POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL

What does a princess do after happily-ever-after? Oksana Baiul of Ukraine was Cinderella. The poor little orphan who slept at a run-down rink, practicing on uneven ice to qualify for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. There she defeated the sport’s two dueling ice queens and was suddenly royalty herself. Baiul, at 16, was embraced by a worldwide audience hungry for miracles and was beloved by Americans who were willing to pay handsomely to see success stories. Baiul went to America to become perhaps the most highly paid newcomer in professional figure skating (with a $1.5 million contract, excluding endorsements and tours). “We’ve been trying to Americanize her as much as possible, and the U.S. public has responded very well,” one of her agents, Michael Carlisle, told TIME last year. Baiul drove a green Mercedes-Benz and bought herself a $450,000 house in Simsbury, Connecticut. She posed for sexy fashion shoots, learned to go clubbing in Manhattan, and exhibited an aversion to seat belts. Baiul is just 19.

Her leap into adulthood has become increasingly troubled. Baiul was arrested in Connecticut last week for driving under the influence of alcohol and reckless driving after she swerved off the road and hit some small trees. She was admitted to a local hospital, where doctors put 12 stitches in her scalp and treated her for a concussion. Her blood-alcohol level was 0.168%, well above the state’s limit of 0.10%. JoJo Starbuck, a two-time world bronze medalist in pairs skating who has choreographed Baiul a number of times, said, “Watching her recently, I’ve been concerned that her lack of discipline would catch up with her. Her head has been turned by so many things since she’s come to America.” Says her Americanizing agent Carlisle: “This is an unfortunate slip in the process.”

When she first arrived in the U.S., Baiul stuck close to her coach and surrogate mother Galina Zmievskaya and to Ukrainian Olympic champion Viktor Petrenko, who has always acted as a kind of older brother to Baiul. But they have been drifting apart. “She had kind of stepped away from the real hard work on the ice,” Petrenko told TIME. “She’s just enjoying her life.” That included adding a new layer of friends, like Ari Zakarian, 30, the Russian-trained skater who was a passenger in her car the night of the accident. In the days after the crash, he slipped away to Switzerland. Reached by TIME, he said, “The accident, in my opinion, was not because she was drunk, but because she got very emotional. There was a Madonna song playing, and she loves Madonna; she was like performing, she was getting into it. So I don’t think it was exactly the alcohol.”

Baiul was swept away not only by abundance but also by the dual pressures of being a kid and not being a kid. Carlisle explains that the lapse occurred “because she collapsed so many years of her childhood into a very short period of time.” She knew she had a shot at winning another Olympic gold medal in 1998 (Katarina Witt and Sonja Henie are the only women singles skaters to win more than one), but amateur skating’s regimen and multiplicity of rules left her chagrined. So did the grueling professional schedule. And her body was changing, no longer the poised pubescence perfect for jumps and axels. Relearning her balance led to accidents and injuries and occasional withdrawals from performances. She told Esquire last April that she had grown three inches in a year. “I’m not anymore little girl, you know.”

Discipline, however, is hardly the first requirement in the showy professional world. “It makes sense for an orphan to go for the bucks and kick back a bit,” says Christine Brennan, author of Inside Edge, a best-selling book on skating. “But what Oksana did is equivalent to Tiger Woods’ winning the Masters this year and saying, ‘That’s it, I’m leaving the P.G.A. Tour, and I’m going to play in pro-ams and exhibitions for the rest of my career.'” Brennan believes Baiul should have kept on a hard training routine for 1998 instead of settling for the softer world of the pro-ice tours. Professional competition, she says, is an oxymoron. “It isn’t the real thing.” At the moment, she says, it’s “Broadway.”

Friends and associates believe Baiul will bounce back from this lapse. Says Bob Young, director of the skating center in Simsbury, where Baiul trains: “She realizes that maybe it’s best to turn back to the people who have been there, who have gotten her where she is and know what’s best for her.” At the hospital, Young says, Baiul asked him, “What do I do to correct this mistake?” He adds, “There was no attempt on her part to say, ‘Make it go away, can you make it better?’ It was, ‘Yes, I was driving. Yes, it happened.'” Baiul faces possible jail time, temporary license suspension and up to a $1,300 fine. Says Petrenko: “If she wants it, she will get good advice and support. If she doesn’t want it, nobody can help her. That’s up to her.”

–Reported by Charlotte Faltermayer/New York