NOTES

Competing in her fourth Winter Olympics, U.S. speedskater Mary Docter of Madison, Wis., finished 17th in her final event, the 5,000 meters. Last week, she had two 15th places in the 1,500 and the 3,000.

Yet, the recovering alcoholic said that she had a great Olympics because she maintained her sobriety.

“I was a wreck after the 3,000,” she said. “I bombed out, and I was sad for a couple of days. Before, I would have gone out and gotten trashed. But I’m now happy with myself and can handle it. I have good self-esteem. I never really gave myself a chance before.”

Speedskater Dan Jansen’s chances of winning a medal in today’s 1,000 meters improved when Germany’s Jens-Uwe Mey, the silver-medalist in the event in 1988, withdrew because of flu. Mey won the 500 Saturday, a race in which Jansen finished fourth.

Also withdrawing from the 1,000 was Jansen’s teammate, Eric Flaim, who finished in a tie for 24th in Sunday’s 5,000 after coming down with a case of food poisoning the night before.

More than a week after the other U.S. figure skaters arrived in France, the 1991 women’s national champion, Tonya Harding, checked into the village Sunday after flying here from her home in Portland, Ore. Her competition begins Wednesday night.

“I came in later because I wanted to have the ice time available at home that wasn’t available to me here,” she said. “I think it was in my best interests to stay home and miss the opening ceremony, even though I heard it was really fun.

“Peggy Fleming said she won her Olympics in (Grenoble) France, and she didn’t didn’t come for the opening ceremony.”

The ice dance champions, Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko, were rattled after last year’s European Championships in Bulgaria, where she tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug. But when the urine sample was re-tested in Cologne, Germany, it was clean.

As a result, they were allowed to defend their title in the World Championships a month later at Munich, but they had missed so much training time while she was under suspension that they were not at their best and finished second to the Duchesnays.

“We came here to correct that mistake,” Ponomarenko said Monday night.

While listening to the Olympic hymn on the victory stand because the Unified Team does not have an anthem of its own, Ponomarekno was talking to Klimova, his wife.

“I told her I loved her,” he said. “Three times.”

The U.S. ice dance champions, April Sargent-Thomas and Russ Witherby, finished 11th; the other U.S. team, Rachel Mayer and Peter Breen, was eighth.

Mayer was the only dancer Monday night to fall.

“This was the best run-through we’ve ever had until the fall,” Breen said. “There was just a crater in the ice that said, ‘Rachel, I want you to hang out down here for awhile.’ ”