FIGURE SKATING : Wylie Wins Rousing Duel With Petrenko

Some cynics within figure skating contend that professionals do not really compete, at least not compared to the cutthroat amateurs, but apparently no one told Paul Wylie and Viktor Petrenko.

On Thursday night at the Forum, in the DuraSoft Challenge of Champions, they re-created their duel from the 1992 Winter Olympics, in which Petrenko won a controversial decision and the gold medal over silver-medalist Wylie, but the outcome this time was reversed.

The difference between them was as slight as it was in February at Albertville, France, the determining factor being a slight mistake Petrenko made on the landing of one of his five triple jumps.

The judges did not mark him down much. He earned perfect scores of 10.0 from five of the seven judges for artistic impression and from three of them for technical merit. But the judges liked Wylie’s virtually flawless performance better. All of them gave him perfect scores for artistic impression, and three of them scored him as high for technical merit.

Both Wylie and Petrenko finished ahead of third-place Brian Boitano, who lost for the first time in 11 professional competitions since winning the gold medal in the 1988 Winter Olympics.

The only skaters capable of perfection Thursday night were the ice dancing winners, Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko of Russia, who impressed the crowd as much as they did the judges with a program skated to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

In her second professional competition since winning gold medals in the 1992 Winter Olympics and World Championships, Kristi Yamaguchi was clearly superior against three others who have won world championships, Switzerland’s Denise Biellmann and Americans Jill Trenary and Rosalynn Sumners.

Skating a lengthened version of her Olympic original program to the “Blue Danube,” Yamaguchi was both elegant and athletic. She earned perfect scores of 10.0 from four judges for artistic impression, and although she missed her landing on a triple flip, she received no score of less than 9.9 for technical merit.

The sister-brother team of Kitty and Peter Carruthers were the lone U.S. pair against three from Russia, a country that dominates the discipline.

The Carrutherses program Thursday night was not particularly ambitious. But they skated it flawlessly, earning two perfect scores for artistic impression and one for technical merit. Their aesthetics provided the difference.

,