‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : Our Top Story: Harding Finally Gets to Norway : Figure skating: Reporters are right behind her--from Portland to Lillehammer. She meets Kerrigan without incident.

It was shortly before 1 p.m. Wednesday when the media representatives were booted out of the Hamar Accreditation Center, which could mean only one thing. The Tonya watch had become a Tonya warning.

So while awaiting her imminent arrival, about 100 television crews, reporters and photographers from maybe a dozen countries, did what all aggressive, news-hawking members of the Fourth Estate would have done in such a predicament.

Standing outside in 10-degree weather, snow blowing in their blue faces, they asked trash collectors outside the Hamar Accreditation Center what they thought about figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

As might be expected, even they could not agree.

“I think she’s beautiful,” Amund Reck Lysthaug said of Harding.

“No,” Nina Rehegland said, “I want Nancy to win. Tonya is not going to win. She’s fake. She’s trash.”

That is what reporters like to call an informed source.

Twenty-seven minutes later, a blue Volvo 940 DL pulled up carrying Harding, who was dressed in her red, white and blue USA uniform; the United States’ assistant chef de mission, Paul George, and the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief security officer, Larry Buendorf.

After another 16 minutes, she emerged with a competitor’s credential around her neck and waved. “I feel great; I’m ready,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”

Five weeks, dozens of charges and countercharges, too many tabloid television shows and magazine covers to count, seven books, three made-for-TV movie deals, a $25-million lawsuit and a court-negotiated settlement since she was first tied to the Jan. 6 assault on Kerrigan, Harding had arrived at the Winter Olympics.

And within hours of her arrival, she had run into Kerrigan, for the first time since the national championships last month in Detroit, where the attack occurred.

Harding and Kerrigan greeted one another, according to USOC spokesman Mike Moran.

“They were coming from opposite directions in the (athletes’) village,” he said. “They were both with groups of friends. They stopped and talked and went on their way. It broke the ice.”

The last leg of Harding’s journey began at 10:45 a.m. PST Tuesday in her hometown of Portland, Ore., where she boarded a commuter jet bound for Seattle. She transferred there to an SAS flight to Copenhagen, where she changed to another SAS flight that took her to Oslo.

A dozen journalists, including Bob Baum of the Associated Press, arranged to travel with her.

He reported that she slept from Portland to Seattle but seemed wide awake on the first half of the flight to Copenhagen, padding around in her stocking feet in Euroclass, signing autographs and drawing smiley faces underneath them, once borrowing a video camera and turning it on CBS anchor Connie Chung.

Harding talked some to the other journalists, rejecting the suggestion that she would be annoyed by the media attention that would greet her in Hamar, the site of her figure skating competition that begins on Feb. 23.

“No,” she said. “I mean, I’m going to Norway!”

She would not, however, answer questions about Kerrigan.

When Harding tired of the attention, she said, “I’ve had enough. You guys can all go back to your seats now so I can get some sleep.”

There were another 100 media types waiting for Harding at Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, where she was led down a ramp and whisked away in a USOC van that took her 80 miles north to Hamar. She went first to the athletes’ village, where she received her uniform, then was taken to the accreditation center.

Although reporters had to wait outside, they were not alone. Standing with them was Norway’s minister of agriculture, who could not get his credential for the Games until Harding left.

Afterward, reporters filed back into the building and asked eyewitnesses what they had seen.

Leif Kobbeltvedt, the young man behind the help desk, said he got Harding’s autograph. It was only the second one he had ever asked for in his life.

Whose was the first?

“Nancy Kerrigan,” he said.

Is he going to sell them?

“No,” he said, shocked by the notion. “You get them for yourself. You don’t get autographs for money.”

Hanne Marken, 21, took Harding’s picture for the credential.

“She was shy,” she said when asked about her most famous subject.

The man supervising the photo process, an American Kodak representative named David Curtiss, said, “She was great; she asked for a cup of coffee. Katarina (Witt) will be here the 18th. That’ll be a breeze.”

After Harding left the accreditation center, she was taken back to the athletes’ village, where, in order to avoid the media, she was admitted through the service entrance.

That was the last public Harding sighting of the day.

Connie Chung, however, was seen later at the Olympic Amphitheatre. The woman who shares the seat once occupied by Walter Cronkite was interviewing a South Korean skater, asking her what she thought about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.

And that’s the way it was, Feb. 16, 1994.