COLUMN ONE : The Cold World of Skating : Pressures to cash in can push some young hopefuls over the line. Jealousies, bitter rivalries and sabotage sometimes tarnish the sport’s elegant image.

The shocking attack on ice skater Nancy Kerrigan--and the growing belief that it somehow involved the camp of rival Tonya Harding--have tattered the carefully tailored image of women’s figure skating.

But to those who spend time in the chilly corners of neighborhood rinks where girls and their parents begin to dream of Olympic gold, it is no revelation that the figure skating world is not all sugar and spice on ice.

Just ask Janice Thomas, whose daughter Debi won a bronze medal for the United States at the 1988 Olympics.

It was not easy rising before dawn to drive miles up the freeway so Debi could train for hours before school. Then there were the staggering costs for lessons, equipment and travel. At $25,000 a year, it was a crushing load for a parent, especially a working, single mother with a mortgage to pay.

But what really bothered Thomas about the sport her daughter came to star in were the nasty, uncontrollable aspects: the jealousies, bitter rivalries and petty acts of sabotage by resentful competitors and their friends.

“Deb’s boots (skates) turned up missing from time to time, and once I tracked it down to another girl at our rink,” recalled Janice Thomas. “She said she had picked them up by mistake, but how could that be? Deb’s name and phone number were written right inside.”

Coaches, skaters and their parents say that behind the sequined outfits and radiant smiles, women’s figure skating can be a cutthroat sport, one not nearly so innocent as television portrays.

Stealing and tampering with skates--an item more personalized than a golfer’s putter--is just one way to sideline an opponent. Putting super glue on the guards skaters use to protect their blades is another dirty trick, one coach said.

Some skaters, including Debi Thomas, have discovered their music tapes vital to competition stolen or snipped with scissors. On the ice, skaters may fail to yield the right of way during warm-up sessions or attempt to break a rival’s concentration when she is attempting a difficult jump.

Rumor-spreading and gossip are more common, seen as ways to unsettle a nervous competitor. Some skaters also try to curry favor with judges in one of the world’s most subjective sports.

Parents are sometimes the instigators. Like Hollywood stage mothers or Little League fathers, they often have unrealistic expectations and may push their children to attempt stunts they cannot perform.

Some go further. At Lake Arrowhead’s renowned International Ice Castles Training Center, the proprietor recently warned a parent who had urged his child to trip another skater. Barbara Roles-Williams, a 1960 Olympic bronze medalist from Arcadia and now a coach, recalled one mother at a Newport Beach rink who stood at the rail and cast hexes on her daughter’s competitors. Another Newport Beach mother got a tongue-lashing from Roles-Williams when she wished aloud that her child’s rival would hurt her leg.

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But such behavior, insist Roles-Williams and others, is more the exception than the norm. All sports have their bad apples, they say.

“Certainly there are these minor types of incidents in figure skating, but it’s a great sport, good for your body, good for your mind,” Roles-Williams said. “And I hope no one concludes otherwise.”

Still, said Claire Ferguson, president of the Colorado-based U.S. Figure Skating Assn., “we are not a group of perfect people. Skating is not some sort of fantasy world, and we are not a bunch of windup Barbie and Ken dolls.”

This may come as a surprise to those who become mesmerized by the sport each time the Winter Olympics rolls around. The network television image of female skaters as elegant goddesses suggests a sorority of girls who have just stepped off the top of a wedding cake--sexy, perhaps, but certainly unsoiled by sweat and the seamy side of life.

In reality, the young skater’s world is a grueling one. Long hours of practice deny the girls a typical social life and cut into every other part of growing up.

The sport’s intense physical demands--especially the jumps, which get more daring each year--require thin, perfectly fit bodies, which can mean constant, obsessive dieting. Lisa Carey of Woodland Hills, a U.S. junior pairs champion in the 1970s, recalls coaches who would force the heavier girls onto the scales in public to shame them into losing more pounds.

Striving to match the ice princess look that skating judges--and the public--have shown they like, girls will go to whatever lengths their wallets and parents allow. Nose jobs are common, as is teeth polishing for a sparkling smile. At this year’s national championships in Detroit, hip-thinning liposuction emerged as the skater’s newest cosmetic weapon.

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Driving all of this, veterans of the sport say, are its high stakes and the slim chances of cashing in. Unlike many team sports, which provide numerous slots for the talented to fill, skating offers its true crown to only one, the Olympic gold medalist.

Although many runners-up can earn a living as coaches or skaters in traveling ice shows, only the Olympic champion cashes in big-time, winning enduring fame, endorsements and other perks that can mean millions.

“If Nancy Kerrigan wins the Olympic gold medal in Lillehammer, she will have gigantic, seven-figure earnings for four years until our next queen,” said Michael Rosenberg, an agent who represents 36 prominent skaters. In the two years since she won the gold for the U.S. at Albertville, France, Kristi Yamaguchi has earned about $2.5 million, agents and other skating insiders say.

This is a dramatic change from decades past, said Carol Heiss Jenkins, a 1960 Olympic champion now coaching in Ohio. “In my day, you competed to see who was the best of that time, to have someone designate you as the best. We didn’t expect anything else to come out of it. I was on the news, Harry Reasoner interviewed me, that was about it.”

Although today’s adolescent girls may not be propelled by the temptation of fame and a fat bank account, some of their parents are. Keeping a child in competitive figure skating can easily run $30,000 a year, experts said. Yamaguchi’s father, Jim, once likened the experience to “sending Kristi to Stanford or Harvard for . . . 12 years.”

Forced to work two jobs, mortgage their homes, spend hours at the rink and make other sacrifices to keep their daughters on ice, some parents hope for a pay-back.

“It’s big money, big contracts and big agents today, and some parents talk to their kids about this when they’re young,” said Roles-Williams, who now coaches in Torrance. “They think it motivates them, but in reality it’s a (burden) over their heads. They feel they have to keep going, that they have to live up to that.”

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Many girls hold up fine and even flourish under the pressure. Captives of a rigorous training regimen, they develop discipline, self-confidence, courage and goal-setting skills that help them greatly in life. Moreover, some skaters say their sport forces them to cope with low scores, painful tumbles and other crushing disappointments.

“It’s a tough sport, and when you don’t win, your self-esteem takes a dive because it’s seven people telling you that you didn’t measure up,” said Yvonne Gomez, who skated for Spain in the 1988 Olympics but grew up and trained in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Despite that and the hard work, I loved skating, and it has really benefited me in my life.”

Pam Zeckman, a former competitive skater from Chicago, agreed: “I had to learn how to lose and deal with it. That’s what I do now in real life. I stumble, get up again, get over the disappointment and just go on.”

For some skaters, things do not work out that way. The “pressure-cooker” of the skating world is simply too much, Zeckman says, and “somehow it all goes haywire.”

The demands of weight reduction drive some to diet pills or eating disorders. Others cannot handle the stress of performing, or want to quit but are racked with guilt over their parents’ considerable investment of time and money in the sport.

Some turn to therapy for help. Even Kerrigan--the picture of poise when she faced TV cameras after her attack last week--began began seeing a sports psychologist when she was having troubles with falls several years ago.

Others, such as the San Fernando Valley’s Tiffany Chin, drop out, cutting their emotional losses but perhaps not realizing their potential.

“I wouldn’t want my kid to be an ice skater. No way,” Chin, a former U.S. champion, said shortly after she decided to skip the 1988 Olympics and turn pro at age 20. “I’d want my kid to grow, to go to college, to become a whole person. There’s so many traps in skating. Once you’re ensnared, you can never find your way out.” Today, she teaches young figure skaters at the Iceoplex in North Hills.

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Some skaters attempt to have the best of both worlds, fighting to retain rich, well-rounded lives. Such renegades, however, risk criticism from coaches who fault them for lacking single-minded focus and true desire to succeed. Debi Thomas is a case in point.

Thomas, who grew up in San Jose, loved skating but loved many other things as well. She played the flute and trumpet, and enjoyed rock concerts and the opera. Determined to become a doctor from the age of 5, she realized that school was something that could not be missed. So, unlike many other skaters who take correspondence courses, she remained in school and graduated from Stanford University.

“Debi was someone who needed and wanted balance in her life, and skated best when she had it,” her mother said. But the skating world didn’t like it. “They wanted total sacrifice,” Janice Thomas said, “and the exclusion of everything else. It was very hard on Deb.”

Still, Debi Thomas managed to succeed. She now attends medical school at Northwestern University.

Dr. Glen Elliott, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at UC San Francisco, said the “isolative and solitary” nature of skating has its drawbacks. Unlike team sports, he said, “it’s you working for hours a day perfecting your moves, and the only social involvement you get is when you’re applauded or booed.

“Psychiatrically, one would assume that puts you in significant danger of assuming your worth is tied to your ability to get cheered on the ice and win the prize,” Elliott said.

Another hazard of such intensive training, he said, is that “adolescence is the time when most children are trying to develop themselves as social beings. Instead, skaters are mostly developing themselves as superfine physical specimens.”

Despite the attack on Kerrigan, insiders say that nastiness and acts of sabotage are rare in the highest tiers of the skating world. There are exceptions, of course. Karin Doherty, a former German national champion who coaches in Las Vegas, recalled how one of her skaters, Richard Zander, had to withdraw from a major competition in Minnesota in 1989 after the blades of his skates were ruined with pliers.

And at the world championships in Paris one year, a famous American pairs team discovered just before competition time that their costumes had been cut into pieces.

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But most of the hurtful stunts and ugly shenanigans seem to occur at lower levels of competition. Lisa Carey, the former pairs champion who is now public relations director for the Harlem Globetrotters, remembered the tensions she experienced in Burbank’s Pickwick Arena.

“People would get in your way on purpose so that you couldn’t practice a jump,” Carey recalled. “They would try to make it as difficult as possible for you to get quality time on the ice. You’d get mad, but it never came to blows. You’d make faces at each other.”

The most troubling episodes, skaters say, are the instances of theft and tampering of skates. Coaches order their students to keep their equipment with them at all times; some even have beeper alarms on their bags.

Psychological torment is another tactic sometimes used to try to psyche out the opposition. Rudy Galindo, who was Yamaguchi’s pairs partner when the two were national champions in 1989 and 1990, recalls how a rival’s mother ridiculed him and his mother, who is overweight. It was painful, until one day when his mother solved the problem.

“The woman was laughing at us, telling us we were pathetic, and suddenly my mom just charged her and tackled her,” Galindo said, recalling the 1987 incident with a laugh. “My mom won that one and they left us alone after that.”

Tiffany Chin and her family also lived through a strong dose of psychological abuse. When Chin was a youngster training in San Diego, parents of other skaters spread vicious rumors, suggesting, among other things, that her mother, Marjorie, beat her. The family also received hateful, unsigned letters and anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night.

Though upset, Marjorie Chin seemed to accept the harassment as part of the skating game, a necessary evil:

“Whoever’s on top is going to be criticized,” she once told The Times. “It wasn’t unique. Many mothers in skating have to endure this.”

Times staff writer Randy Harvey and researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story.