WORLD SPORTS SCENE / RANDY HARVEY : Hamilton Recalls Golden Times as a Figure Skater in Sarajevo

As Christmas approached, Scott Hamilton’s thoughts returned to Sarajevo and a holiday spent there.

“We were there at Thanksgiving in 1983, and there was this very charming man at the Hotel Bosna who knew about our traditions and made sure we had turkey for dinner,” Hamilton said. “I wonder what happened to him.”

Less than three months later, Hamilton was back in Sarajevo for the 1984 Winter Olympics, where he won the gold medal in men’s figure skating. He knows what happened to the rink because he saw pictures of the rubble after it was shelled in the ceaseless, senseless war among the Serbs, Muslims and Croats.

“I don’t watch the network news any more,” he said. “I’d rather remember Sarajevo for what it was than for what it is now.

“Maybe I’m in denial, but the images are so devastating that it’s frightening for me to imagine that those same people who gave and gave and gave during the Olympics are the same people involved in this horror.”

In tribute to them, the Discover Card Stars on Ice show, which is scheduled to come to the Forum on Sunday night, includes a special segment featuring Hamilton and four other Sarajevo medalists, Brian Orser, Rosalynn Sumners and Kitty and Peter Carruthers. They skate to Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend.”

Hamilton said he would like to return someday to Sarajevo, but only when he is sure it is safe. He is not optimistic that day will come in the near future.

He quoted former Yugoslav skier Jure Franko, who, asked when the war would end, said, “When there is no one left to murder.”

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Not a moment too soon, Kristi Yamaguchi and Japan’s Midori Ito skated against each other for the first time since the 1992 Winter Olympics during Dick Button’s recent professional competitions in Landover, Md., and Toronto.

In Landover, Ito finally gave the performance that everyone knew she was capable of in 1992, when she went to Albertville, France, as the favorite but succumbed to the pressure and finished second to Yamaguchi.

“She did a triple axel, a triple-toe, triple-toe combination and a triple lutz,” Yamaguchi said during a visit to Los Angeles last week to promote her Stars on Ice appearance. “I just sat there and applauded. What else could I do? She is one incredible skater.”

The judges thought so, too, giving her first place ahead of Yamaguchi. In a competition more reminiscent of the Olympics, in Toronto a few days later, Ito was off, and the steadier Yamaguchi finished first.

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Broadcast News: Now that it has lost professional football on Sunday afternoons, CBS reportedly is considering televising more figure skating. The sport is nowhere near as popular as the NFL, but it consistently attracts more viewers than some sports, including college basketball. For the second consecutive year, a repeat of a year-old figure skating show rated higher than the recent Indiana-Kentucky game.

And now that Fox has professional football on Sunday afternoons, it seems eager to seek other sports opportunities, including the Olympics. Even as the announcement was being made that Fox had won the NFC rights, network representatives said they had a team en route to Nagano, Japan, to check out venues for the 1998 Winter Games. There also is an assumption that Fox’s chief, Australian Rupert Murdoch, will be a major player in bidding for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.

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Germany’s Lothar Matthaus, one of only two active players--along with Argentina’s Diego Maradona--named to soccer’s all-time World Cup team, is seeking a new world to conquer after his contract expires this summer with Bayern Munich.

That means either Japan or the United States, and he said in an interview before the recent draw in Las Vegas for the 1994 World Cup that he prefers the United States. But movers and shakers behind Major League Soccer, the proposed professional league sanctioned by the U.S. Soccer Federation, should contain their excitement because Matthaus is leaning toward the existing American Professional Soccer League.

The reason, said his U.S. representative, Gunter Harz, is that the APSL already has a nucleus of good U.S. players under contract and, with the infusion of a dozen or so quality players from other countries, could become a viable league internationally more quickly than MLS.

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Even though she had a year unlike any other woman in track and field since Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988, China’s Wang Junxia was not named as the International Amateur Athletic Federation’s female athlete of the year.

Wang received far more first-place votes than any other competitor, but, incredibly, she was not even listed among the top three on many ballots. As a result, she finished second to British hurdler Sally Gunnell.

Either a number of voters suspected Wang’s world-class performances in distances from 1,500 meters to the marathon were drug-aided, or the balloting is heavily weighted with British voters.

The U.S.-based Track & Field News, however, named Wang as its women’s athlete of the year. Both polls listed Algerian miler Noureddine Morceli as No. 1 among men.

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Thumbs up to the U.S. Olympic Committee for moving so quickly to replace Quincy Watts’ two gold medals from the 1992 Summer Olympics after they were stolen from his grandmother’s Inglewood home.

Thumbs down to the USOC for moving so quickly to disqualify ice dancer Gorsha Sur, a Russian immigrant, from the 1994 Winter Olympic team, although the U.S. Congress is expected to hear his request for accelerated citizenship Jan. 24, three weeks before the Games open in Norway.