THE OLYMPICS / WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : Without Thinking, Wylie Jumps Into Third : Figure skating: Petrenko leads after short program when Browning (fourth), Bowman (seventh) and Eldredge (ninth) all have troubles.

Virtually without exception, people within figure skating’s inner circle adore Paul Wylie. But, in any conversation with them, they eventually come to the point where they must mention his one flaw. He thinks too much.

That trait served him well at Harvard, where he was graduated last year with a degree in political science. On the ice, however, even he concedes that it has prevented him from realizing his enormous potential.

But on Thursday night in the Winter Olympics, his last competition before he retires to enter law school, he tried a new mental approach, which, basically, was no mental approach at all. “It was a matter of reducing my brain,” he said.

As a result, he enhanced his chances for a medal at the Olympic Ice Hall by finishing third in the original program, which counts toward one-third of the final score that will be determined after Saturday night’s freestyle program.

Ahead of him are the Unified Team’s Viktor Petrenko and Czechoslovakia’s Petr Barna, who both have reputations for performing better in the 2-minute, 40-second original program than in the 4-minute, 30-second freestyle program. Wylie, in contrast, usually skates better in the longer program.

But unlike four years ago at Calgary, when it was apparent from the beginning that either Brian Boitano or Brian Orser would win the gold, this competition is unpredictable, as evidenced by Canadian Kurt Browning’s fourth-place finish in the original program as a result of a fall on a triple axel.

A three-time world champion, Browning has been unable to train normally because of a back injury, but he refused to use that as an excuse.

So did two-time U.S. champion Todd Eldredge, who withdrew from the national championships in January because of a similar injury and spent the last month training near his doctor in Massachusetts instead of on his home rink in San Diego. He landed his triple axel, but, inexplicably, fell on his double axel and was in ninth place.

Current U.S. champion Christopher Bowman of Van Nuys did not cleanly land his triple axel, the first difficult element in his program, and seemed to fade emotionally after that, finishing seventh.

That left Wylie, a controversial choice for the Olympic team because of his unimpressive performance in the national championships, as the only U.S. medal hope.

U.S. Figure Skating Assn. officials must not be particularly comforted by that thought because Wylie usually does not skate well under pressure. Even his coach, Evy Scotvold, once said that the one thing Wylie needed in order to be a better competitor was “a lobotomy.”

“I mean that in a nice way,” he added.

But perhaps such drastic measures will not be necessary. After watching Wylie skate in practices this week, Boitano said: “I think he’s a new person. This is his last year, his last competition. There’s no pressure.”

Wylie, 27, confirmed he brought a new attitude into the original program.

“I was trying to deny the fact that I’m competing at the Olympics,” said Wylie, who is from Denver. “I was thinking that I was training at home and that a lot of people who like me came to watch. It was a way to keep the heart rate low and the concentration high.”

How will he approach the long program?

“I’ll just try to perform the thing and not think about the ramifications,” he said.