It Took a While, but She’s a Convert : Skating: Bailey wanted to be another Dorothy Hamill until she figured out that speedskating was her Olympic ticket.

Everyone seemed to know Chantal Bailey was meant to be a speedskater.

Everyone except Bailey, who tried figure skating, waitressing and college before a $6 pair of garage-sale speedskates planted the seed of a dream she hopes will blossom in the Winter Olympics.

Bailey grew up in Champaign, Ill., which has one of the country’s few speedskating tracks. That meant every kid in town--including a brown-haired girl named Bonnie Blair--skated there at one time or another. Bailey put on speedskates once in a while, but her Olympic aspirations centered on figure skating after she saw Dorothy Hamill cast a gold-medal spell at the 1976 Olympics.

“The speedskaters used to tease me and say, ‘You’ve got speedskater’s legs, why don’t you try it?’ ” said Bailey, who is a muscular 5 feet 8 and 160 pounds. “I used to put on an old pair and go in and out of people. I did that maybe three times. I had the figure skater’s mentality that you’re over the hill at 14 if you haven’t started a sport by then.”

Bailey started figure skating at 10 and eventually learned to launch herself into triple jumps and graceful spins. But even then, her schoolmates were convinced that she was in the wrong sport.

“My freshman year, Bonnie Blair signed my yearbook, ‘I’m glad we got to be friends. I really think you should become a speedskater, but I know you’re good at figure skating,’ ” said Bailey, who was a year behind Blair at Central High School.

Because she wasn’t good at tracing the compulsory figures, Bailey never reached the national level as a figure skater. Her progress in speedskating, though, has been stunning.

Despite waiting until she was 22 to devote herself to speedskating, Bailey made the national team in 2 1/2 years, and the Olympic team in six years. She qualified to compete at Lillehammer in the 1,000-meter sprint and the 1,500 along with Blair, the three-time gold medalist.

Bailey is also in the 3,000, and if her time in that race is among the 16 fastest at the Games, she will race the 5,000.

“My goals are to be in the top six in 1,000, the top six to 10 in the 1,500, top 10 in 3,000 and top 10 in 5,000,” she said. “You can’t put limits on a beginner. Beginners can make jumps like you wouldn’t believe, and I still consider myself a beginner.

“I’d like to be world class, top three, in the 1,000 and 1,500. I want to stop just being another American who made top 20. I want top three. I can feel there’s so much more in me when I finish my races.”

Bailey thought her Olympic hopes were finished when she quit figure skating. It was a wrenching decision, made tougher by remembering the pain she and her parents endured to keep her dream alive.

Her father, Raymond Dunn, took on three jobs to finance her lessons. Besides working for the Illinois Highway Dept., he did janitorial work and collected stray hubcaps along Interstate 74 and turned them in for cash.

“Champaign, Ill., is not a Mecca for figure skating,” she said. “If you don’t live in the right area and you don’t have a lot of money, it’s really difficult to make it in that sport.”

Her mother, Shirley, helped out with bake sales and car washes. She also provided emotional support when Chantal, eager to lose weight so she would look better on the ice, developed bulimia when she was 14.

As a victim of the eating disorder, Bailey would eat, then later make herself throw up. Unchecked, bulimia can cause complications that lead to death. Bailey was down to 120 pounds--thin for her athletic frame--before she recovered.

“When something takes over your life like that, you know it’s hurting you but you can’t stop,” she said. “It starts to take over the one thing you love. I couldn’t jump, I couldn’t do anything. You don’t have control over it. You want to stop but you can’t.”

She regained control of her eating habits and her life but found herself at a loss about her future at 18, when she had gone as far as she could in figure skating. Speedskating was no more than an idle thought then, when she enrolled in Denver Technical College.

“I had it in the back of my mind after figure skating, but first I had to find myself. ‘Who is Chantal?’ ” she said. “I started going to school to study sports medicine. I thought, ‘Maybe I can work with Olympians.’ I had become a regular, everyday person. I was in school and I waited tables. . . .

“I was a little bit overweight and I had gotten out of shape, so I joined a speedskating club in Boulder,” said Bailey, whose second-hand skates drew laughs. “I started speedskating again and had that little flicker of flame in me, but I thought it would be a dream that would always be a dream.”

Her dreams began to take shape in 1988, when she almost qualified for the Olympic trials, and in 1992, when she almost made the Olympic team in the 1,000-meter sprint. Working with Mike Crowe, who had coached Blair and Dan Jansen, her progress accelerated. She was the 1993 national all-around champion and began to record top-15 finishes in World Cup competition.

The all-around title--which brought financial support from the U.S. Olympic Committee--couldn’t have come at a better time. Her marriage to computer salesman Tony Bailey had broken up and her finances were shaky.

“Last year, I pretty much went on my credit card,” she said. “It was, ‘Make it or you’re in debt big time.’ ”

Bailey’s best international placings have been in the 1,000. She was second to Blair twice in that race at the Olympic trials and had a personal best of 1 minute 23.14 seconds. That’s more than five seconds off the world and Olympic record of 1:17.65 set by Germany’s Christa Rothenburger.

“That’s the one where, in my head, I say, ‘This is my race,’ ” she said. “I really like that race. It’s not a question of ‘Will I die?’ It’s more a question of ‘Keep your speed up.’ It’s pretty easy for me.”

Little has come easily to Bailey, but she’s not ready to give up.

“I’ve been praying to be an Olympian since I was so young,” she said. “God didn’t forget my prayers, I did. He didn’t, and He decided to make them come true.”