‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : Parisien’s Story Is Bad News/Bad News : Skiing: She had a tragic ‘92, when she lost a medal and then her brother.

It took U.S. skier Julie Parisien 20 years to reach the mountaintop in ski racing, but less than one year to lose an Olympic gold medal and her brother.

So much for life’s fairness. So much for 1992.

Grief, cloaked in degrees, became Parisien’s night stalker. The Olympic loss struck first--what a gnawing pain it seemed then--on the slopes of Meribel, France, at the 1992 Albertville Games.

A month before, Parisien had crashed into a recreational skier and lost four front teeth. A few days later, she cracked her wrist on a slalom gate in Italy.

But she charged into Albertville, fought off the pain, flashed her newly capped teeth, was fitted for a cast, taped her injured wrist to her ski pole and went on her Olympic way, choosing to ignore this run of misfortune.

Parisien posted the fastest time after the first run of the Olympic slalom. The gold was hers to lose. Between races, she went back to her room, alone.

“We had so long between runs, that was the hard part,” Parisien recalls. “It was about 2 1/2 hours. Usually we have about 45 minutes. Looking back, I would have stayed and hung out with the rest of the competitors. It wasn’t that I thought too much, but I think I got a little complacent, a little mellow. It was like, ‘Cool.’ ”

Parisien wins gold in France. Cool. No, magnificent .

So how come the second run was slow motion, compared to the first? She knew she had blown it mid-run and expected the worst, then looked up at the leader board and found it.

Parisien did not simply squander the gold, she finished fourth--the ultimate Olympic indignity--losing the bronze by five-hundredths of a second.

Could there be anything worse?

Yes.

The next Dec. 17, while Parisien was away at a World Cup race in Canada, older brother Jean-Paul, her mentor, was killed when his car was run off the road by a driver only miles from the family home in Auburn, Maine. J.P., a student at the University of Colorado, was returning home for the Christmas holidays.

“It was a hit-and-run, but they found the guy 15 minutes later,” Parisien says, recounting the story. “There was black ice around this corner, and J.P. was going about 40, under the speed limit, and this guy pulled out to pass him. He was a disabled driver as well, he was driving with hand controls. (He was also) a habitual drunk. He rear-ended J.P. and he spun around and hit a tree.”

Unlike those relatives who seek justice to ensure closure on tragedy, Parisien did not involve herself with the post-crash particulars.

“The guy’s life is ruined already,” she says. “He’s a paraplegic, he’s a drunk and now he’s killed someone.”

Given the emotional weight of the last two years, it comes as no great surprise that Parisien--the world’s top-ranked slalom skier a year ago--is struggling.

These were to have been the Olympic Games of redemption, a chance to right the wrong of ’92. Patience is not one of Parisien’s virtues, so it had to be fate that she would have to wait only two years before Lillehammer.

Yet, Parisien begins the 1994 Olympics battered and bruised emotionally, with only a few top-15 finishes to show for her season. She is no longer among the top 20 slalom skiers in the world.

What went wrong? In the weeks after J.P.’s death, Parisien had jumped right back onto her skis.

“I knew I had to get back,” she says. “I couldn’t mope. You grieve, you go through this whole terrible process, but it’s a process, and you just have to keep things as normal as you can. Your mind and your heart are so gone. But you go out with your friends, even though it’s hard; you go out with people who are going to make you feel safe. You put on a good face, you go on.”

Her brother was gone, but Parisien swears he was there in some form, propping her up. Three weeks after Christmas, when Parisien slightly twisted her knee, J.P. kept pushing her, all the way to the World Championships in Morioka, Japan, at which Parisien got a silver medal in slalom.

Yet, afterward, she was almost despondent because she hadn’t won gold for her brother.

Parisien continued to feel J.P.’s presence. Together, perhaps, they were destined to take the gold in Lillehammer and make some sense of his loss.

Everywhere she looked, there was J.P., in some incarnation. Sometimes he took the form of her other brother, Rob.

“There were times when it was Robby turning into J.P.” she says. “He’d say something that sounded so much like him. There are mystical feelings. You feel presence.”

Last summer, Parisien sought a fresh start. She requested that she train independently of the team with Rob Clayton, who had coached her on the Alpine B team.

The U.S. team agreed to try it.

As Parisien struggled to put the pieces back together, it was arranged for former World Cup champion Tamara McKinney to accompany her to Italy in October for pre-World Cup training.

But none of this--not Clayton, not McKinney--translated into results, and after several mediocre performances early in the season, the Clayton plan was scrapped and Parisien returned to the team.

Parisien’s slump continued through Christmas. In fact, she had to rally in January with a couple of top-15 performances just to meet the U.S. team’s Olympic qualifying criteria.

Although she has yet to crack the top 10, Paul Major, the U.S. Alpine director, thinks there is time to repair Parisien before the gates open on her specialty, the slalom, on Feb. 26.

“Julie has really struggled at times,” Major said last week. “It’s been a real emotional battle.”