‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / Lillehammer : Jumps’ Glitter Isn’t Golden Figure skating: Kerrigan impressed with her five triples, but Baiul’s performance was more artistic overall, judging referee says.

HAMAR, Norway —  In 30 years as an International Skating Union judge, the referee for the women’s figure skating competition in the Winter Olympics said Saturday that she has never been involved in a more difficult decision than the one that gave Oksana Baiul of Ukraine the gold medal over Nancy Kerrigan of the United States.

Britta Lindgren of Sweden was not a member of the nine-member panel that judged the competition, but, as referee, it was her role to judge the judges. She said she would have given Kerrigan a higher mark for technical merit and Baiul a higher mark for artistic impression, but, ultimately, she agreed with the five judges who ranked the Ukrainian first.

“Nobody could say who was the better or worse,” she said. “They were very, very similar. Five judges preferred Oksana, and four didn’t. It could have been the opposite.

“But we have to make a decision, and it’s hard to do it in 20 seconds. It’s not so easy to think of all these small details. It’s sometimes more than you can handle. This was the most difficult decision I’ve ever seen. I think so, absolutely.”

With the figure skating competition concluded, the first four finishers in each discipline returned to the Olympic Amphitheatre Saturday for an exhibition before a capacity crowd of 6,000. But most of the discussion among the sport’s officials focused on the judging in the women’s freestyle program of the previous night.

Kerrigan said she would not second-guess the judges because she had not seen Baiul’s performance. But after her exhibition appearance, she said she was disappointed, based on what she had been told.

“It’s just a little upsetting,” she said. “I was flawless, I didn’t have any touch-downs, I didn’t make any mistakes. I was clean. She two-footed two jumps.”

Some experts said that Kerrigan should have been awarded the highest technical merit scores from all nine judges because she did five triple jumps. Three judges gave higher technical marks to Kerrigan, three to Baiul, and three had them even.

Lindgren said, however, that all nine judges were able to satisfactorily justify their scores in an event-review meeting Saturday morning. Kerrigan, she said, lost judges technically because she changed a planned triple flip to a double at the beginning of her four-minute program.

“Nancy’s triple-triple, that was the positive side for her,” Lindgren said. “But it was felt that Nancy, first of all, didn’t do the triple flip. Oksana had a very good triple lutz at the start, and she did a triple flip, even with a touch-down.

“And the spins of Oksana are very beautiful and maybe more interesting than Nancy’s are. Oksana’s flying spin for sure was better quality, and so was her step sequence. Nancy has one good step sequence and one good spiral, but it is only one.

“It is not only the jumps that are important.”

Lindgren added that Baiul could make a case that she should have been awarded higher artistic impression marks from all nine judges instead of only three. Three scored Kerrigan higher, and three had them even.

“Nancy was quite slow and careful with her skating,” Lindgren said. “She is a little more cold as a skater. It’s nice presentation, but it doesn’t really come from inside. When Oksana presents a program, you can see it is coming from the heart, from inside. It’s the difference between good presentation and a little better presentation.”

Lindgren made her remarks after an ISU news conference called at the behest of International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch to discuss the controversy in Great Britain over last week’s ice-dance judging. The British favorites, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, finished third behind two Russian teams.

But ISU officials also were asked whether the presence of Ukrainian judge Alfred Koritek on the women’s panel represented a conflict of interest. He is the president of the Ukrainian figure skating federation and the father of Baiul’s former coach. When his son left to coach in Canada, Koritek arranged for Baiul to train with her current coach, Galina Zmievskaya.

ISU rules prohibit judges from sitting on panels for competition in which family members are involved. But ISU vice president Lawrence Demmy of Great Britain said that the rule might be broadened in the future. Koritek gave first-place scores to Baiul in both the technical and freestyle programs.

The other judge in the women’s competition who had an apparent conflict of interest was Germany’s Jan Hoffman, the 1980 men’s silver medalist who trained under Jutta Mueller. She coaches Katarina Witt.

Hoffman, however, placed Witt eighth and the other German skater, Tanja Szewczenko, sixth. He proved to be the decisive judge because his combined technical merit and artistic impression scores had Kerrigan and Baiul even, but he had Baiul scored higher for artistic impression, which is the tiebreaker in the freestyle program.

Demmy said that he would have scored Torvill and Dean first in the free dance last Monday night but said that they had points deducted because of two illegal moves. So did the winners, Oksana Gritschuk and Evgeni Platov, but their transgressions were less serious, he said.