Life Getting Busier and Busier for Charity-Founding Hall of Fame Skater Yamaguchi

She’s a spokeswoman for the 2002 Olympics and an author. She’s a Hall of Famer and the founder of a charitable organization. She has her own line of clothing and all sorts of endorsements.

Oh, yes, Kristi Yamaguchi also remains one of the foremost figure skaters in the world.

Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist and a fixture on the professional circuit ever since, can’t seem to sit still. The energy she brings to her performances with the Discover Stars on Ice tour carries over into all of her off-ice projects. And there are dozens of them.

Most notable these days is her Always Dream Foundation, which benefits underprivileged children in northern California and Nevada. She has plans to expand the foundation nationwide.

“Our goals are to have a positive influence in the lives of children,” Yamaguchi says. “When you work with them, you get a real sense of different children’s needs, and you want to help them realize some of their goals.”

As part of its effort, the foundation has held an in-line skating event called “Skates in the Park” the past two years in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The next one, on May 24, will be at Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif.

“I’d like for the in-line skating programs to become a nationwide thing,” she says. “We’d like to expand all of our programs to get more people involved and help more children.”

Yamaguchi already has been doing that on the tour, which has the Make-A-Wish Foundation as its beneficiary.

“You can never do enough to help. I hope we can be as successful as Make-A-Wish,” she says. “It opened my eyes to develop this foundation.”

Inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in January, Yamaguchi has been the most successful women’s skater in pro events since leaving the Olympic-eligible ranks after her championship in Albertville, France. Her showmanship rivals that of Scott Hamilton and Kurt Browning, two of her co-stars on tour.

“Being able to entertain people is what keeps me going,” she says. “This is my sixth year, after 20 years of competing. I can’t say it is my favorite thing to do anymore. It’s to the point where it gets hard.

“But it also is so much fun to be able to take your skating to a different level. It’s a tough schedule, but it lets you do what you want artistically and intellectually.”

Even though she has helped write two books that hit the market this year, Yamaguchi won’t claim she’s becoming an intellectual.

“Figure Skating for Dummies,” explains in layman’s terms--with diagrams and photos--the most arcane elements of the sport. When Yamaguchi was meeting the media at the U.S. championships, where she was inducted into the Hall of Fame, she was asked to describe the difference between eligible and ineligible skaters.

Without missing a beat, she held up a copy of the book and said, “The answers are all right here in my book, ‘Figure Skating for Dummies.’ ”

Jerry Seinfeld couldn’t have had better timing as a pitchman.

The other book, “Always Dream,” is an autobiography featuring a superb array of photos of Yamaguchi from her early childhood through Albertville to today.

“I felt with all the other books out there, the unauthorized ones, I should do one myself, with a say in the kind of direction I wanted it to go in, with . . . the message I want to get across,” she says. “Seeing it come together, step-by-step, was a very rewarding process--sort of like putting together a skating program from the beginning.”

She’s also gotten involved at the beginning of the buildup for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. The organizing committee asked her to be a goodwill ambassador for the games, and she was in Nagano “to spread the word that this will be the greatest Olympic games. We want to start to create the excitement now.”

Yamaguchi can picture herself in a more defined role for Salt Lake City. She wouldn’t mind being a consultant for the figure skating venue and competition.

“By then, who knows how much more I’ll be doing as a skater,” she says. “That’s four more years. I’m not sure how much competition I might be doing.”

She hopes still to be touring with Hamilton, Browning, Ekaterina Gordeeva and the rest of the Stars on Ice cast.

“When you skate every night with the best entertainers on the ice,” she says, “what could be greater?”

The Always Dream Foundation can be reached at (510) 451-PARK or at the organization’s Web site: www.kristi.org.