Skaters Kuchiki and Sand Facing Uncertain Future : Championships: Couple who train in Costa Mesa might be splitting after eighth-place finish.

It might be a case of “Hello, I must be going.” Only one year after Natasha Kuchiki and Todd Sand emerged as the best hopes for the future of U.S. pairs figure skating, it is now possible that they might be history.

John Nicks, who coaches Kuchiki and Sand at Costa Mesa’s Ice Capades Chalet, said he will meet with them within the next month to discuss their next move.

But he acknowledged that their eighth-place finish Thursday night at the Oakland Coliseum Arena in the World Championships, a competition in which they finished third last year, is an indication that they have lost their momentum.

“You can overcome that, but it’s difficult sometimes,” he said. “When we talk, I’m going to be very open and very frank. I will lay it out factually and see what they feel about it.”

Asked about the whispers within the sport about the meeting after last month’s Winter Olympics, in which referees and judges involved in the pairs competition critiqued the competitors, Nicks said he was aware of them.

Although he has not been able to confirm it in discussions with judges, he said that he heard that the consensus was that neither Kuchiki and Sand nor the U.S. champions, Calla Urbanski of Skokie, Ill., and Rocky Marval of New Egypt, N.J., are believed to have bright futures as teams. Kuchiki, 15, and Sand, 28, finished sixth in the Olympics; Urbanski, 31, and Marval, 26, were 10th.

Reportedly receiving a favorable critique based on their potential were the 11th-place finishers, Jenni Meno, 21, of Westlake, Ohio, and Scott Wendland, 26, of Costa Mesa, who, like Kuchiki and Sand, train under Nicks at Costa Mesa.

But none of the three U.S. pairs was impressive in the World Championships. Urbanski and Marval finished seventh, one place ahead of Kuchiki and Sand, and Meno and Wendland again were 11th.

“Certainly, it was a disappointing evening for American pairs skating,” Nicks said after Thursday night’s freestyle programs.

Because no U.S. competitors finished among the first five, the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. can enter only two pairs in next year’s World Championships at Prague, Czechoslovakia.

As recently as last winter, it would not have been impossible to imagine Kuchiki and Sand contending for a gold medal at Prague. Now, there is no guarantee that they will make the U.S. team by finishing first or second in next year’s national championships even if they are still together.

If they are not together, it will bring to a close one of the more remarkable chapters in U.S. figure skating history.

Their rapid rise to prominence was little short of phenomenal considering that most successful pairs work together for several years before receiving international attention.

Pairs from the former Soviet Union, who have finished first 25 times in the World Championships in the last 28 years, often are teamed four or five years before they even enter a major international competition. Three former Soviet pairs, including champions Natalia Mishkutionok and Artur Dmitriev, finished among the first five here.

Nicks paired a 12-year-old Kuchiki, of Canoga Park, with a 25-year-old Sand, who was living at the time in Thousand Oaks, in the spring of 1989, only nine months before they would finish second in the 1990 national championships.

Although Kuchiki was too young according to eligibility rules, the International Skating Union granted her a special waiver to compete in the 1990 World Championships at Halifax, Canada, where she and Sand finished 11th. One year later, they won the national championship and finished third in the World Championships.

But they began to slide this year, due at least in part to Sand’s lingering back problems that have made it difficult for him to land one of their crucial elements, a side-by-side double axel. They were third at this year’s national championships, one month before their sixth-place Olympic finish.

Sand, who now lives in Costa Mesa and attends Cal State Fullerton, skated his best performances of the season here, landing the double axel all three times he tried it. “You never know what’s going to happen on a particular jump in the future, but I think he’s gotten past the mental block he had with it,” Nicks said.

This time, however, Kuchiki made a significant error, a rarity for her, when she fell in Thursday night’s long program on a relatively simple double jump. “That was stupid,” she said in the range of a microphone near the rink after they finished, but Nicks did not allow her to talk to the press.

“She’s too self-critical,” he said. “Most of the time, in pairs skating, partners like to point fingers at each other, but she almost always assesses their performance by the way she skated.”