Kurtains

HAMAR - The hard part was over. That's what hurt. Hardly anyone in high-performance athletics gets to choose the moment when his career comes to an end; and in figure sating, like boxing, when it comes it almost invariably hits like a Mack Truck.

But it shouldn't have been that way for Kurt Browning. He shouldn't have had to go out like American speed skater Dan Jensen - all those world records, no Olympic medal.

The hard part was over. Two years of painstaking preparation after the disaster of Albertville; two years of psyching himself up for the showdown with Brian Boitano and Viktor Petrenko, the last two Olympic champions. And now he could reach out and almost touch the medal for which he had remained a competitive skater.

Boitano and Petrenko had crashed and burned, eliminated by their own mistakes early in the men's technical program of the Lillehammer Olympics figure skating competition Thursday.

Browning knew it by the time he skated last in the program; knew it was within his grasp when he landed the dreaded triple Axel which has plagued him so often, finished the combination with a double-toe loop, and suppressed a grin. The rest was going to be nothing but air. The feeling lasted maybe 30 seconds.

"They put a lot of their lives on that one little blade, for a split second," his coach, Louis Stong, would say later, "and you're talking about extreme skill here. This is devastating stuff."

Browning fell on a triple flip.

"We looked at it from the end of the rink, and it looked fine, and it looked fine. The landing was on the curve, and clean," Stong said. "But somebody up there was saying, 'Not this time.'