ALBERTVILLE, France -- The crescendo will occur inside a stark arena in front of 9,000 spectators on the final Friday night of the Olympic Winter Games.

A solitary figure in a raspberry dress with a matching headband will glide across a sheet of ice.

For four minutes and 30 seconds she will skate to a haunting Spanish melody that will echo through the building and around the planet. And if the night is perfect, she will become a butterfly with a smile, soaring for gold and glory.

Kristi Yamaguchi's delicacy will enchant an audience. But it is her strength that could bring her ever-lasting fame.

Just as she combines artistry and athleticism in a bid to become the Olympic women's singles figure-skating champion, Yamaguchi's life is a blend of fortune and fortitude.

The performer was born with misaligned feet.

The skater survived the death of a coach, the breakup of a pairs' partnership and the distress caused by a move from Northern California to Western Canada.

The fourth-generation Japanese-American came from a family that lost every possession during the panic that swept a country in a state of war and confusion.

From this melting pot emerged an athlete of grace and steel.

"I see myself as a skater who likes to put on a performance and use the music," Yamaguchi said. "And, of course, I'm one who puts the jumps in there."

Yamaguchi is a 5-foot, 93-pound prima skater who wears a size 1 dress and size 4 shoes. But don't let her size fool you.

"Kristi has a killer instinct," said her coach, Christy Kjarsgaard Ness. "If you look hard, you can see it."

But Yamaguchi's genius is to mask the killer instinct with a coating of sequins, smiles and triple jumps. She may still litter her sentences with pauses and giggles. But on the ice, the 20-year-old woman is a star.

1991's dominant performer

After three consecutive second-place finishes at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Yamaguchi finally established herself as the sport's dominant performer in 1991, leading an all-American medal sweep at the World Championships in Munich.

At last month's U.S. Championships, she won the gold medal with two perfect on-ice displays to place even more distance between herself and her rivals, Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.

Now, as she enters the Olympic Games, she moves inexorably toward a meeting with Japan's wondrous jumping machine, Midori Ito.

"It was strange, being a world champion without being a U.S. champion," Yamaguchi said. "But now, I have an American title."

And she is part of an American story, one mixed with racism and redemption.

Yamaguchi will represent a country by cutting edges on ice. But her roots lie in the dust of internment camps set up to imprison 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Her mother, Carole, was born in 1945 behind the barbed wire fence of the Amache Camp in Pueblo, Colo.

Her father, Jim, was 4 years old when he and his three brothers, four sisters and their parents were tossed off their Gilroy, Calif., farm and shipped to Poston, Ariz.

"When you look back on something like that, you just figure it was a time of panic," she said.

"It's hard to think it can happen again."

An American story

What happened to Yamaguchi's family was a result of fear and ignorance that swept American in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even second- and third-generation Japanese Americans, whose forebears immigrated to the United States at the turn of the century, were not immune from unfounded accusations that they would aid the enemy.

Yamaguchi's maternal grandfather, George Doi, was drafted in the Army in 1942, put through basic training 13 times and finally shipped to Europe, where he served with the 100th Infantry that crossed the Rhine into Germany. In America, his wife, Kathleen, fearing for her safety, voluntarily entered an internment camp to give birth to her daughter.

Years later, George Doi would reflect on his family's war-time experiences and his granddaughter's budding stardom: "When I think of all we came through, it is almost unbelievable."

Jim Yamaguchi can recall his family wandering from camp to camp in the West, from horse stables in Salinas, Calif., to tar-roofed shacks in Arizona. When the war ended, they migrated to Santa Maria, Calif., where they lived in tents.

"There is no anger in our family," Carole Yamaguchi said. "No one really said too much about it until we were all a little older. Then, they explained to us what had gone on. We weren't bitter."

They went on with their lives, fulfilling American dreams. Jim Yamaguchi attended dental school, entered the Air Force in 1963 and later started a practice in Fremont, Calif. He married Carole, whom he had met while enrolled at the University of California at Berkley.

They raised three children. Lori, 23, is a former world champion baton twirler who recently graduated from the University of California at Davis. Brett, 17, is a senior point guard at Moreau High School.

And Kristi, well, she was always smaller than the other kids. Born with feet that were turned in at an awkward angle, she wore braces and special shoes as an infant. Ice skating at age 6 provided her with added therapy and the incentive to emulate her childhood hero, 1976 Olympic champion Dorothy Hamill.

Yamaguchi's career took off in two directions. Disciplined and determined, she was a natural for singles. Light and fearless, she was a prized pairs' partner. So, she compromised and launched a dual career.

A dual career on ice

At the 1988 junior world championships, Yamaguchi won the single women's title and then combined with Rudy Galindo to win the pairs' championship. They then stepped up to seniors with astonishing ease. At the 1989 nationals in Baltimore, Yamaguchi stole the show, finishing second to Jill Trenary in women's singles and winning with Galindo in pairs.

It was a breathtaking story made even more dramatic by the appearance and guidance of her pairs' coach, Jim Hulick, who had cancer.

But Yamaguchi was on a pace she couldn't maintain for long.

Within a five-day period in December 1989, Hulick and Yamaguchi's 73-year-old grandfather, George Doi, died. Those around Yamaguchi say she went through a difficult period of growing up.

"She had to mature a lot," said her mother.

Yamaguchi also grew accustomed to living away from home. A day after her 1989 high school graduation, she moved out of her lavender bedroom, leaving her 50 stuffed pigs behind, and went to Canada to join her singles' coach. Christy Kjarsgaard had married Andrew Ness, an Edmonton physician, and established a training base at the Glenora Club, a fabled rink that served as the proving ground of three-time men's world champion Kurt Browning.

Away from home

After an initial bout of being homesick, Yamaguchi thrived in the competitive atmosphere. She added bounce and style to her jumps. She struck up a friendship with Browning, who, in turn, bolstered her confidence. And last spring, she began sharing an apartment with Danish skater, Anisette Torp-Lind.

"When she lived at home, I did everything for her," said Carole Yamaguchi, a medical secretary. "When Kristi lived with Christy Ness, she did everything for her. Now, Kristi has to decide if she should buy chicken breasts or chicken wings."

When she isn't shopping or paying bills, Yamaguchi is practicing. She is adding an artistic balance and maturity to her repertoire of triple jumps.

The perfectionist is displaying passion.

"Kristi is growing up," Browning said. "She was always a very consistent performer. But now, she is more human. She has a lot more feeling. She can pull off the moves that make you go, 'Ooh.' Technically, and artistically, she was wonderful. Now, she has something special."

It's called charisma.

The quality was on display at last month's nationals in Orlando, Fla. She took center stage and held it, captivating the crowd with the triples, but adding emotional depth with the wave of an arm and the well-timed raise of an eyebrow.

But unlike Harding and Ito, Yamaguchi is unable to land a triple axel, a 3 1/2 -revolution jump.

"I feel there is no physical reason that I can't land the jump," she said. "It's a matter of completing the jump and telling myself to land it."

But Ness remains unconcerned about Yamaguchi's inability to land the jump, saying, "This is not a finish line they're trying to cross."

Near her rainbow's end

Skating is a show. Jumps count. But so does style. And only Yamaguchi has the ability to seamlessly blend both elements. It's a new era. The vamping and jumping that brought Germany's Katarina Witt the last two Olympic gold medals, won't sell to the judges in France.

Yamaguchi's career will come down to one performance, a lyrical interpretation of "Malaguena." Her aim is not merely to seduce a crowd. Her goal is to display a range of emotions to match her array of triples.

"I'm trying to feel that I'm dramatic and strong, soft and romantic," she said.

Yet even as she comes closer to the end of her rainbow, she is drawn back to her roots, inquisitive about her past. The woman who considers herself All-American, whose picture appears on the box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, would like one day to add to her Japanese vocabulary of hello, goodbye and thank you.

"A lot of times when I skate in Japan, the reporters say, 'Kristi, your English is very good,' " she said. "It should be. I'm fourth generation in the U.S."

Still, she is not totally recognized around the global village. At least, not yet.

When she arrived for the World Championships in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1990, reporters encircled her, and a Japanese interpreter began to speak with her. Apparently, the crowd thought they had cornered Ito.

Yamaguchi wasn't upset. She just laughed.

No such mistake will be made in Albertville, France. Dressed in raspberry, an American will stake a claim for gold.