THE OLYMPICS / WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : Yamaguchi Is Good Enough for the Gold : Skating: She misses a triple loop, but other contenders also have problems. Ito wins the silver, Kerrigan the bronze.

Sixteen years ago, when she was 4 years old, she skated around on the ice while clutching a Dorothy Hamill doll. On Friday night, Kristi Yamaguchi of Fremont, Calif., became the United States’ first women’s figure skating champion at the Winter Olympics since Hamill in 1976.

Yamaguchi was not perfect in her 4 1/2-minute freestyle program, but she was unquestionably closer than any of the other 23 competitors on the final night of figure skating competition at the Olympic Ice Hall.

“Ten years from now, nobody’s going to remember that Kristi had trouble with her triple loop,” said Dody Teachman, who coaches one of the other U.S. women, Tonya Harding.

But millions will remember that Yamaguchi, 20, had the gold medal around her neck, placed there by International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, as she sang the national anthem, the fourth time it has been played for the United States since the 16th Winter Games began two weeks ago.

Japan’s Midori Ito stood next to her on the awards stand with a silver medal, but she was the only non-American to finish among the top four. Nancy Kerrigan of Stoneham, Mass., was the bronze medalist, followed by Harding of Portland, Ore.

It was the first time in women’s figure skating that two competitors from the same country have won medals in the Winter Olympics since 1960, when Carol Heiss and Barbara Roles of the United States also finished first and third. Four years earlier, the United States had a one-two finish with Tenley Albright and Heiss.

“Sensational,” said Kerrigan’s coach, Evy Scotvold, of the United States’ current dominance of the sport, which reached its zenith last year with the 1-2-3 finish of Yamaguchi, Harding and Kerrigan, in that order, at the World Championships.

The skating Friday night, however, was less than sensational as the pressure of the Olympics seemed to trip up all of the women, who provided more spills than thrills.

After watching the freestyle programs with 1988 men’s gold medalist Brian Boitano of the United States, the women’s gold medalist in 1984 and 1988, Germany’s Katarina Witt, said: “I realized tonight how much pressure there actually is out there. I looked at Brian and said, ‘I wonder how we got through the Olympics.’ ”

In an analysis that might not endear her to feminists, Teachman said: “It’s just the nature of the sex. The boys can go out there and turn their emotions off. They don’t get so rattled, not as much as the girls do. If the girls can learn to do that from the guys, they can probably beat the guys.”

But the men seemed no less jittery last Saturday night in their freestyle programs. In fact, Yamaguchi, despite her flaws, landed five clean triple jumps, one more than the men’s champion, Ukrainian Viktor Petrenko, did in his freestyle program, and she did it with considerably more style as she skated to a Spanish composition, “Malaguena.”

Her only disappointment was that she did not perform as well as she can, certainly not as well as she did during her first-place original program Wednesday night or in the subsequent practice sessions. But, as she said earlier this week: “Anything can happen.”

Even a near-fall on one of her easiest triple jumps, a triple loop, midway through her program. “I’m a little surprised because that’s one of my very best jumps,” she said. But she recovered nicely, turning her next jump, the troublesome triple salchow, into a double while regaining her composure, and then finishing without another significant error.

Skating first among the contenders, shortly after she had been visited backstage by Hamill, she virtually clinched the gold medal when the nine judges, on a scale of 6.0, gave her 5.7s and 5.8s for technical merit and eight 5.9s and one 5.8 for artistic impression.

That placed pressure on Ito to skate flawlessly in the freestyle program, which counts toward two-thirds of the final score, to compensate for her fourth-place finish in the original program. The pre-competition favorite, she apologized to the Japanese people after that performance.

She had been rattled in practice that day when France’s Surya Bonaly did a back flip perilously close to her. But Ito, 22, answered with eight double axels while skating in a circle around Bonaly at center ice in practice Friday.

Ito brought that same grit to the rink Friday night, when she missed a triple axel, picked herself up and landed one cleanly. It was the first time a woman had ever done a triple axel in the Olympics, and that, more than anything else she did, earned her the silver medal.

“I think now the people of Japan will excuse me,” she said.

The rattled skater Friday night was Bonaly, 18, who appeared to be on the verge of winning a medal after finishing third in the original program. But although the former gymnast almost became the first woman to land a quadruple jump in competition, failing to get credit for it because she completed only 3 1/2 revolutions in the air, she was otherwise awkward.

The judges sent the two-time European champion a clear message to improve her technique and choreography by placing her sixth in the freestyle program, fifth overall. The other two medalists in the recent European championships finished 10th and 13th. Eight of the top nine were North Americans or Asians.

But the rest of the world is not likely to catch the U.S. women soon. “I think the top 10 from our national championships would finish in the top half here,” said Kerrigan, 22, who, although satisfied with the bronze medal, might return to the Winter Olympics in 1994 to prove that she can skate better than she did Friday night, when she almost fell once and left out some of her more difficult elements.

So might Harding, 21, who was disappointed because she fell on her triple axel for the fourth consecutive time in competition.

It was her triple axel that enabled her to upset Yamaguchi for the 1991 national championship. But no one since has been able to beat her in a major competition as she has won a world championship, a national championship and, now, an Olympic championship in the last 11 months.