After 13 Years, Ottey Puts the Midas Touch on Career : Track and field: Jamaican stumbles at 200-meter finish, but edges Torrence to win first gold medal.

After 13 years of competing at the world-class level, 13 years with two handfuls of second- and third-place finishes in individual events at major championships but no firsts, Jamaica’s Merlene Ottey sensed Thursday night that a gold medal finally was within her grasp.

Approaching the finish line in the 200-meter final in track and field’s World Championships, she knew she had a lead over her closest rivals, the United States’ Gwen Torrence, the 1992 Olympic champion, and Russia’s Irina Privalova. All Ottey had to do was hold it for 10 more meters, a little more than a second.

“I couldn’t wait to get to the tape,” she said later.

Thinking more about winning the race than running the rest of it, she began to lean prematurely. Then, she began to lose her balance. When she crossed the finish line, her arms flailing, she looked more like a woman running from a swarm of bees than making her mark on a sport that prides itself on its athletic aesthetics.

It was not pretty, but Ottey’s moment finally had come.

She, though, would not allow herself at first to believe it. She thought she had won the 100 meters three nights earlier, only to be told an hour and 45 minutes later, after her appeal to the jury, that she had finished behind the United States’ Gail Devers by one-hundredth of a second, about a third of an inch.

This race also was close. Only two-hundredths of a second separated Ottey and Torrence. But, this time, the Jamaican would not be disappointed. Her time was 21.98 seconds, Torrence’s 22.00. The gold medal belonged to Ottey.

On a special night for Ottey, track and field showed off its drama, its beauty, its power and, yes, its infuriating intricacies for a capacity crowd of 52,700 at Gottlieb Daimler Stadium.

Great Britain’s Sally Gunnell set the first world record of these championships. She ran the 400-meter intermediate hurdles in 52.74 seconds and duplicated her 1992 Olympic victory over American Sandra Farmer-Patrick, who also ran faster than the previous world record, finishing in 52.79.

After breaking the world record in the men’s intermediate hurdles in last summer’s Olympics, Kevin Young, formerly of UCLA and now of Reseda, was not up to that performance. But he did win in 47.18, the seventh-fastest time ever.

Perhaps the most disappointed, and disappointing, athlete in Barcelona, Ukrainian pole vaulter Sergei Bubka became the only athlete to four-peat, winning the same event in all four World Championships dating to the first one in 1983.

Bubka failed to clear a height in three attempts in the Olympics, but here he needed only three jumps to dispose of his competition, winning at 19 feet 8 1/4 inches. He then requested that the bar be raised to a world-record height of 20-1 3/4, which he said later he would have cleared easily if the officials on the field had known the rules.

Although pole vaulters normally are given two minutes to complete their attempts, the clock is supposed to be set at six minutes when there is only one competitor remaining.

So Bubka was furious when the officials allowed him only two minutes for his first attempt at the world record, then assessed him a miss when he failed to meet the deadline. While he argued, the clock again was set, this time at four minutes, which ran out even before he picked up his pole.

By that time, there were more officials on the field to straighten out the confusion. They erased the misses, giving Bubka three attempts. But he was too addled to regain his momentum, coming close only on the final one.

“I can’t believe it’s possible to be a referee in the World Championships and make so big a mistake,” Bubka said. “It’s a scandal.”

The crowd thought so, too, whistling derisively at the officials.

The spectators were equally demonstrative, but considerably more appreciative, later, when Ottey was awarded her gold medal. They gave her a five-minute standing ovation, the same as they had done when she received her silver medal in Tuesday’s ceremony.

“I’m overjoyed,” a tearful Ottey said later, adding that, at 33, she is not sure she will have another chance in the World Championships or Olympics.

Since the 1980 Moscow Olympics, she has won 11 individual medals in major meets. Until Thursday night, none was gold.

“I had a stressful day,” she said. “I thought I could win, but I was afraid I was going to break a leg or false-start. I kept waiting for the worst to happen.”

Instead, for once, the best happened.