LILLEHAMMER / ’94 WINTER OLYMPICS : Drama Moves Inside Rink : Figure skating: There’s more to event than the Kerrigan-Harding saga. Baiul, Bonaly are early favorites.

Based on the media coverage they have received, it might seem as if there are only two contenders in women’s figure skating at the Winter Olympics, Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. In fact, there are as many characters in this drama as in a Russian novel.

Sorry, tabloid fans, that is not a subtle reference to “Crime and Punishment.” This is a story about figure skating and the women who will compete, starting with tonight’s technical program.

Before Kerrigan was injured in an assault Jan. 6 at the national championships in Detroit, which Harding’s ex-husband and others allege Harding helped plan, neither woman was expected to cause much fuss here. Harding did not even qualify for the 1993 World Championships, and Kerrigan finished fifth.

Because no American woman won a medal, the United States was restricted to fewer than three competitors in the Winter Games for only the second time since 1924.

Kerrigan and Harding have improved since last winter, or at least that was the consensus when they arrived in Detroit, but they are not the way to bet. In the most recent line posted by Ladbrooke’s of London, Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul was the favorite, followed by France’s Surya Bonaly, then Kerrigan.

The contenders:

OKSANA BAIUL, 16, Ukraine

The waif-like Baiul (By-YUL) established herself as the overwhelming favorite last winter, when she became the youngest world champion since Sonja Henie in 1928. She was just the young woman judges were searching for, a ballerina on ice.

But whether it is because everyone in the sport is scrutinizing her more than they did before or whether her body is maturing, it has become evident in recent months that she is not as strong or as consistent with her jumps as some of her competitors.

She also was distracted during training by reporters who found their way to her Ukrainian training sites, initially in her hometown of Dneprpetrovski and later in Odessa, to hear her story.

It is a compelling one. Her father left home when she was 2, and she did not see him again until the funeral of her mother, who had died of cancer, 11 years later. Orphaned, Baiul slept on a cot in the rink where she trained until her coach left for Canada.

Asked to step in, Galina Zmievskaya initially demurred because she knew she would be required to serve not only as a coach but a parent. But her most successful student, 1992 Olympic champion Viktor Petrenko, talked her into it.

“She is only one girl,” he said. “How much can she cost?”

Two years later, Baiul was the world champion. Weeping with joy afterward, she told her coach, “These tears are God’s kisses from my mother in heaven.”

SURYA BONALY, 20, France

A former gymnast, Bonaly (Bone-a-LEE) will never skate with the grace necessary to win true acceptance among the judges. But she may win a gold medal because she can out-jump almost every woman to compete in the sport and many of the men. She is so powerful that she has difficulty finding skates strong enough to withstand the torque of her takeoffs without wobbling.

Exacting revenge for her second-place finish to Baiul in last year’s World Championships, Bonaly recently won her fourth consecutive European championship.

Bonaly’s story is almost as intriguing as Baiul’s. She was adopted by a gym teacher and an ecologist who reared her on a diet of macrobiotic food and Zen.

They told reporters for years that she had been born on Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean. A French magazine even paid for her to spend a weekend there so it could photograph her on the beach, surrounded by coconuts. But as Bonaly approached 18, when the record of her birth by French law would become available, they admitted that she had been born in Nice.

Suzanne Bonaly is a stereotypical skating mother who scared off numerous coaches and even Surya for a while. But Bonaly, a practice-a-holic who works out eight hours a day, could not stay away, and, with the assistance of Frank Carroll during summers at Lake Arrowhead’s Ice Castle, has improved her style.

CHEN LU, 17, China

Another woman who makes the summer pilgrimage to figure skating’s new Mecca at Lake Arrowhead, there to train with Carlo Fassi, Chen emerged with a sixth-place finish in the 1992 Winter Olympics, one behind Bonaly, then vaulted to third in the subsequent World Championships.

She, however, seems to have stalled there, again winning the bronze in last winter’s World Championships, and is believed to have only an outside chance of improving here.

Chen’s mother is a table tennis instructor, and her father is a former ice hockey player in the Jilin province of northeast China, who taught all three of his daughters to skate.

But two of them quit because they did not believe they could become competitive athletes and remain feminine, a faulty premise that Chen disproved.

The first figure skater of note in a country with more than a billion people and only 10 indoor ice rinks, Chen, called Lu Lu by her friends, had no role models, developing her artistic approach by studying videotapes.

As a result, she sometimes seems mechanical. A smile here and there would help. But she more often loses points for the inconsistency of her jumps, a problem that has been exacerbated as her center of gravity has shifted with age.

TONYA HARDING, 23, U.S.

A drag-racing, gun-toting, pool-hustling, cigarette-smoking hellion from the wrong side of the tracks in Portland, Ore., she was an outsider in the sport even before this mess with Kerrigan. But when she is on, the judges cannot deny her.

She, however, has not been really on since 1991, when she became only the second woman, the first American, to land the demanding triple axel and, for a brief, glistening moment, had no equals in the world as she upset Kristi Yamaguchi for the national championship.

Enduring a series of on- and off-ice crises, her career since has steadily descended. She was second in the world in 1991, fourth in the Olympics and sixth in the World Championships in 1992 and off the charts in 1993. The fact that she is even here is a tribute to her perseverance. Although she has worked hard to soften her style, judges do not think much more of her in that category than they do Bonaly. But if Harding survives the technical program and lands the triple axel in the freestyle, a feat she has not accomplished since the fall of ‘91, look out.

NANCY KERRIGAN, 24, U.S.

In the Nancy vs. Tonya, good vs. evil morality play presented live and in color for the last six weeks, Kerrigan has been portrayed by some as a New England ice princess. In fact, she is as blue collar as they come. The daughter of a welder and a legally blind mother, she grew up playing ice hockey on outdoor rinks with her brothers.

As a junior figure skater, she was considered a jumper. But as she matured, she developed long, clean lines and an elegant style that often was compared to Katarina Witt’s.

The flip side of that transformation was that Kerrigan no longer could count on her jumps, a problem that her coaches considered mental. When she began seeing a sports psychologist in 1991, she had her best year, finishing third in the world.

But she is a shy, introspective woman who did not like having her psyche probed and quit seeing the psychologist a year later. Although she finished third in the Olympics and second in the world in 1992, her skating went backward. Favored to win the world championship last year, she finished fifth.

Persuaded to return to a sports psychologist, she entered this season with renewed confidence and was skating marvelously before the assault in Detroit that knocked her out of the national championships. She has not competed since early December, so it is anyone’s guess how she will perform here.

KATARINA WITT, 28, Germany

A two-time gold medalist who took advantage of a new rule that allowed professionals to return to serious competition, Witt chose to go for it even though she has been left far behind by the younger women in technical ability.

Because of that, critics called her comeback a publicity stunt. She has proven them wrong. Not only is she in better shape than she was when she won her second gold medal in 1988, her freestyle program is more demanding than was her Carmen in Calgary.

“I was really flirting my way through that one,” she acknowledges.

This time, she has a message. She is skating her freestyle program to the Pete Seeger anti-war hymn, “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?,” as a tribute to Sarajevo, where she won her first gold medal.

She does not have the tricks to win, but only Baiul can challenge her artistically.