the program looked like and there’s a few places we were very unhappy with and we’re working to make those places better and better. We’re looking forward to the Olympics.”

Their chief rivals here are two pairs from the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Canadian duo of Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler. Natalia Mishkuteniok and Artur Dmitriev, the 1991 world champions, recently repeated as European champions, ahead of compatriots Elena Bechke and Denis Petrov. Mishkuteniok and Dmitriev are stylish skaters who emphasize artistry, while Brasseur and Eisler, who finished second in the last two world championships, are more acrobatic and athletic than innately graceful.

Kuchiki and Sand try to balance art and athletics, capitalizing on their skating ability as well as their ballet and choreography training. They will plan to include three especially difficult moves in their long program: one is the triple twist, in which Kuchiki, taking off on her left foot, is tossed into the air by Sand to make three revolutions before landing near him on the back outside edge of her right skate. In the throw triple loop, Sand throws her high and far away, with Kuchiki taking off on the back outside edge of her right skate, making three counter-clockwise turns and landing on the same foot.

A seemingly perilous move they pull off with ease and have made their trademark is the throw triple salchow, in which Kuchiki takes off from the back inside edge of her left skate, is hurled into the air to turn three times counter-clockwise and lands several feet away from Sand on a right back outside edge.

“We’re pretty similar on the technical side. There’s five or six pairs in the world that can challenge for medals there,” Sand said in assessing the competition in Albertville. “It’s just a matter of consistency and how nice their program is. I think we have a good combination of athleticism and artistry. I don’t think we’re overly athletic, so much that we let the artistic side slide, and we’re not being so artistic so we’re trying to cover up some inadequacies.”

To get this far, they’ve both sacrificed some of their childhood and much of their time.

To ensure he can lift and support Kuchiki without strain, Sand adds weight work to his training regimen. Somehow, he fits in classes at Cal State Fullerton. Because the demands of training and competing keep Kuchiki from attending school, she takes correspondence courses from the Black Mountain Academy. That means she misses out on the teen-age joys of shopping or gossiping with classmates.

Pizza parties are forbidden to Kuchiki, too, because judges look closely at skaters’ physical appearance. With that in mind, Denise has taken Natasha for body wrapping treatments to streamline her daughter’s shape.

“From the minute I open my eyes it’s, ‘You can’t have that because of skating,”’ Natasha said.

Her mother recognizes the difficulties Natasha faces.

“She wants to go and play and she’s still 15, but she can’t because she has to practice or get her rest,” said Denise, whose older daughter, 17-year-old Tamara, finished 13th among senior ladies at Orlando last month. “She can’t go to the mall or do things with her friends.

“It’s hard. The poor thing is constantly on a diet. We had her tested and she really doesn’t have much body fat. It’s just that muscle weighs so much. . . . Is it worth it? Yes, because who at her age gets to go to the Olympics? Her friends saw her on TV and said, ‘Are you going to the Olympics? The real Olympics? We’re going to watch you.’ She makes friends all over the place. The only problem is my phone bills are incredible.”

Despite the financial and emotional costs, Natasha said the satisfaction of skating outweighs the deprivations.

“Most kids, they go to school everyday and they say, ‘You’re so lucky. You don’t have to go to school.’ I still go to school. I have to train and then I come back and go to school while they’re at the mall or the movies or whatever,” said Natasha, who hopes to continue competing through the 1994 Games in Lillehammer, Norway. “But the flip side is I get to travel and that’s great. . . . I guess it’s determination. We both know what we want to do.”

Sand acknowledged he had “a couple periods, a couple of different times, where I was trying to decide whether to continue or not.” One of those times was before he was paired with Kuchiki, whom he has come to regard as a sister. The two occasionally lunch or go to movies together when time permits.

“It’s hard to know. You never know what’s going to happen,” Sand said. “I’m sure glad I stuck it out. It’s been worth it.”