‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : Talbot Had Given Her Best Before the Games Began

The sign said isprepareing. It meant they were preparing the ice. There was a break in the action, as the sportscasters say, and the first-rate speedskaters had already skated. Two dozen women already were done.

One of them, a friend and teammate of Kristen Talbot’s, already was in the stands, slapping hands with her fans. The gold medal of the Winter Olympics was hers, principally because nobody else left had the chance of a snowball in Helsinki.

Kristen’s father didn’t care.

“Come on! Show us what you’ve got!” Gary Talbot, a carpenter from Schuylerville, N.Y., called out through cupped palms.

A drum roll alerted the next two skaters in the women’s 500 meters to take their marks. Kristen, 23, in skin-tight blue, inched forward. So did a Hungarian teen-ager named Krisztina Egyed, who when she wasn’t wearing skates said she enjoyed going surfing. They lined up side by side, Kristen and Krisztina, and froze like statues until the starter’s gun went off. This was their whole Olympics, this race, but hardly anyone in the arena was paying attention.

Gary Talbot did. He slid forward to the edge of his chair to get a better look as his daughter swung wide in the outer lane around the oval’s first turn. As she swooped by, he shouted, “Go, honey!”

She went. Faster and faster, yet careful not to fall, Kristen careened around the final bend and headed down the slippery stretch. The third of three Americans to skate in a 34-woman field, she could scarcely feel the stiffness in her hips that had understandably been bothering her for more than a month.

It was the residual effect of an operation Jan. 11 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in which an oncologist “harvested” two quarts of marrow with long needles from 100 points of Kristen Talbot’s hip bones, a life-saving procedure not for her, but for the patient to whom Kristen’s marrow was donated, her 19-year-old brother.

Gary Talbot rose.

“Go!” he yelled.

Kristen crossed the finish line with one last, lurching stride. The whole go-around took less than a minute. She straightened up and checked her wristwatch. At the same time, her father’s eyes sought out the electronic scoreboard and its up-to-the-instant results. He nodded. Not bad. Not so very damn bad. TALBOT, USA it read, 41.05. And automatically the scoreboard had computed where this clocking put her in the pack.

It put her 20th.

Funny thing about priorities. Someone could have justifiably concluded that 20th place would be unacceptable to a real competitor or to those who champion her cause. Particularly not to a three-time Olympian such as Kristen Talbot, who has been struggling unsuccessfully to do better in one of these pageants than 17th place. Particularly not when Bonnie Blair, the leader of practically every pack, was up there on a pedestal basking in all the applause, modeling another medallion.

Talbot, hardly ecstatic, slipped off her hood and slipped on her eyeglasses.

“Not too bad. It was a pretty solid race,” she said, meekly.

Then quiet for a moment.

And then, “Especially because I was feeling, you know, kind of anxious.”

Kind of anxious. Let’s discuss anxiety and Kristen Talbot for a minute. One day in mid-December, her younger brother, Jason, began to complain of dizzy spells, fatigue and a searing pain in his lower back. Jason is a speedskater himself, a short-tracker who has held national titles. Upon hearing her son’s symptoms, Michele (Mickey) Talbot, a registered nurse, insisted on taking him in for tests.

At the hospital in nearby Saratoga, N.Y., where she works, Mickey had heard her share of bad news. This was the worst yet. Her son had aplastic anemia, a rare disorder in which bone marrow ceases producing necessary blood cells. Doctors say this disorder, if left untreated, kills about 85% of those who suffer from it within five years.

Jason needed a transplant. All four of his brothers and sisters immediately volunteered, but Matthew was only 7 and Andrew was 3, and doctors preferred not to ask so much of someone so young. As for Ryan, well, he was 9 and brave, but unfortunately his blood chemistry did not prove an ideal match. And besides, it was all academic. Kristen never flinched, never hesitated, never once mentioned the U.S. Olympic trials that were days away, saying, “Right from the beginning, I knew I had to do this. This wasn’t a tough decision”

Jason joshed with her.

“Oh, no! Your blood in my veins,” he would crack. Privately, though, he was so touched. Twenty-four hours after clinching a place on the U.S. team in the 500 meters, his sister flew from Milwaukee to Baltimore. She checked herself into Johns Hopkins. Her brother had insisted the operation be postponed until Kristen could qualify for her third and last Olympics. Now it could be put off no longer. Out came the needles. Into her bones they went, for 90 excruciating minutes. Within half an hour, her marrow was cleansed and into Jason’s bloodstream it went.

He has been improving daily. So has she.

Weakened by the loss of the red cells, Kristen came back slowly. Her frame of mind improved, too, at least until four days ago, when there was a message for her to phone home.

“I was in the sports-medicine office here when I got the message,” recalled Kristen, who plans to become a physical therapist. “And first thing I thought was, ‘Oh, no! Something’s wrong with my brother.’ ”

Instead, her father’s father, Edward Talbot, had died of a heart attack in Saratoga Springs.

Kristen said, “My dad has been saying all along if Jason got well enough, he would come to the Olympics to watch me skate. Somehow a ticket (air fare) got paid for so he could come. I talked to my grandmother and she said, ‘I know he wouldn’t have had it any other way.’ She wants me to go out to skate for him and Jason.”

Jason, released recently from Johns Hopkins, traveled to Upstate New York for his grandfather’s wake Saturday. The funeral will not be held until the spring, Kristen said, because during winter the cemetery ground is too hard to dig.

As for her, she decided to skate in her race and give it everything she had. This is a young woman who has already given much. She would give what she had and if 20th place was the best she could do, well, not everyone can be Bonnie Blair.

She pushed her eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose and said, “That’s fine by me. I would have liked to go down in the record books for something else, but if someone at least credits me for showing some courage, well, you know, there are worse things.”