THE OLYMPICS / WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : These Silvers Didn’t Figure : Figure skating: Wylie is second to Petrenko as judging comes under fire.

Until Saturday night, when Paul Wylie won an Olympic silver medal, his coaches, Evy and Mary Scotvold, had no doubts about the talent of the figure skater whom they watched every day at their modest rink in Acton, Mass.

“For seven years, I’ve thought he was one of the most magnificent skaters I’ve ever seen,” Mary said. “The last week before we left home, I broke into tears three times. I was so embarrassed, but it was because I knew it was coming to an end.

“I was just praying that everyone in the world would see what we’ve seen for seven years, and they did.”

Performing perhaps the best freestyle program of his career, certainly the best in an international competition of any consequence, Wylie, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate from Denver, skated well enough Saturday night to win the gold medal in the Winter Olympics.

Instead, he left the Olympic Ice Hall wearing the silver medal around his neck, while Viktor Petrenko, a Ukrainian skating for the Unified Team, was adorned in gold, a circumstance that more than a few expert observers believed should have been reversed.

“I’m a big fan of Petrenko’s, and I admire his skating and his ability,” said Brian Orser, the silver medalist from Canada in the 1984 and 1988 Winter Olympics. “But tonight, he just wasn’t there, and somebody else was. I thought Paul Wylie was excellent.”

Even more blunt was John Nicks, who coaches at Costa Mesa’s Ice Capades Chalet.

“I thought the winner of the men’s gold medal had the worst performance I’ve seen since my first Olympics in 1948,” he said. “There’s no doubt Paul Wylie should have won tonight.”

While on the subject of judging, he also spoke out on behalf of his skater, Christopher Bowman of Van Nuys, who improved from seventh after Thursday’s original program to fourth overall with a crowd-pleasing freestyle performance and could have, Nicks said, been third instead of Czechoslovakia’s Petr Barna.

Then there was the favorite, three-time world champion Kurt Browning, who was not even Canada’s best skater, in part because of a back injury that limited his jumping ability and in part because Elvis Stojko was so dynamic. But Browning finished sixth overall, one place ahead of Stojko, because the Canadian judge placed Browning second in the freestyle program, behind only Wylie. “That demonstration of judging is very bad for the sport,” Orser said.

But, as the French say, c’est la vie . A judging controversy in figure skating? Imagine that.

So overjoyed was Wylie with his silver medal, he refused to be drawn into it.

Asked his opinion of his scores from the nine judges, he responded: “I didn’t even look at them, I’m sorry. What were they?”

The actual scores themselves are not particularly pertinent, although, for the record, both Wylie and Petrenko received four 5.9s on a 6.0 scale for style.

None of the other 22 skaters received higher than a 5.8 in that category, and only Wylie and Stojko received 5.9s--one each--for technical merit as the quality of the performances, in general, was not very good for an Olympic freestyle program.

But the important figures to remember are seven and two because those are the number of judges that Petrenko and Wylie won, respectively. That determined the gold medalist.

A case certainly can be made that the judges were correct. Even U.S. judge Hugh Graham, a former president of the U.S. Figure Skating Assn., voted for Petrenko, the bronze medalist in 1988 and twice a runner-up in the World Championships.

He performed the most difficult combination of the night, a triple axel-triple toe, and followed that with four more triple jumps, although he landed only two of them cleanly. He faltered near the end, falling on a triple axel and turning a double axel into a single. But it was a challenging program.

Wylie, in contrast, admitted that he skated conservatively. He also did six triple jumps, including two axels, but none of them were in combinations. If that fact alone was not enough to prevent him from winning the gold medal, then he probably sealed it when he turned a triple lutz three minutes and 41 seconds into the 4 1/2-minute program into a double.

“I wish I had done the triple lutz,” he said. “But I could have fallen. I noticed in the original program that the crowd lost interest when people fell. I didn’t want that to happen to me. I wanted the audience with me because they could force the judges to get behind me.”

Audiences have always been with Wylie, a stylist with a reputation for wilting under pressure. Never until Saturday night had he finished higher than ninth in an international competition. In the World Championships at Munich last year, he was 20th after the original program, barely surviving the cut so that he could skate in the freestyle. He finished 11th overall.

In his 11th national championships, an event he has never won, last month at Orlando, Fla., he was so depressed after another disappointing freestyle program that he went to the dressing room, changed into his street clothes and began planning his immediate future in law school. He was stunned when informed that he had finished second, earning a berth on his second Olympic team.

In 1988, he finished 10th. This time, in perhaps his last competition, he was determined not to let the opportunity slip away. He was not selected by the USFSA to represent the United States in the World Championships next month at Oakland.

“I always wanted to skate well in the Olympics,” he said. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘Yeah, that was great, that was my moment.’ It’s the happiest moment of my life.”

But, someone pointed out to him, he could have won the gold medal.

“Hey,” he said, “how much of a Cinderella story do you guys want?”