‘94 WINTER LILLEHAMMER OLYMPICS : Blair’s Best in 1,500 Not Good Enough : Speedskating: She finishes 0.03 seconds short of a bronze, which would have been her sixth medal.

At 1,500 meters, speedskater Bonnie Blair is a sprinter stretching out. It is not her distance, but she almost turned it into her sixth Olympic medal Monday.

Supported by the Blair Bunch, her cheering section of friends and relatives, Blair skated her best time at the distance and missed the bronze by only 0.03 seconds.

“That would have been special, but I can’t be disappointed,” she said. “It was a real strong race for me.

“The one thing I wanted to do was skate a personal best because I had been so close all season, and to do it by over a half-second makes me real happy. I hadn’t skated a personal best in six years.”

Having won the 500 already, Blair is expected to win the 1,000 Wednesday for a fifth gold, breaking a tie with Evelyn Ashford, Janet Evans and Pat McCormick as the most victorious American female Olympian.

Her coach, Nick Thometz, was asked if the strong effort in the 1,500 might take a toll in the 1,000.

“For her to skate that strongly at 1,500 can only give her more confidence in the 1,000,” he said. “She’s skated a lot all season and always recovered well. She’s very strong, physically and mentally.”

Blair agreed.

“The first part of the race came so easily, and I felt so right technically, I have to feel it can only help me in the 1,000,” she said.

“I died on the last lap, but that’s a given. That always happens to me (in the 1,500).”

Skating in the second pair, Blair did 2:03.44 compared to her previous career best of 2:03.92.

She was third, behind Emese Hunyady of Austria and Gunda Niemann of Germany, when Svetlana Fedotkina of Russia, skating in the ninth of 15 twosomes and benefiting from resurfaced ice, came in at 2:02.69, almost two seconds below her career best, bumping Blair to fourth and Niemann to third.

That was the way it ended, with Hunyady’s 2:02.19 providing Austria with its first gold in speedskating.

“I had been so close and so strong in that race all season that I felt if I could skate a career best, I’d have an outside chance at a medal,” Blair said. “I also knew with the resurfacing and the way the pairings were, Fedotkina was the only one who could bump me out.

“I had my hopes up, but that’s part of the game. Sometimes you’re one of the first and sometimes one of the last. Sometimes you have to wait, and sometimes they have to wait on you.”

Blair finished fourth in the 1988 Olympic 1,500, but her 1992 pace was so far off medal contention that Peter Mueller, her coach then, shut her down over the final 400 meters and she finished 21st in the rain at Albertville.

“I think we made the right move,” Thometz said of the decision to go hard. “She wanted to skate, and she skated outstandingly. She puts pressure on herself any time she goes against the clock, but she also knew she wasn’t in the same position in this race that she is in the (500 and 1,000).

“I told her, ‘Whatever you come up with is great,’ and I think that took some pressure off. I mean, you can’t look back and say, ‘Well, we didn’t win a medal, so it was a mistake.’ ”

No regrets from Blair or Thometz and apparently none from Niemann, who won the 3,000 and 5,000 in ’92 and was runner-up in the 1,500.

Given a shot at three golds here, the 27-year-old librarian has only the 5,000 left in her last Olympics after falling in the 3,000 and skating cautiously on the early laps of the 1,500 because of it.

“I am doing my best,” she said. “I can’t be disappointed.”

Hunyady, 27, is on a roll, having won the all-around world championship in Butte, Mont., in early February.

She was born in Budapest--”I have the same name as a Hungarian king, but there’s none of that in my family”--and followed a coach to Vienna in her late teens. She was alone with no money and no job until going to work in the bank where she is still employed.

“I got a late start,” she said of her competitive skating and desire to continue through 1998. “I can still be faster.”