�� If Kristi Yamaguchi wins the gold, her whole life will pass in front of us: Born with club feet, she learned to walk wearing special shoes connected by a corrective bar. Only to turn out so nimble, so graceful, on figure skates in the Winter Olympics. If Yamaguchi wins the gold, her whole genealogy will be laid out for us: Her father though a third generation American with a West Coast upbringing equal to his given name, Jim, was banished with his family to an internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry after Pearl Harbor; her mother was born in such a camp. Only to have Kristi on the verge of causing a Stars & Stripes to be run up the flagpole and the Star-Spangled Banner to be played in Albertville, France.

�� Ironic? �She doesn�t feel that way,� said Kristi�s mother, Carole. �I don�t feel that way. I do know my mother�s friends � her whole senior citizens group � they�re very proud of Kristi.

�� �But my kids never even dated Japanese kids.� Besides Kristi, 20, there is 23-year-old Lori and 18-year-old Brett. Lori was a baton-twirling champion in high school and Brett is a guard on his high school basketball team. This is a California family.

�� �My oldest dates a Jewish fellow,� Carole Yamaguchi said. �You know, they�re fourth generation; they�re so assimilated. They don�t speak Japanese. I think they speak more French.

�� �But [she laughed] Kristi was mistaken for Midori once.� More irony, for some: In these Olympics, the co-favorites are considered to be Yamaguchi, the American of Japanese descent, and Japan�s own Midori Ito, whose fireball jumps and relentless pace brought her the world champion in 1989 and a recent pre-Olympic victory over Yamaguchi at the Lalique Trophee competition in Albertville.

�� �At the World Championships in Halifax in 1990,� Carole said, �the local radio station had sent a translator and everything to the airport, and when we got off the plane, they greeted us and chatted with Kristi and then they asked, �How do you speak such good English?� And she said, �I�m American.� They said �Aren�t you Midori?� She said �No.�

�� �And they all took off.�

�� To the Yamaguchis, that was pretty funny. They give every inch of being unassumingly happy to be here, thrilled at the prospect that Kristi�s best performance probably would be worthy of a gold medal; unburdened by extra baggage. According to Micheal Rosenburg, who represented Dorothy Hamill when she was the last U.S. woman to win the singles� gold in 1976, the woman�s singles figure skating champion will be the hottest property of this or any other Winter Games. �Since Sonja Henie, that�s been true,� Rosenburg said. Which is to say �forever,� because the first Winter Olympics was in 1924, when Henie made her first appearance as an 11-year-old and finished eighth � followed by three consecutive Olympic golds. These days, Rosenburg represents another of Yamaguchi�s Olympic challengers, American Tonya Harding.

�� Yamaguchi has already gotten Madison Avenue�s attention, having won last year�s World title when one of Ito�s rocket jumps blasted her right off the ice and through an opening in the boards. Kellogg�s, banking on the pre-Olympic focus, has put Yamaguchi on a million boxes of Special K cereal.

�� Fame, no? �I�m living in Canada now,� Yamaguchi said, shrugging. �Those boxes aren�t sold there. It would be strange, walking through the supermarket and seeing your picture on all those cereal boxes, but I haven�t experienced that.�

�� She has seen the boxes, in a less public setting. �My mom shipped a few cases to me. To get rid of them.�

�� To mom, back in the San Francisco Bay Area, all this fuss is nice, but bright lights are not the future she wants for her younger daughter. �She knows,� said Carole, �that I�d like her to come home, marry a nice fellow and have a family. But she says, �Oh no, mom. Not yet.� �

�� Two-and-a-half years ago, the day after high school graduation, Kristi left her family�s Fremont, Calif., home to live near her coach, Christy Kjarsgaard-Ness, who married a Canadian doctor and settled in Edmonton after the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Yamaguchi is taking courses at the university in Edmonton, and now shares an apartment with a Danish skater after almost two years of living with Ness and her husband, Andrew. �I see a more mature skater,� Carole said. �And I think she�s starting to make all her own decisions now: Should she buy the chicken breast or the chicken wings for dinner? I used to do everything for her. She�s 20, but she�s just starting to date, just starting to be on her own.�

�� Her first international trip came when she was 14 years old, to Yugoslavia, but her mother went along. And all those mornings of having to be on the ice at 5 a.m. in California � that was the only hour she could get the ice time to labor over compulsory figures, no longer required in international competition. Kristi�s mother would rise at 3:45, fix breakfast and serve as unpaid chauffeur. It was hard when she left,� Carole said. �I�m so used to being involved. Suddenly, she�s gone and I can sleep till 6 in the morning.�

�� Jim Yamaguchi is a dentist, Carole a medical secretary. Ness said the parents always found time to support their children�s extracurricular passions, and they hardly were hurting financially. But skating is ferociously expensive - $300 to $500 for a pair of skates, $200-an-hour for rink rental, $80-an-hour for coaching. �My husband is pretty laid back,� Carole said, �but he kept on saying, �You gotta cut back on these skating bills. You gotta cut back.� �

�� Kristi, like her siblings, always was a good student � A�s and B�s � and she showed a talent for photography, winning county fairs awards for her work. She brings to her activities a quiet intensity, her coach said, yet always under control. �I�ve never had a discipline problem with her. Never,� said Ness, her coach since Yamaguchi was 8. �She is the type of person that I don�t think she�s ever thrown anything in anger and broke it in her life. Because she wouldn�t want to lose that thing.

�� �The whole family succeeds,� Ness said, �but they�re not the type to brag.�

�� �Oh, I don�t know,� Carole said. �I�m bragging about Kristi right now.�

�� Anyway, Kristi�s skating does it�s own boasting. With a socko winning show at last month�s national championships in Orlando, Yamaguchi shined up and put on display seven triple jumps, placed so effortlessly in a long program of spins and a flowing pace that she looked every bit the Olympic champion.

�� Known not so long ago as "a little jumper", Yamaguchi is amused to hear hear now that she lends a graceful balance to a sport supposedly careening off into a gymnastics competition of leaps and bounds. Ito and Harding, as the only two women ever to have landed the tough 3 1/2 revolution triple Axel, are seen now as the jumpers - along with France's unpolished Surya Bonaly - so it is Yamaguchi and the American Nancy Kerrigan who are labeled as the "artistic" ones.

� �"Kristi's very much a complete skater now," Ness argued. "People forget she's doing seven triple jumps out there; they just start watching her skate, and she does everything so well, they forget how much she's doing."

� �In Edmonton, she has worked with three-time world men's champion Kurt Browning of Canada - "He's helped me more than I've helped him," she said. "He's pushed me beyond my limits". And her rising status is what has led to being sought by a whole crowd of Asian American groups eager to honor her: the San Francisco Asian Chamber of Commerce, the National Chinese Women's Business Association, the Pan Asian National Chamber of Commerce, the Japanese-American Citizens League, and the Taiwanese-American Citizens League. In August, Yamaguchi will be grand marshal of Nisei Week, the largest of Japanese-American festivals.

� �This kind of attention, along with traveling the world and being exposed to different cultures, has stirred in Yamaguchi a recent curiosity in her roots, which her mother finds "interesting", in part because the family always thought of themselves as so Californian.

� �Jim Yamaguchi was 7 at the time of Pearl Harbor, when his family was sent to an internment camp at Postan, Ariz. Carole's parents, George and Katherine Doi, lost their flower-growing business in Gardena, Calif., and Katherine was sent to an internment camp in Amache, Colorado, where Carole was born. When the U.S. authorities realized George Doi already was serving in the army in Germany, Katherine was allowed to leave the camp. But she was so fearful when she returned to southern California that she checked back into the camp until after the war.

� �"Our parents never said much to us children about it," Carole Yamaguchi said, "until we were much older, and then they just explained what happened. My dad wasn't bitter; he was such an American he didn't even give up Japanese names."

� �Carole met Jim when both were students ar Cal. She never had been to Japan until she accompanied Kristi for a competition there recently, and Jim's single time there when he was stationed at Okinawa by the U.S. Air Force in 1963 - the Air Force needed a dentist. "He had a great time," Carole said. "He was just fixing teeth and playing golf."

� �Ness calls the Yamaguchis "a typical American family." But if their daughter wins gold, it won't seem that simple.

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