The Second Time Around : In 1988, Brian Boitano won Olympic Gold. In January, he won the chance to try again. Now, his hair receding and his frontrunner status a memory, the best athlete in a generation of skaters jumps back into the Olympic spotlight.

There is an old Hollywood adage, which may or may not be true, that says an actress is more than just a woman; an actor is less than just a man. A similar adage may or may not be true of figure skaters: a female figure skater is more than just an athlete; a male figure skater is less than just an athlete. Male figure skaters tend to have more in common with Fred Astaire than Carl Lewis. They don’t look like athletes. They are willowy and thin, like Astaire, or compact and slight, like Joel Grey. They flit around the ice like sprites, spinning and leaping with grace, lightness and, especially, style, which is more important than athletic strength. In fact, figure skating may be the only sport where a competitor’s “technical merit”--the ability to skate fast, say, or leap high--counts less with judges than “artistic impression.” Officially, both standards are scored and carry equal weight, but it is not uncommon for judges, who are subjective, like dance critics, rather than objective, like a track-meet stopwatch, to subtract points from a competitor’s score because they don’t like his hairstyle, or the music he’s skating to, or maybe even the spangled costume he’s wearing.

And male figure skaters don’t have a typical athlete’s attitude toward their sport. Most athletes train to win for years. Figure skaters train for years to win once. All of their training, and all of their competitions, are essentially one long warm-up for a single contest: the Olympic Games. The prize is so important that U.S. women’s front-runner Nancy Kerrigan was brutally mugged to enhance her rival’s chances (see sidebar). The pressure is so unbearable that it has been said no figure skater ever won a gold medal with his or her best performance. Instead, the gold goes to whoever succumbs to pressure the least and skates less badly than the rest.

After a figure skater wins a gold medal, he becomes rich and famous and is expected never to compete seriously again. After all, he can hardly surpass his gold medal. At best, he can only duplicate it. And if he doesn’t, if he loses his next Olympic competition, his gold medal will be devalued. Figure skaters may be the only athletes who are so terrified of loss (which propels most athletes to their next competition) that they stop seriously competing after their biggest victory.

But they can’t actually retire at, say, 24; they still have to skate ; they just don’t have to compete . So they become, instead, skating performers, entertainers, in one of those circus-like ice shows that feature Olympic champions alongside Snoopy and Mickey Mouse. They have only to glide onto the ice, perform a few of their famous moves and then exit to applause and adulation. It is expected of gold medalists that they will trade on their Olympic fame for wealth. It is expected that they will become self-parodies, that their talent will rust from disuse until, finally, they have to be replaced, at 30, say, by a newer, younger gold medalist.

Brian Boitano might have been such a skater. He won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Calgary in 1988, at the age of 24, with a performance so good it may have defied the conventional wisdom. “I had heard that everyone had won the Olympic gold and not skated their best,” he said then. “I did it. That’s my best.” He has been called the preeminent male figure skater of his generation, maybe of all time. And he has been described, again and again, with words usually reserved for athletes: “powerful,” “strong,” “ultimate competitor.”

Which may be why, after his Olympic medal, he refused to do the expected. He retired from amateur competition and became a pro (in endorsements, touring fees and pro prize money, he began taking in more than $1 million a year). But he refused to join an ice show. “Hey,” Boitano has said, “you might be Huckleberry Hound. I know some guys who were champions, and they were in these, like, loincloths. Can you imagine coming out in a loincloth every night? I’d be out of place. There’d be fluff ahead and fluff behind.”

So, instead, Boitano created his own ice shows, some with female counterpart Katarina Witt (who had defied custom and returned for a risky shot at a second gold medal--and won). At the time, Witt was appearing in a show called “Holiday on Ice.” It required that she float above the rink in a hot-air balloon. “Please,” she cried to Boitano on the phone. “Get me out of this!” Together, they created performances that Boitano considered “athletic entertainment.” Time magazine deemed one of them, “Skating II,” “an ice show for thinking adults.” Another, “Carmen” on ice, won them both Emmys.

Still, that wasn’t enough for Boitano. “He had a hard time leaving the world of competition,” says his coach, Linda Leaver. So Boitano continued to compete in professional figure-skating events. He won 10 professional championships after his Olympic gold medal. In lots of sports, that would be considered a heightened achievement compared to his amateur Olympic victory. Professional competitions in other sports (the Super Bowl, the World Series) are deemed vastly superior to their amateur counterparts (the Rose Bowl, the College World Series). Professional figure-skating competitions, however, are often a mix of true athleticism and the kind of kitschy, crowd-pleasing antics professionals pick up, like ticks, from their ice-show experiences.

His “retirement” frustrated Boitano almost from the moment it began. He knew that he was skating better than ever. “His jumps were higher; he was skating faster; there was nothing in his skating that wasn’t better,” says Leaver. To prove it to the world, and himself, Boitano petitioned the International Skating Union in 1990 to open the sport to professionals and amateurs alike. When eligibility was relaxed for the 1992 Games--but not enough to include Boitano--he kept pushing, hoping for another chance. “If you’re a real skater, you’ll always wonder if you still have it,” he said. “I’d like to be known for skating when I die, and I can’t unless I put it on the line.”

Boitano, it seemed, didn’t fear losing, nor did he fear that his gold medal would be tarnished if he proved unsuccessful in future Olympic Games. “I may have the worst night of my life,” he said, “but even if I were to lose, I think there’s a message (in) that . . . about wanting to do what you want to do and not being scared of the consequences.”

Such bravado had already meant six years outside amateur competition and a public tussle with the skating hierarchy. It would also mean 18 months of grueling training and, finally, an ego-bruising fight for a spot on the 1994 U.S Olympic Team. But in the end, he did what he wanted to do. Four days from now, Boitano, 30 years old, injury prone and competing against the best men’s field in recent memory, will once again “put it on the line” at the Olympic Games.

BOITANO HAS WHITE SKIN STRETCHED tightly over a prominent forehead and an angular, bony face. He looks like an ascetic, a 13th-Century monk out of “The Name of the Rose.” His black hair is receding, which is why he now cuts it short. Judges and skaters, who remember his long, fluffy ‘do from ‘88, are quick to comment on it--”Brian, what happened to your hair!”--as if his hair, like Samson’s, would somehow affect his skating. He has also gained weight, which is why some judges have told him he looks fat. He is big, for a figure skater: 5-11, 165 pounds. He has the flaring, muscular thighs of a sprinter or a split end in football.

At competitions, when the skaters practice in groups together on the ice, he looks like a big, predatory bird surrounded by hummingbirds. Their skates seem barely to touch the ice, but Boitano plows forward, digging in his skates as he makes huge figure eights the length of the rink. He moves with his head down, shoulders slightly hunched. The other skaters stay stiffly upright, their eyes looking up toward the top row of seats, like actors playing to the back of the house. As Boitano builds up more and more speed in his figure eights, he begins to smile, luxuriating in the sheer physicality of skating fast.

Each of the skaters gets his own practice time on center ice, while the competition works out around him. One at a time, they run through their routines, beginning to end. When they miss a jump, hands touching the ice for balance, they glance into the stands, seeking out trainers, parents and agents: the entourage. Then they glide toward their coaches, seated at a long table with other coaches, close to the ice, for long words of advice and encouragement: “Excellent! Excellent!” says a coach, handing over an Evian and a Kleenex. “Just remember to keep your body straight.”

But even when center ice is his, Boitano only skates small parts of his routine, 30 seconds here, 20 seconds there, one leap, and then he circles slowly around the rink, his head always down, contemplating what he has just done. There is no entourage, and on those rare occasions when he stops by his coach, they barely speak. Maybe a word or a nod, and Boitano is off again, skating in his own private world.

For years, Boitano was considered “the most powerful and technically exact” skater of his generation, according to choreographer Sandra Bezic, who helped create Boitano’s winning routines in 1988. He was a perfectionist when it came to technique--tight spins, deep edges, straight body--and the best jumper of all time. Sports Illustrated claimed he spent “more time in the air than on the ice.” Leaver says that sometimes he’d lose points with judges because “he jumps so easily.” At the World Championships in ‘83, Boitano became the first male figure skater ever to successfully complete six different triple jumps in competition. He finished seventh.

The problem was, Boitano skated like a robot. Which means that, however graceful his deep edges, he wasn’t an artist . He was “stiff,” says Bezic. “He didn’t give his heart.” Instead, Boitano preferred to win on purely athletic grounds. And he did win. He was four-time U.S. champion and defending gold medalist going into the World Championships in 1987, the prelude to the ’88 Olympics, when he lost in a crushingly close battle with Canadian champ Brian Orser. “The judges want what they want,” Boitano said then. “I want what I can give.” For 1988, Boitano hired Bezic, who designed a routine for him that, according to her, allowed him to “hide behind a character” as a town bully and a Napoleonic soldier. (“Sandra had a hard time making me arrogant,” he says.) For the first time in his career, the skating world was talking about Boitano’s powers of interpretation, his emotion. In Calgary, against Orser, the Napoleonic soldier struck gold.

After his Olympic victory, Boitano was more resigned to making his peace with the judges. “I learned to ask their opinion,” he says. “That’s the way life works.”

But Brian was not so acquiescent when it came to the skating establishment’s refusal to allow him back into amateur competition. In 1990, the International Skating Union ruled on the pro question, making some, but not all, professionals eligible again. Any skater, like Boitano, who had participated in non-sanctioned competition was still barred. Boitano made no secret of his frustration and his sense of betrayal. “I didn’t pound on tables,” he says now, “but I constantly began to talk to the press about this.”

In a column in Newsweek in 1991, he explained why he didn’t just stay an amateur in order to compete: “My family had generously supported me for 16 years. It was time to stop relying on them.” But he also made it clear that he had expected to be able to skate in the next Olympics anyway. “ISU officials assured me,” he wrote, “that my career path would not bar me from entering the Olympics when eligibility requirements were relaxed.”

At the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, most observers thought that the sidelined Boitano could have won another gold medal and added some much-needed luster to a ho-hum American team. “The talk from everyone was that I was skating so well, I would have won the ’92 Olympics,” he says. A few months later, the ISU revised its regulations again, allowing all professionals to regain their amateur eligibility. The press quickly termed it “the Boitano Rule.”

Not everyone in the skating world celebrated. American Mark Mitchell, silver medalist in the ’93 U.S. Nationals, and Canadian champion Kurt Browning, who had placed a dismal sixth in Albertville, complained publicly that Boitano had already had his shot at Olympic glory (and the wealth and fame it brought), so now it was their turn. Boitano’s desire to return to Olympic skating “rubs a few people the wrong way,” said Scott Hamilton, a U.S. gold medalist in ’84. “He might take a spot away from somebody else.”

Boitano responded, “This is not a dance recital, it’s a competition. If they want to win the spot, then defeat me.”

In June of ‘93, Boitano’s application for reinstatement was officially accepted. In order to make the U.S. Olympic team, he would need to come in first or second at the U.S. Championships in January. Bezic again would be his choreographer. By then, Leaver, Bezic and Boitano had already tried out the short program that he would take to the nationals and, they hoped, to Norway. (Skaters perform two routines in competition, a “technical” or “short” program that must include prescribed moves, and a 4 1/2-minute “long” or “free” program, worth two-thirds of the final score, that is almost entirely of their own devising.)

They were also at work on a new long program, and, once again, they settled on a character for him to play, but this time it wasn’t much of a stretch. To Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and “Lincoln Portrait,” Boitano portrays an American pioneer--”It’s the story of going west,” he says.

And the story of a pioneering skater? “I’m playing myself,” he says. “In the slow middle part, I fold my arms in front of my chest, surveying all my hard work. I’m proud of what I see. As far as my skating, this routine allows me to hit a lot of triple jump combinations. The bottom line with all athletes is, they have to hit the triples.” Boitano always comes back to the jumps.

Skate America in Dallas in October was Boitano’s first warm-up for the Nationals, and his first amateur competition since March, 1988. He came in second to Viktor Petrenko, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist, but he was definitely back. (The Nationals “seem like little more than a formality,” said the press.) Then at the U.S. Pro-Am Figure Skating Challenge in Philadelphia in December, his final warm-up before the Nationals, Boitano blew away the admittedly spotty competition, amassing the most points of anyone in the event and landing six triple jumps.

Amid the showmanship that might be expected at a pro-am event, Boitano’s muscular and more serious style stood out clearly. No spangles for him; he took to the ice in tights and a billowing silk shirt, both in basic black for the crucial long program. And while his competition mugged for the crowd (Scott Hamilton hit his signature back flip and greeted his coach with a high five), Boitano held onto a game face, breaking it only when he took his bows, as the applause--a little grudging after the antics of the others--turned into a standing ovation.

Hamilton, who took second place in the competition, answered as many questions about Boitano’s comeback as his own performance. “He seemed nervous,” Hamilton told reporters. “He has nothing to be nervous about. Jumps are the do or die, and he’s the best jumper I’ve ever seen.”

But a Russian coach sniffed: “All Brian does is jump. Today, all the other skaters can jump. It isn’t so special anymore. (In Norway), the others will beat him on artistic expression.”

When Boitano stood in front of the press microphones, the reporters went into attack mode. At Skate America, midway through his long program, he had included a spread-eagle that took him from one end of the rink to the other. In Philadelphia, that gliding move was interrupted with yet another jump. One reporter asked why he made the change. Boitano began to answer, then stopped. “I want to get it right,” he said in his soft, slightly spacey voice. “The judges suggested I put another jump in the slow middle of my performance. I’m willing to play by their rules. I mean, am I going to make a statement, or win?”

They asked him about his nagging injuries--groin, hip, knee, back. “It’s just about pain, not loss of strength,” he said. “I don’t worry about them, or the competition. I just concentrate on doing my own thing, on staying in my bubble of concentration.”

And then, without prompting, he went on. “I have control over that voice inside me that makes me nervous,” he offered. “Oh my God, yes, I’m nervous. I’m nervous! The competition at the Nationals is going to be great ! They’re all great ! But I won’t chicken out. I won’t not take the risk.”

LINDA LEAVER IS LATE. SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO arrive at the Iceland skating rink, east of San Francisco in Dublin, Calif., 45 minutes ago to answer questions about Boitano. Instead, the rink is deserted, except for a lone hockey player, a teen-age boy skating past a sign on the wall that reads “Home of Brian Boitano, 1988 Olympic Gold Medalist.”

When Leaver finally shows up with Boitano, she offers this apology: “I had to wait in line for Brian’s Christmas present.” She is smiling, as if all the world revolved around her protege.

Boitano, who has been doing calisthenics in the lobby, looks over, annoyed, and begins lacing up his skates. “Linda, you talk while I practice on my own,” he says.

Boitano was 8 years old when his mother took him to an Ice Follies show in San Francisco, north of their hometown of Sunnyvale. Soon after, Boitano abandoned his roller skates and went to the Sunnyvale Ice Palace, where he met Leaver. After their first lesson, Leaver went home and told her husband, “One day Brian will be a champion.”

The relationship between Leaver and Boitano is an odd one in the figure-skating world. She is less his Svengali than his junior partner. When they first met, Leaver did not have the background of most other high-powered coaches, many of whom were once champions. She had given up skating in college to devote herself to her family and coaching at the ice rink.

“I don’t think I had any reputation as a coach when I met Brian,” she says today. “But Brian was so coachable. He told you honestly what his fears were. He builds his own set of standards and tries to equal or succeed them. And he has a love for skating.”

Boitano calls Leaver the most technically expert figure-skating coach in the world, and more. “She’s the best,” he says. “She doesn’t tell me what to do, she tries to make me be independent.” It started when he was a youngster. “I’d say, ‘Tell me, Linda. I’m scared to death.’ And she’d say, ‘You’ll know what to do when you’re out there.’ ” It wasn’t long before he internalized her confidence.

Their relationship has its sore spots, however. Off the ice, she insists on doing everything, from coaching to making airplane reservations to organizing his fan club. Sometimes she overextends herself, as she did this day. “When she messes up,” Boitano says, “I tell her to get an assistant, but she won’t. She just promises it won’t happen again.”

While Boitano skates his routine, Leaver keeps glancing at him. “Maybe some skaters have caught up to Brian’s jumping,” she says. “But people take his jumping for granted now. He’s constantly being compared to himself. They expect him to do things he hasn’t done before. Oh! Look at that! A triple axel. Awesome!

“At 14,” she resumes, “all Brian wanted to do was go fast and jump. I told people he had creativity and it would come out in time. Now, he’s just right. Look! See the way his hands float up instead of just coming up. He feels the music now. I can feel what he feels on the ice. He’s gone that next step from just jumping. He still sends chills down my spine,” she says.

When Boitano finishes, after an hour and a half, his face is flushed. “Oh, I had a great time,” he says. “I felt strong.” He has changed into his usual off-ice uniform: sneakers, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and baggy sweats. He heads for his car, a white Volkswagen, and the 40-minute drive to San Francisco, where he lives. This afternoon, he has appointments with an acupuncturist and a physical therapist. On the drive, he talks about his childhood.

“I lived in this perfect suburban town,” he says of Sunnyvale. “All these tract homes.” Boitano is the youngest of four children. His father, Lew, is a dapper, gray-haired retired banker. His mother, Donna, worked briefly as a bridal consultant. “It was so typical,” Boitano laughs. “But I had a great childhood. I was very independent and had a great imagination.”

Some articles claim Boitano spent most of his childhood in his room, spinning out fantasies, as if to presage his life as a figure skater. The lonely, misunderstood artist. But Boitano says those stories are not true.

“I was a typical boy,” he says. “I played Little League baseball. My father was the coach. He wanted me to be a baseball player, too. He never showed it, but I always felt he was disappointed when I became a skater.”

It is not hard to envision the dreams Lew Boitano had for his son. In his youth, Boitano Sr. had played professional ball for the minor-league San Jose Bees. So he and his son played catch--a Norman Rockwell painting, dad tossing the ball, his son catching it and firing it back. Only Brian Boitano, one can imagine, did not fire it back the way his father hoped, and his father realized his dreams for his son would go unfulfilled.

“I wanted to do something different,” says Boitano. “On my own, where I couldn’t bank on teammates to help me through. I wanted something that relied on speed and power. You know, jumping on the ice is like flying at 35 m.p.h., except that you’re in control.”

Whatever his father’s disappointments, Boitano has always claimed he had the perfect skating parents, supportive but unobtrusive. They couldn’t wait for him to drive so he could chauffeur himself to the rink. They treated his skating with the benign neglect of people who did not understand it. To this day, they rarely attend competitions (although they will travel to Lillehammer), and they decline to be interviewed about their son’s career.

Boitano began to make a name for himself as a teen-age skater (his first victory was when he was 8, in a “pixie derby boys” competition). As he progressed, Boitano began to resent all the criticisms that he was just a technical, proficient, powerful skater, without artistry. “If I was a robot on the ice,” he says, “it was because I let them make me into one. I was naturally passionate, but I could see passionate people weren’t making it in skating. They don’t let you have any joy.” He pauses, then adds, “No, that’s wrong. You don’t let yourself have any joy. I had to be a robot because what I was trying to do needed to be so technical. I wish I was more passionate in life, but I let skating take that away from me. The judges were hard on me. They were hard on everybody. When I was 14, a judge told me I’d never make it. This invades your psyche. You re-evaluate yourself. Why am I doing this? Money? Fame? I searched my soul. Finally, I realized I was doing it because I was good at it and I loved it.”

Boitano loves to talk. Since his Olympic training began, Leaver has been warning the press away from her charge, so as not to impair his concentration or compromise his training. When she shooed him past a writer at the hotel during the Philadelphia competition, Boitano sent her back a few minutes later to invite the writer to join him and his parents for breakfast. Lew Boitano talked golf (“Oh puh -leeze,” Boitano said, “you play 36 holes for what?”). While his mother sat unsmiling, Boitano leaned over the table and whispered to the writer, “ So , you interviewed Traci Lords. When my parents aren’t around, you’ve got to tell me all about her.” He grinned, rubbed the palms of his hand together, shoved them between his knees: a typical Boitano gesture. When he gets excited, like a child, he can’t contain himself.

“I want people to say, ‘Oh my God! He’s the best!’ ” he says without guile. “But I don’t want to be treated like a star. Ugh. I hate that. Glitz and all that celebrity. You know, people in the Green Room vying for attention. ‘I’m a really simple person, even though I make a lot of money, blah blah blah.’ ”

For virtually all of his life, he has focused totally on skating. Walking along a street in San Francisco’s North Beach one night, searching for an after-dinner espresso, Boitano mentions that someday he would like to open a restaurant. But when? He’s too busy--skating.

Finding a seat at a crowded sidewalk coffeehouse, Boitano goes unrecognized. Once the espresso is served, he begins to talk about his insecurities, his dreams. He’s afraid he’s devoted so much of his life to sport that he’s missed out on a formal education. “But I know a lot of guys with a college education, and they’re still clueless.”

And he spins dreams much wilder than owning a restaurant. “I’d like to buy a ranch in the Napa Valley and raise animals. Like a zoo. I’d even milk cows.” He laughs at the thought of himself milking a cow.

Then it’s right back to skating. “I’d have my own ice rink,” he says, “and after I chased the cows off the ice, I’d skate for my friends. I could do it on my own terms. As an athlete, not an artist. I don’t consider myself an artist, but an athlete. I could have been a sprinter. It’s all in the heart. Most other figure skaters couldn’t be anything but skaters. I’m an athlete who happened to skate. The judges say I’m not artistically the best. But when I hit a triple jump and they say it’s beautiful, I go, ‘Ha! There!’ I please myself. God, sometimes I wish I was a little guy. They’re so light and quick. I’m too big. I hit the ice like a ton of bricks.”

He laughs, then says seriously, “What I’m trying to do with my skating is show the more masculine side of figure skating. That’s why I never wear costumes. It’s not athletic to wear beads.”

He raises an eyebrow, and adds, “Do you know, Scott Hamilton once dropped his pants on the ice? The fans loved it.” He shakes his head. “My fans are mostly women between 16 and 69. I want to change that image of my sport. I want guys to appreciate me for being an athlete.”

AT THE U.S. CHAMPIONSHIPS IN Detroit, Boitano is the first of the truly competitive skaters to take the ice, at 9 p.m., live on national television. The night before, he won the technical program, barely beating 21-year-old Scott Davis, from Great Falls, Mont., the defending U.S. champion. In the eyes of the press, hooked on a comeback story, Davis has already been relegated to second place. The headlines in the sports section of the Detroit Free Press, giving the game to Boitano, read: “Who’s No. 2?” Some skating experts, however, thought that Davis actually had skated better than Boitano in the short program.

Davis is handsome, with sandy-colored hair and freckles, and could pass for Tom Sawyer. In fact, he was often seen around the lobby of his hotel in Detroit with a girl who could pass for Becky Thatcher. The two, scrubbed-looking and fresh-faced, held hands wherever they went. Davis’ dad, a football coach, is yet another father who was reportedly not happy when his son became a figure skater, but Davis has come a long way in a short time. Once, he idolized Boitano. In Detroit, however, Davis does not seem awed by his hero. He has the easy arrogance of youth, no matter what the press is saying.

Boitano, in black again, skates onto the ice to “Appalachian Spring” and immediately hits the first of seven planned jumps. The audience cheers, and then, as Boitano hits jumps Nos. 2 and 3, the excitement and tension build. He hits the fourth jump so powerfully, it seems he could easily rotate four, not three times, before landing. On No. 5, he makes a barely noticeable slip. The audience is holding its collective breath now. Boitano leaps for his sixth jump and, in midair, realizes he can’t pull it off and performs just 1 1/2 turns before he lands. He hits the seventh triple without a hitch.

He finishes at center ice, spinning to a blur and a thunderous standing ovation. At the “Kiss and Cry Corner,” where the skaters and their coaches wait for the scores in full view of the TV cameras, he talks to Leaver about his performance as the scores come up, mostly 5.7s and one 5.6 (out of a possible 6.0) for technical merit, and mostly 5.8s for artistic impression. They are good scores, but there is room at the top.

When Davis skates, he looks looser than Boitano, more emotional in the face of Boitano’s natural austerity. After each jump, he smiles, while Boitano’s face gave away little except intense concentration. Davis’ jumps are not as powerful or as high as Boitano’s, but he hits them all, one after another, and draws the audience to him. Davis looks hungry for a victory tonight, and the audience can sense it. His routine is choreographed to “West Side Story,” and he is right in character--a finger-snapping gangster from a more innocent time. When he hits his final jump, the audience rises like a huge beast and roars its appreciation. Davis pumps his fist like an athlete who has scored a touchdown and skates over to the Kiss and Cry Corner. When his scores are announced, 5.8s and 5.9s, it is apparent that he will defeat his onetime idol.

Late that night, in the bowels of the arena, Boitano is waiting to go into the interview room to face the media. Dick Button, the former figure-skating champion, now a TV analyst, goes over to Boitano.

“I thought you skated well,” Button says.

“I did too,” says Boitano. “I was real nervous. There was so much pressure on me.” Boitano has been telling the world all through his comeback that he wanted to take the risk of competition, that it was the opportunity to take that risk that he had really been fighting for, win or lose. But now, it’s clear just how fiercely he wanted the chance and the win. His smile is at half wattage, his ascetic face looks drawn. He had said before the finals, “I really want to win. If I do, I’ll be so happy I’ll practice the day after.” Now that he hasn’t won, he says he has no plans to practice tomorrow.

When Boitano enters the interview room, he takes a seat beside Davis, who is already explaining to the media that he skated conservatively tonight after he saw Boitano’s missed triple axel. Then he says, “It seemed like a dream to receive such an ovation” when competing against Boitano. His coach, Kathy Casey, is not so magnanimous. She says she was angry at the headlines that had already given Boitano a victory before he skated.

When questions are directed toward Boitano, as always, he doesn’t dissemble. His disappointment is clear. “I’m not happy someone else came in first,” he says. “That stupid triple axel!”

The following morning, a number of TV news crews set up their cameras in the lobby of the Westin Hotel. They are not there to record Boitano’s entrance, or even Scott Davis’--their successes and failures have paled next to what will become The Biggest Story Ever in Ice Skating, the attack on Nancy Kerrigan. When Boitano appears in the lobby, in baseball cap and sweats, he is unnoticed. He goes over to a couch and, staring at the TV cameras, says, “Wasn’t that terrible about Nancy? There are really bad people in this world.”

He turns his back on the cameras, once again intently focused on his own skating. He escaped one of his fears--”cake all over my face”--by making the team. “I proved my comeback was serious,” he points out. Then: “Maybe I’ll do better as an underdog.” Boitano knows the competition in Norway will be tougher than last night’s. Besides Davis, the field will include current world champion Kurt Browning, reigning Olympic champion Viktor Petrenko of Ukraine, and Elvis Stojko, silver medalist at the 1993 world competition and, like Browning, a Canadian.

“I’ve never been my best when I’m in the lead,” Boitano muses. “I’m good, but I’m not great when I’m ahead. It’s just that I’m always better when I’m striving for things. Now maybe this will build a fire under me.”

AFTER CALGARY, ON AN EXHIBITION tour in Milan when Brian was skating’s king, he met another golden boy, Alberto Tomba, the Italian slalom skier. “He snubbed me and turned his back,” Boitano says. It’s not difficult to figure out why. Tomba is a big, muscular, handsome man who reeks of jock. When Tomba met Boitano, he saw just another male figure skater, a man in a sport he did not respect. An amiable man, with childlike gestures, breathy enthusiasms and a soft, lilting voice. And Tomba misread all of it as a sign of weakness as an athlete and a man.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Boitano gives the lie to the belief that manhood and true athleticism lie in a host of superficial, macho mannerisms rather than in the true character beneath them. Boitano may giggle, he may not slap a friend on the shoulder very forcefully, but beneath those gestures lies a man with the character to compete purely in his sport and excel, for the sheer joy of it, under the most intense, immediate pressure any athlete could ever face.

At the last Winter Olympics, in Albertville, Boitano was forced to sit in the stands and watch. It does not take much of a stretch of imagination to see him there, rubbing his palms together, jamming them between his knees, not in excitement, but rather in frustration. Which was why, later that night, after the Albertville rink was dark and deserted, Boitano and Katarina Witt glided onto the ice--two former champions skating their own private program.

In Lillehammer, the spotlight will once again be his.

“It’s only 4 1/2 minutes,” says Boitano, “and you just have to turn it on under pressure when the light hits you. You can’t make a mistake. You can’t say I’m not ready. And if you slip and fall and want to get off the ice, you have to argue with yourself to go on. You have to say , ‘Shut up, for Chrissakes, and concentrate.”