The videotape was grainy. Sometimes, there was no sound, just the image of a little blond pixie moving across the ice blithely on her skates. The tape belonged to Joe Inman, the skating judge, and to him it was priceless. It was a special night indeed when he could invite Brian Boitano, in town for a skating performance, to come over and watch it.

Boitano sat transfixed in front of Inman's television set. These performances were nearly twenty-five years old, and other than a snippet here or there, he had never seen them. By the time he had come of age in the sport, this girl was gone.

"Look at that," Boitano marveled at one of her jumps. "Look at the spring off the ice. And she lands like a pillow, so smooth."

Boitano shook his head. "There's so much stuff here . . ."

The pixie turned one-footed edgings into artwork before Boitano's eyes.

"Go back," Boitano said to Inman. "Can you rewind it a few seconds? There!"

Boitano smiled at a particularly intricate piece of footwork. 'I want steal that move."

In twenty minutes, the tape had wound its way to blackness. Boitano finally turned his eyes back to the room.

"I never had a skater I idolized when I was growing up," he said. Now, I realize I should have idolized Janet Lynn.

Accompanied by one of her five sons, a plain, heavyset, forty-one year-old woman was waiting in a booth at a suburban Detroit restaurant. Waiting for the kind of person she almost always avoided. Waiting for a reporter, of all things.

The U.S. Figure Skating Association said it could not find Janet Lynn. No telephone number, no address. A box of fan mail sat for years in the USFSA office in Colorado Springs, collecting dust and the occasional letter. Only a woman with the world's most comprehensive figure skating Rolodex knew how to reach her, and she warned of serious consequences if Lynn ever learned who had given out her number.

Sure enough, when the phone call was placed, Lynn immediately wanted to know how she had been found.

A couple days later, Lynn ended up in the booth at Mountain Jack's in Auburn Hills, which shares a highway exit with the sports arena of the Detroit Pistons. She brought Nic, one of her fifteen-year-old twins, for companionship and encouragement. But if it was true that she really didn't want to come, it also became true that she didn't want to leave. More than four hours after she began talking, she finally finished.

Then again, a Midwestern housewife who once signed a three-year, $1.45 million professional sports contract-the largest in history for a woman at that time-had a lot of explaining to do.

"It's very flattering that people care, but I've always downplayed what I did in the past because of our children," Lynn said softly. "I don't want them to grow up to be the children of the Olympic whatever. Those things are past anyway, and I've gone on to a different life. When we've moved to a new place, I never tell anybody what I did. They just kind of eventually find out because of something that happens, like when a Japanese camera crew shows up at our house."

Janet and Nic turned to look at each other. They giggled like siblings. This hiding business wasn't as serious as it initially sounded.

The Japanese have come calling because Janet Lynn was the most precious figure skater ever. She never won an Olympic gold medal, but if the rules in 1972 were as they are today, she would have. If most Americans don't know that, the Japanese will remind them, for it was in their country, at the 1972 Games in Sapporo, that Lynn fell to the ice on a flying sit spin and, amazingly, sat there and smiled. The next day, mobs of fans pushed to be close to her. "I was like a rock star," she said.

In the United States, Lynn won five consecutive national championships from 1969 to 1973. Had she been better at the dreaded compulsory school figures that dominated the sport then, she could have been every bit the household name that Peggy Fleming, who came immediately before her, and Dorothy Hamill, who came right after, still are today.

Except that, unlike Fleming and Hamill, Lynn was content to fade away. It wasn't an entirely easy decision, especially when exercise induced asthma snatched away the last year of her pro career and later gave her a reason to try a comeback in her late twenties. But Lynn, unlike so many of the other stars of her sport, allowed herself to be plucked away from skating and taken to another place, and she lives there still.

Where that is, exactly, she won't say. She would prefer that details of her family life remain untold, not because anything is wrong, but because she wants it that way. Her husband's government work keeps them on the move, from Colorado to Minnesota to a well-to-do suburb north of Detroit. Her children range in age from nine months to seventeen years old. She would prefer not to recite their names for the public.

A much warmer glow develops when she talks about her skating. What do you think would happen if you tried to skate now? she was asked.

"Ummmm." The skater most beloved by her peers couldn't come up with an answer, so she laughed nervously.

Nic chimed in, "She skated once on a school trip in Minnesota."

The teachers and other parents knew her as Mrs. Janet Salomon. When they saw her on the ice, twirling and spinning, they were quite surprised to see that Mrs. Salomon really knew how to skate.

Nic set the record straight. "My mom is Janet Lynn."

"Your mother's Janet Lynn?" one of the teachers replied incredulously.

Janet Lynn shrugged at this story: "That was two babies and about forty pounds ago, though."

As a skater, Janet Lynn was sweet and vulnerable. She was a child who never grew up. She reached only five feet one and a half inches. Her short blond hair fell softly onto her forehead and often blew in wisps as she glided across the ice.

During practice sessions at the Wagon Wheel Ice Palace, a resort built of logs and railroad ties in the cornfields of northern Illinois, she would skate over to her coach and lay her head on the coach's shoulder.

"She nudged up to me like a kitten," said Slavka Kohout, the woman who coached Lynn from 1959 to 1973. At competitions, Lynn would put her head on the railing and rest between compulsory school figures, then charge off when it was her turn again. And she always smiled. Father's orders.

"No matter what you do, smile," Lynn said her father told her."

And I always did. He didn't care how I skated, he just wanted me to smile when 1 was out there."

Kohout, the daughter of a Chicago businessman who was herself a fine skater, always sent Lynn out to skate by taking hold of both her hands, staring into her eyes, and telling her, "Go out and tell a story."

"I wanted her to take her attention off the technical aspect so that she wouldn't get so tied up," Kohout said. "I knew that a fall didn't make a bit of difference if the performance was interesting. Some of these skaters go out mindlessly and just go through the motions. I knew she had good imagination, so that I always wanted her to be thinking of something and projecting something and looking into people's faces. And so I would say it: 'Just tell them a story. Listen to your music. Hear it again for the first time. Tell a story to it.' "

Lynn's skating was charming and delightful, unlike anything we see in one skater today. If Boitano's attention to detail could be mixed with Oksana Bauil's magic, Michelle Kwan's youthful exuberance, and Nancy Kerrigan's athleticism, that would come close. Lynn wasn't doing all the triples those skaters now do-no woman was-but were she skating today, with the coaching and technical advances of the nineties, she probably would be able to do most of them.

Were she skating today...

With no compulsory figures, with her jumping and skating ability and with her middle-American wholesomeness, Janet Lynn would be one of the most famous athletes on the planet.

The outside world has a strong and misguided sense that only in the 1990s has figure skating begun to demand that its stars be tiny preteens who alter the lives of their families to further their ice-skating careers. The truth is, this has been going on for years.

When Janet Lynn was in first grade in the Chicago suburbs, she took off Wednesdays from school to skate. On Tuesday afternoon, either her mother or father would drive her one hundred miles up the Illinois Tollway to the Wagon Wheel in Rockton, Illinois, so she could skate that night and all day Wednesday.

They then would drive back to their home in Evergreen Park Wednesday night. After two more days of school, Janet, her parents, her two older brothers, and her younger sister would make the trip again Friday night, returning late Sunday.

Lynn spent one school year like that. Then she moved in with a family in Beloit, Wisconsin, four miles from the Wagon Wheel, for the next school year. She was seven years old. Within a few months, however, she was homesick, so her parents worked out another arrangement.

Janet's grandfather moved to Rockton to take care of her the rest of that year, and by the next summer, the whole family moved to Rockford, fifteen miles from the rink. Janet's father sold his half of the pharmacy he co-owned in Chicago and got a job managing a drugstore in Rockford. They bought a house and settled into new schools. All of this was done for Janet's skating.

Also that year, Kohout suggested to Janet's parents that she have a skating stage name. At the time, Janet Lynn was janet Lynn Nowicki. Drop the "Nowicki," Kohout thought, because it was hard to pronounce and spell, difficult to understand over the public address system, and potentially damaging to Janet in those Cold War days if judges from the Eastern bloc didn't like Janet's Polish heritage. Janet's parents went along, even though some Polish-American groups weren't so pleased later on.

A lot was happening to a little girl at a young age. But rather than feeling pushed or pressured by this, Lynn thrived.

"I was a normal kid doing something that I loved to do," Lynn said. I know now that the reason that I loved to do it is because I was so shy that I hated to talk to people, and 1 found out that 1 could express myself in skating without talking to anybody.

"So my skating stemmed out of what I felt in my heart. I was not a natural for a lot of the technical things, but the heart that I had in skating was a gift that God gave me, and it was just a natural for me to share that with people."

The vulnerability in Janet Lynn, at age seven or forty-one, was complemented by the kindness of Kohout, now a sixty-two-yearold who recently returned to coaching in Connecticut. When the Nowickis first appeared at the Wagon Wheel and asked Kohout to coach their daughter, she had a question for them: "You mean you'll let me?"

After a fifteen-minute lesson, Lynn knew she had found her last skating teacher.

"I'd never been so captivated in my life," she wrote in her 1973 autobiography, Peace + Love. (The and in the title is represented by a cross.)

The pairing was perfect for both. Lynn was loyal and unquestioning; Kohout, innovative and unthreatening. "She was very good at imitating whatever she saw," Kohout said. "I'd show her things and she could do them. Janet always innately loved skating, the pleasure of gliding on ice. It was evident always."

Kohout taught Janet to jump both clockwise and counterclockwise, something that no skaters do now. Her footwork was intricate. Her timing was impeccable. Nothing was rushed in her programs, nothing forced. Sometimes, she would stop and wait before the next musical note pushed her on her way.

"Slavka was a genius," Lynn said. "I remember her going to have music cut, and she would take sometimes a note, one note from one album, and use it to have other music connect together. One note to have it all flow together and make it work."

Their partnership flourished. In 1966, Lynn won the national junior championship, and in 1968, not yet fifteen and in the ninth grade, she took the third spot on the U.S. Olympic team, after Fleming and Tina Noyes. She finished ninth, all but forgotten during Fleming's coronation.

But she was developing an important ally in her climb to the top of her sport: Dick Button of ABC Sports. At the 1968 Nationals in Philadelphia, the Olympic trials, Button was in his element. Lynn said it's funny to watch the replay:

"Little Janet Lynn ... only needs to move up one place to make the Olympic team ... she's moving gracefully, powerfully... Isn't she fantastic? ... A beautiful jump!"

Lynn wasn't entirely fantastic. She fell twice, on a triple salchow and a double lutz.

After the second fall, Button changed his tune: "Oh! I don't know what's happening to her tonight!"

But Button was smitten. Within five years, he would be Lynn's agent and he would be Kohout's husband. He and Kohout had two children, but were divorced in 1984.

In the 1960s, just as it is now, skating was terribly expensive. After Lynn won the junior national title in 1966, her mother told Kohout that Janet was going to have to quit taking lessons. The Nowickis had run out of money.

Kohout went to the owner of the Wagon Wheel and explained the problem. From that moment on, the Nowickis never paid for ice time or another lesson for their daughter.

The assumption was that Kohout knew that Janet Lynn was going to be something special, and the rink didn't want to lose her. But Kohout said that wasn't entirely true. "You never know you have anything," she said. "It's circumstances and it's luck and how you develop and the lack of injuries. But we never knew what would happen.

When Fleming turned professional, she left American ice to Lynn. Lynn always won the national championships, but went to the worlds and performed so badly on the compulsory school figures that she finished out of the medals in 1969, 1970, and 1971. Another American, Julie Lynn Holmes, ended up ahead of Lynn each of those years. It was a sign of Lynn's charisma; she often failed at the biggest moment of each year, and yet she left the arena with the crowd on its feet, chanting her name.

Then came the 1972 Olympic Games. Newsweek put her on the cover, but foretold of her potential problems: Lynn, the magazine said, is "a virtual cinch to enchant the Sapporo audiences with her dazzling free skating-and almost equally certain to fall short of the points accumulated by Austria's Beatrix Schuba in the dull compulsory competition."

Lynn had tried everything to get better at compulsory figures, but she just couldn't muster the steadiness to retrace her figures six times without major errors. She was a free skater. To her, the compulsory school figures weren't skating; they were drudgery. Yet they then accounted for 50 percent of the total score in 1972. And Schuba, a massive woman who clanked around the ice in the free skating (long program), may have been the greatest compulsory figure skater ever.

Lynn was fourth after the figures. Schuba was first. She had all but locked up the gold medal before the free skating began. Everyone knew Schuba was exceptionally weak in the long program, but it didn't matter. Her lead over Lynn was as wide as the ocean.

Lynn said she was lucky to be fourth: "In one of my loops, I did a little fish. I got up to the top of it and it's supposed to be a certain shape, and I got nervous and stuck and so this fish thing came out. And that was a really huge no-no."

More than two decades later, in the retelling, she could laugh. Back then, Lynn raced to her room in the Olympic village and sobbed for hours.

"I was so embarrassed. I realized that I had just ruined everything that I had lived for my whole life."

Lynn had become a born-again Christian several years earlier, and she spent much of the night praying. When she got on the ice for the long program two days later, she performed as if she had not a concern in the world. Except for the fall on the flying sit spin-which she turned into one of the crowning achievements of her career with that smile-she was perfect. She received no score lower than a 5.8, most of the marks were 5.9s, and she even received one 6.0 for artistic impression from the Swedish judge.

The London Observer described it this way: "There is a movement in her program ... when she suddenly moves backwards so that her blond hair flies forward and her arms are outstretched and she is indeed a young girl in love with the world. She would say she is thanking God for so much happiness. Those who watch her can make of it what they will, knowing only that it is supremely beautiful.

Lynn won the long program but, because of the school figures, managed just the bronze medal behind Schuba and Karen Magnussen of Canada.

The next year, officials of the International Skating Union realized the public had no idea how their sport arrived at its results. Why was it that in the only part of the competition the world watched on television-the long program-Janet Lynn was first, but she finished third overall?

So skating officials added a short program. And because a short program was added, Janet Lynn stayed amateur for one more year. Figures would count for just 40 percent of the overall score; the short program would be 20 percent; the long program, 40 percent. Schuba had retired; Lynn finally had her chance.

She won the last of her five national titles in 1973, beating Hamill, and went to the worlds in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. She traced the best figures in her life and was second, behind Magnussen. The next day was the short program. Oddly, Lynn was nervous. This was supposed to be her event. Its existence was based on her Olympic experience the year before. But, as she later wrote in her autobiography, something didn't feel right.

The requirement to do certain jumps bothered her. She had never had to do a jump before; she did them because she felt like doing them. Now, every skater was required to do a double-double combination-hers was a double axel/double loop-as well as another double jump-hers was a second double axel. Being told what jumps to do made her uneasy.

Within forty seconds near the end of her short program, the unthinkable happened. Lynn fell on one double axel. Then, she fell on the other.

Kohout stood by, dumbfounded.

"The double axel was the most stable jump she ever did," she said.

"She had double axel when she was ten years old. If I really wanted to show her off, I'd stand in the middle of the rink and have her do double axels across the ice. She had one of those beautiful ones that goes up and floats and then checks out.... And she fell on it, and then she fell on it again."

Lynn and Kohout, both heartbroken, didn't discuss the short program disaster for twenty-one years. In 1994, when Lynn was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame at the Nationals in Detroit, Kohout thought it was time to bring it up.

They were sitting beside each other at the ceremony.

"By the way," Kohout asked out of the blue, "what happened on the double axels at the worlds in '73?"

"Oh, my legs got so cold," Lynn replied. "There were windows open way up high in the arena, and I got so cold."

"I was just wondering," Kohout said.

Twelfth in the short program, Lynn again pulled herself together in the long program, received two 6.0s, kissed Button on the cheek as he interviewed her, and won the silver medal behind Magnussen.

It was another grand leap to the medal podium, but it also illustrated her only true weakness: her inability to cope with the rigid discipline of the school figures, and, for forty seconds on the Bratislava ice, the unforgiving requirements of the short program. But when the music came on and she could skate with total freedom, she was the best there ever was.

"No one who ever skated displayed more simple joy, more love for, the sport," Button said on television. Her skating, he said, "was just one smooth-flowing thread of silk."

That summer, at the age of twenty, Lynn signed the $1.45-million deal with the Ice Follies, becoming the highest-paid female athlete in the world, making more than Fleming or even tennis star Billie jean King.

When International Management Group, which worked with Button to represent Lynn, invited her to discuss investments, she had a confession to make: she did not know how to write a check. Her life had been absorbed in training. When it was suggested by the people who ran Ice Follies that she go to a nice store and buy herself some clothes, she returned with a few relatively inexpensive outfits that she and her mother liked. Ice Follies officials took one look at the clothes and suggested she go back and spend more money.

Lynn was not a master of life off the ice. Within two years, unable to control her exercise-induced asthma after a bout with pneumonia, she quit professional skating with a year still left on that huge contract.

Lynn married Salomon, the brother of a skating friend of hers, and they started a family. Money was never a problem; she had invested most of her skating earnings, and her husband had a fine career. But in 1980, living in Colorado and itching to try to skate once more, Lynn returned to professional competitions and shows for three years. She skated with John Curry's company; she went to Button's professional competition in Landover, Maryland.

But with three young sons at the time, she and her husband decided that she should return home. "It was the best decision that I've ever made, to be home with my children, to strengthen our marriage, to be at home instead of out gallivanting."

And that is where she remains to this day, at home. But it's a constant struggle. Her religion tells her to be a good mother and wife, so she says this: "I'm much more comfortable having people know me for what I am instead of what I used to do." Lynn said she is happy being anonymous, the mother of five boys, the loyal wife working in the kitchen.

To that end, she vigorously defends motherhood. But in her words, a wistful uncertainty lingers.

"I miss so much that vehicle of expression," she said. "When you have been in the arena and your peers have been the best in the world in something, it's real hard to pull back from that and realize that, well, I'm cleaning toilets now. There are these days that I think, 'Why am I doing this?' And then I have to go through all the reasons in my mind, because I know there are logical and certain reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing, but you don't get much support from anywhere, basically."

Some of the people who knew her as a skater worry and wonder about her today. They are intensely interested in what has happened to her. They talk about how she looked the last time they saw her, seven months pregnant with her fifth son at the Hall of Fame induction. How could little Janet get so big? And that family-five boys! Everyone wants to know where she is living and if she is happy.

Lynn and Kohout rarely talk. Like many coaches and pupils, they went their separate ways. Their meeting in Detroit was a reunion. At the induction ceremony Lynn read an uplifting poem she had written in honor of Kohout. But, when they spoke alone later, Kohout found Lynn quite maudlin.

"She was so sad in Detroit whenever her skating came up," Kohout said. "It's almost a little sad that she hasn't followed a little of her own star."

"Sometimes I am sad," Lynn said, "because I am not out skating or doing something that brings immediate gratification. But I am more content than I have ever been when I fight through that desire to have glory for myself and realize that what I'm doing at home with my family will have wonderful long-term benefits."

Boitano stopped her the last time he saw her, at the 1994 Nationals in Detroit. He always talks about hearing music, even elevator music and immediately picturing himself doing a routine on ice.

"Janet," he wanted to know, "when you hear music, do you still picture yourself skating to it?"

"Yes," she replied. "Always."