End of the Winter's Tale

* It's been a long campaign. When the New York Daily News headlined T.G.I.F., almost everyone could respond with relief. F usually means Friday, but better than that, final. First came the assault, then the arrests, then the wranglings in court. As the world watched with fascination, the January attack on Nancy Kerrigan fueled a media frenzy, amply supported by the public's craving for the latest swill. Checkbook journalists, dubious gurus and assorted sleaze hounds soon joined in. By the time the drama was served up cold on the Olympic rink, it had all the ingredients of a classic face-off: Kerrigan, the almost too model American miss vs. Tonya Harding, the grungy underdog whose ex-husband and entourage allegedly tried to knock off Kerrigan to establish their own proletarian ice queen -- and money machine.

After all, all, all that, however, the gold medal in women's figure skating went to neither Nancy Kerrigan nor Tonya Harding but to Ukraine's Oksana Baiul. The outcome was a shock -- but not entirely a surprise. Any member of last Wednesday's TV sport audience knew that Harding was scarcely in physical shape to contend for a medal and that Kerrigan was stronger and more poised than she has ever been. But the enchantress was Baiul, 16, who presented herself elaborately costumed as the Black Swan in Tchaikovsky's ballet. Feathers and all.

It was naive but inspired -- sublimely expressive of the changeling that Baiul is. Her Friday long program, which secured the prize, was shakier, but she moved with rare, sinuous rhythms on the ice. And, irony of ironies, she was recovering from her own injuries suffered the day before. Her physical pain was evident, framing her performance with agony more immediate than the video memories of Kerrigan weeping in Detroit seven weeks ago. The bizarre accident in which the Ukrainian collided with a German competitor during practice had created not only a new victim but prepared the way for a new heroine. Baiul required stitches on her right shin and two injections of pain killers on Friday. But her smile reached the rafters even as she flirted shamelessly with folks in the jury box. It is magic she has used before. Says a French judge, who understandably requests anonymity and was not on the Olympic panel: "You have to be careful with Oksana. You are drawn to her face and forget to watch her feet."

To the bitter Kerrigan entourage and many skating observers, that's just what the judges did. Baiul's performance was not nearly as clean as her rival's; she two-footed a triple flip (a major gaffe) and simplified another jump. Critics were quick to point out that her first-place rankings each came from four East bloc countries and a German judge from the defunct Democratic Republic. Since the early 1980s, the majority of the nine judges' rankings has carried the day rather than the old system of totaling all points; if Kerrigan had been competing in 1976, when Dorothy Hamill won, the gold medal would have been hers.