As This World Turned, Pairs Were on Thin Ice : Figure skating: In a yearlong soap opera, couples break up, then get together in different ways.

In the year since the 1992 U.S. figure skating championships, here are some of the questions with which followers of the pairs competition have been titillated: Will Calla dump Rocky the trucker? Are Jenni and Todd skating cheek to cheek on and off the ice? If so, can Natasha find happiness with Rocky? And what will become of Scott?

Soap opera fans, do we have a sport for you.

When Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marval returned to the ice Wednesday night in the 1993 national figure skating championships at the America West Arena, they not only were together again but in first place after the technical program. Jenni Meno and Todd Sand were still not talking about what they are doing off the ice, but, on the ice, they were comfortably in second place. Natasha Kuchiki is skating solo. Scott Wendland went skiing.

If these names seem at least vaguely familiar, it is probably because they represented the United States in the 1992 Winter Olympics at Albertville, France. But within two months after the World Championships in March at Oakland, all three pairs had been pared, two of them irrevocably.

While the U.S. Figure Skating Assn., lamented the loss of two of its most experienced pairs, less than two years before the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway, the four skaters involved suffered personal losses.

Sharing a coach, John Nicks, and a rink, Costa Mesa’s Ice Capades Chalet, they had in recent years become close friends. Sand and Wendland rented an apartment together two years ago. Kuchiki and Meno roomed with each other when traveling for competitions.

“We shared a lot of great moments,” Kuchiki said this week. “It was like a big family, the Costa Mesa family. Now, we aren’t talking to each other any more.”

Nicks created a phenomenon when he paired Kuchiki with Sand in 1989, a 12-year-old girl from Canoga Park who was so young that she had to obtain a waiver to skate internationally and a 25-year-old veteran of both the U.S. and Danish championships from Thousand Oaks. They were good together then, good enough to finish second in the national championships in 1990 and third in the World Championships in 1991.

But when they returned to the ice in the fall of ’91 to prepare for the upcoming Olympics, it was apparent they did not have the same rapport. After failing to defend their national title last year at Orlando, where they finished third, and then fading to sixth in the Olympics and eighth in the World Championships, the word from Costa Mesa was that Sand’s differences with Kuchiki’s mother, Denise, had caused a rift between him and Natasha.

More apparent to outsiders was that Kuchiki had matured physically, adding to the pressure on Sand’s injured back as he repeatedly lifted her.

“I did grow, and I also put some weight on,” said Kuchiki, who weighed a hardly gargantuan 112 pounds but had chosen a discipline in which many of the women do not push the scales to three figures.

“There’s always pressure for pairs skaters to keep their weight down. I almost wish Todd had said something more to me about it. It was hard on him last year.”

But there apparently was another factor in the split. As Kuchiki and Sand were growing apart, Sand and Meno were growing closer.

The former did not come as a surprise to Nicks, who said during the Olympics that he was not sure he would recommend to Kuchiki and Sand that they remain together after the ’92 season. But the latter floored him. He had predicted that Meno, of Westlake, Ohio, and Wendland, of Costa Mesa, would be the U.S. pair of the future.

“I was in shock,” Nicks said. “I’ve been in the middle of a lot of things, but they’re usually between skaters and parents. This was a new experience for me, and it’s definitely been traumatic at times. I guess the heart rules the head sometimes.”

Sand, 29, and Meno, 22, are coy about how much heart they have put into their pairing, although she allows, “The relationship we’ve got on and off the ice means we can get a lot of work done in a short time.”

Asked about the hurt feelings of their former partners, Meno said: “I can understand that they feel bad. I’m sure I would have been very upset.”

Kuchiki said she suspected last year that Sand would leave her but not to skate with Meno.

“I read in the paper they were thinking about it a month before,” she said. “That ticked me off.”

Denise Kuchiki said her daughter was hurt.

“At 15, going through a rejection gets hard to deal with,” she said. “She didn’t know what to do. She almost quit.”

Instead, Natasha went to Wilmington, Del., for a tryout with Marval, who was stranded when the volatile Urbanski decided he was not dedicated enough.

“With the sacrifices I was making, I wasn’t getting what I wanted to get,” Urbanski said this week. “I wanted to be better than average.”

When Urbanski announced she had a new partner, Marval also began looking for one. But Kuchiki suspected all along that he would not have been satisfied with anyone other than Urbanski.

“He didn’t give me a chance,” she said. “I can understand he wanted to skate with Calla. But I felt this was a game they were playing.”

Three months after Urbanski and Marval split, they reconciled. The story of the waitress and the truck driver was revived.

Kuchiki became a singles skater.

With her third-place finish in the Pacific Coast sectionals, she earned an invitation to the national championships. Her competition begins Friday.

“I skated at Costa Mesa for four or five weeks, but I don’t feel comfortable around (Meno and Sand),” said Kuchiki, who now trains with Coach Wendy Olson at the Pickwick Ice Rink in Burbank. “They want to carry on a conversation, but I don’t want to have anything to do with them.

“Skating pairs is like a marriage. You share all the memories. Now it doesn’t seem like the Olympics happened to me or winning a bronze medal at the World Championships happened to me because I did those things with Todd.”

She said that she wants to prove herself in singles but would prefer to be skating with a partner.

“I’m going through an emotional ride,” she said. “You have to get yourself focused to reach the top again. A lot of people respect me. I have--what is it you call it?--a superior resume. If I get another pairs partner, I feel like I can (succeed) again.

“It’s a matter of finding that guy. Where is he? Mr. Nicks told me I shouldn’t lower my standards in pairs simply because there’s some guy available.”

One available guy is Wendland, 27, who also has been unable to find a partner and is coaching at Costa Mesa.

Asked recently if he and Wendland are talking, Sand said, “Almost.”

Wendland took a ski vacation this week at Mammoth so that he would not be around a figure skating environment during the national championships, but he sent a good-luck card to Meno and Sand before he left.

“He’s held his head up high,” said his mother, Gerris. “He’s not letting this stop his life.”