LILLEHAMMER / ’94 WINTER OLYMPICS : DATELINE / LILLEHAMMER : She Knows Red Herring When She Sees One

Lots of people will look back on these Winter Olympics as an unforgettable experience.

Then there’s Kristin Matta.

“I’ve had better vacations,” she said.

Matta, director of communications for the U.S. Figure Skating Assn., is the U.S. Olympic team’s press attache for figure skating at the Games.

That assignment, of course, has thrust her in the middle of the never-ending Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan saga. She probably has been the most in-demand person at these Olympics.

“I was talking to my mom (in Costa Mesa) after I’d been on TV at a news conference and she said, ‘You were the one with the dark circles under your eyes, right?’ ”

Fortunately for all, Matta, a former figure skater herself, has kept her poise--and her sense of humor.

“It gets funny sometimes,” she said. “The (non-CBS) TV crews were desperate to talk to anybody, so if you walked by with a USA jacket, you were fair game. But the morning Tonya arrived, one TV crew was all set up and didn’t want me to walk through the door, just in case Tonya might be coming out.”

Were she not so principled, Matta could have made a killing in the market--the fish market.

“One British journalist--I thought he was with a tabloid but he said he wasn’t--offered me a large quantity of smoked herring if I would feed him inside stuff on Tonya and Nancy,” she said.

A large quantity?

“Half a ton.

“I told him, ‘If you give me only one smoked herring I’ll never speak to you again.’ It takes more than fish to bribe me.”

Matta was put off a bit by the media attention Harding and Kerrigan drew the morning of their first skate-together practice in Hamar, but said she understood it.

“That was pretty sad because the Games were on and there were so many other great athletes performing and being ignored,” she said. “But it is a big story and everybody’s doing a job.”

For a while, Matta said, everybody connected with figure skating was saying, “Nothing can top this!” at every new development.

“We quit saying it,” she said. “Every time we say that, something does.”

Matta said she never figured on dealing with this kind of thing when she took the job.

“But I’ll always look back on it in a positive light,” she said. “It’s been an enormous learning experience.”