THE OLYMPICS / WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : Turner’s Skating Song Is Golden : Speedskating: Rochester, N.Y., athlete leaves music, wins women’s 500-meter short-track event.

Cathy Turner, who helped her teammates to a silver medal Thursday, helped herself to a gold Saturday night. But only after she had first helped herself.

Turner of Rochester, N.Y., lost in depression brought on by an identity crisis until four years ago, took her self-discovered cure, speedskating, to its highest level, winning the women’s 500-meter short-track race by 0.04 seconds over China’s Li Yan.

Turner won the race, not Niki Newland, as she called herself in her days as a singer-song writer during eight years away from the sport--eight years, she says, during which she really didn’t know who she was, what she was doing or where she was going.

“I went from sweats to the glamour world in an instant, in a matter of three weeks,” she said.

She made that choice after failing to make the 1980 national speedskating team. It was not, she said, the right decision. Except she didn’t know it then, didn’t even know what it was she was missing. She might have had an inkling on those 4 a.m. runs after having finished a show at 3. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“I was in such a depression, nothing made me happy,” she said. “I tried everything. I could do anything I wanted in the whole world, and nothing made me happy.”

Then she watched the 1988 Olympics at Calgary and it dawned on her. What was missing was skating, which she had been doing since she was 6. It was something she had started and hadn’t finished.

So at 25, she went back to skating, realized she couldn’t make it anymore on the long track and turned to short-track racing--pack skating, the kind she had grown up with. It was a medal sport for the first time at Albertville.

“The moment I (got back on the ice), I felt reborn,” she said.

A reborn Cathy Turner, at 29, has two Olympic medals to show for her efforts--the silver she and her teammates won in the women’s 3,000-meter relay Thursday and the 500-meter gold.

But she didn’t get them for a song.

“I’ve always had trouble with confidence all my life,” she said. “From that lack of confidence, I still had little baby doubts in the back of my head.”

Winning the silver eased those doubts a little.

“That took a little of the pressure off,” she said. “People kept saying, ‘Wow, you might get a medal,’ and I’m like, ‘Wow, I already have a medal.’ I had to keep reminding myself.

“But then the competitor in me kind of took over. It’s like now, ‘I don’t want a bronze, I don’t want a silver, I want the gold.’ ”

So she went out and got it.

She won her quarterfinal heat easily when the three skaters behind her spilled in a turn, then won her semifinal almost as easily, leading all the way, then falling just past the finish line.

The medal race, in which she beat Li Yan of China and Hwang Ok Sil of North Korea, was considerably tougher.

Just before it was ready to start, Turner realized that she was working with faulty equipment.

“I didn’t have an edge,” she said. “I had a bad blade on my left skate, which is really the important one. I said, ‘This can’t be happening.’ ”

Only a quick fix could be be done. Her coach, Jack Mortell, used a little hand sharpener on the dull blade for a few minutes.

“At least it got me through the race,” Turner said.

Just.

She finished less than a skate blade ahead of Li, who made an inside move coming out of the last turn and nearly stuck her foot across the line first.

“I knew somebody was on my tail, but I didn’t know who it was and I knew that I really had to hold on through that last turn,” Turner said. “I gave it all I had, and I saw her coming on the inside of me and I saw her foot--she thrust her foot up forward--and I knew I had to do the same.”

It was just enough, although she didn’t think so at the time.

“I didn’t think I’d won ‘cause I remember looking over and I saw her blade. I thought I’d lost, but I kept looking up at the (score)board and seeing my name.”

Her time was 47.04 seconds.

When she realized she had won, she skated to her mother, who draped her daughter in a gold-fringed American flag and handed her another. Turner skated her victory lap swaddled in, and waving, Old Glory.

Her medal was the fifth gold for the U.S. here, all won by women.

Turner said she probably would quit skating and move on to other things. She has a degree in computer science, she still is interested in music and, she says, there are people interested in her biography and, possibly, a movie of her life story. She even has discussed playing herself in the movie.

“At least I could do my own stunts,” she said.

And her identity crisis? A thing of the past, she says, even if she chooses not to skate anymore.

“I go out after something and I get it, then I move on to something else,” she said. “(Now) I feel complete.”