BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : Rosset Cuts Down Courier Quickly : Tennis: Top-ranked American joins the list of ousted seeded players. Becker also loses.

American men on Spanish clay. The very imagery was gilded in gold and silver, the colors of the Olympic medals that Jim Courier and Michael Chang would carry in shoulder bags their next time through El Prat Airport.

Courier was 13-1 on clay this year and has won the world’s biggest clay-court tennis tournament, the French Open, twice.

Chang won the French Open in 1989 and smiled when he likened the red-brown powder at Vall d’Hebron to “Nestle’s Quik,” soft and smooth and sweet.

It was going to be a tasty treat. Just add Canadians and Danes and Moroccans.

By the first weekend, however, with less than three rounds complete, Courier and Chang already have been subtracted.

Chang went first, losing in four sets to Brazilian Jaime Oncins on Friday, and Courier did him one worse Saturday. Courier, winner of the 1992 French and Australian Opens, the top-ranked singles player in men’s tennis, won only seven games from Switzerland’s Marc Rosset in their third-round match, checking out in straight sets, 6-4, 6-2, 6-1.

The last American standing, Pete Sampras, is a fast-court specialist who will play Andrei Cherkasov of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the third round today.

Clay pigeons, that’s what the U.S. men have become.

And the draw has become a mere shell of its former self, with eight of the original top 10 seeded players gone.

Boris Becker accompanied Courier out of the tournament Saturday, losing to French teen-ager Fabrice Santoro, 6-1, 3-6, 6-1, 6-3. Becker was seeded fifth, but on these courts he was an upset waiting to happen, having struggled through five sets to withstand Norway’s Christian Ruud in the first round and four more to turn back Morocco’s Younes El Aynaoui.

Santoro, 19, finally got the job done, although he conceded afterward that this doesn’t happen every day.

“As we’ve seen in this tournament, players could get to him (on clay),” Santoro said. “But they would be just another (victim) on grass or a hard surface.”

Courier’s performance evoked something less than an embodiment of Olympic spirit. In the match’s first game, he was warned by the chair umpire for abusive language. After failing to hold serve in the first game of the third set, Courier seemed to put his game on automatic pilot.

Then, after getting off the court as quickly as he could, he got off the premises as quickly as he could, blowing off the required postmatch news conference and bolting for the sanctuary of his luxury hotel a few blocks from the Olympic village.

Tom Gorman, the U.S. coach, was left behind, shaking his head and pausing for long periods of time as he attempted to respond to the obvious question:

What on earth happened?

“I wish I knew,” Gorman finally said. “He was looking like he was in prime shape to win a gold medal.”

Rosset, 21, was unseeded here, ranked 44th in the world and not even No. 1 in Switzerland. That honor goes to 28th-ranked Jakob Hlasek, the man who teamed with Rosset this spring to give Switzerland a French Open doubles championship.

On his own, Rosset had not made much of a dent before Saturday. His best Grand Slam showing was the round of 16 in last January’s Australian Open, in which he lost to Courier, 6-3, 6-1, 6-3.

To this point, Rosset had staked virtually all of his reputation on his serve, reputed to be the fastest in the sport. Clocked as high as 128 m.p.h., it can be a true wild card on grass or carpet. But on clay, which absorbs the blow the way a sponge absorbs water, such power often is defused.

Not Saturday. Rosset aced Courier 11 times, including three in a row to close the first set as he planted the first seeds of doubt in Courier.

Rosset kept pounding the ball in the second set, breaking serve twice--and, with it, Courier’s will. Down, 3-2, in the second set, Courier dropped the next eight games, until Rosset led, 5-0, in the third and Courier was shamed into salvaging one game.

Asked if it appeared to him that Courier gave up toward the end, Rosset nodded and said: “Yeah, I think so. The first set was pretty close, then I win the second, 6-2. When I broke him to go up, 4-0, in the third, he didn’t try hard anymore. He was just trying to get the points over with.”

Eventually reached by phone in his hotel room, Courier disputed Rosset’s testimony.

“I was down, 5-0, and broke him back to go to 5-1,” Courier said. “If I’m not trying, I wouldn’t have broke him. Something I’ll never do is not try.

“I was disappointed in the way I played, but I think it was a direct result of the way he was playing.”

American women have had a more profitable stay on the clay, with Jennifer Capriati and Mary Joe Fernandez both reaching the quarterfinals.

Capriati, seeded third, advanced with a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Yayuk Basuki of Indonesia, and Fernandez, seeded fourth, defeated Natalia Zvereva of the CIS, 7-6 (11-9), 6-1.