Browning's Triple Jumps Lead to 3d Title in Row

MUNICH, Germany, March 14 - With a free-skate program packed with triple jumps, Kurt Browning of Canada hit the biggest triple of them all when his scores lighted up inside the Olympic Hall tonight. They earned him a third consecutive men's title in the world figure-skating championships, making him the obvious favorite for the next major international competition, the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France.

His performance included all seven of the triple jumps he had intended - six of them in combinations of two - and one he didn't. Attempting a quadruple toe loop within the first minute of his program, a jump he has landed before, he managed only three revolutions, but the difference hardly mattered.

Browning won superior scores from six of the nine judges to push him past Viktor Petrenko of the Soviet Union, who led after the original program Wednesday. The free skate accounts for 2/3 of the overall score, the original one-third.

Petrenko also completed seven triples of the eight he intended. One slipped to a double, but his scores kept him in position for the silver medal.

By finishing third, Todd Eldredge won the equivalient of a gold medal for the United States. Though his placement brought him only the bronze medal, it enabled the United States to send a third man to Albertville. Had he or either of the other two Americans, Christopher Bowman or Paul Wylie, failed to win a medal, the United States would have been allowed to have only two competitors.

Skating last among the leaders, it was already clear it wasn't going to be Bowman, who was fourth at the time, on his way to fifth behind Petr Barna of Czechoslovakia, or Wylie, who placed 11th.

"I knew someone from the United States had to be in the top three," said Eldredge, the 1990 and 1991 national champion from Chatham, Mass., who is 19 years old.

I knew everybody skates well before me, and I knew I had to go out there and do my work. But I felt I could do it. I felt real confidence."

Given all that was riding on him, Eldredge was brilliant, landing eight triples and performing with more emotion and expressiveness than he had last month in Minneapolis at the national championships.

"After the nationals, I went back to work with the ballet instructor in San Diego." he said, referring to Gail Winfield.

"I wanted to work on my stamina and show off the program more. This was much better not only technically but I was able to get into my program more. The way the audience sounded, they did, too."

By finishing above Bowman, a skater who has never quite fulfilled the greatness predicted for him, Eldredge has put himself in a remarkable position for the future.

Five years younger than Browning and four years younger than Petrenko, Eldredge is perfectly poised to continue through the 1994 Olympics, when he will be only 22.

Two skaters likely to be there with him are Elvis Stojko, an 18-year-old Canadian, and Aleksei Urmanov, a 17-year-old Soviet skater. They both landed quadruple jumps, and Stojko became the first to land one in combination, with a double toe-loop. He finished sixth, Urmanov eighth.

One skater very unlikely to be there is Wylie, the 26-year-old Harvard senior who ended his third appearance in the world championships, not terribly unlike the first two, when he finished ninth after the Olympics in 1988 and 10th last year. He said he would decide before summer whether to continue.