BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 13 : Devers Falls Short of Double : 100 hurdles: She stumbles over last hurdle and finishes fifth. Greek wins the gold medal.

Gail Devers, whose radiation treatment for Graves’ disease last year almost resulted in the amputation of her feet, needed to clear only one more obstacle to win her second gold medal of the Summer Olympics.

She didn’t, clipping the 10th and final hurdle in the 100-meter hurdles final Thursday and stumbling across the finish line in fifth place.

She appeared to have an insurmountable lead.

“It just wasn’t meant to be,” said Devers, a former UCLA All-American from Van Nuys who won the 100 meters last Saturday.

Or perhaps it was meant to be for Paraskevi Patoulidou, who became the first Greek woman to win an Olympic track and field gold medal or even compete in a final.

She won in 12.64 seconds. LaVonna Martin of Trotwood, Ohio, was second in 12.69. Bulgaria’s Yordanka Donkova was third in 12.70.

“That’s the fastest I’ve ever gotten to that hurdle,” said Devers, who appeared to be on a pace to break her American record of 12.48. “I hit it with the heel of my right foot and couldn’t keep my balance.

“I was fighting to stay on my feet and cross the finish line. My thought was just to cross the finish line. I still finished fifth, and that’s not too bad.”

Her time was 12.75, the same recorded for fourth-place Lynda Tolbert of Tempe, Ariz.

Although Devers might have overcome more than any other athlete in the Olympics because of a physical condition that left her without a thyroid, Martin has hardly had a smooth path to Barcelona.

She tested positive last year for a diuretic and was suspended for four years. But she won an appeal when a former Soviet coach who was working with her at Austin, Tex., confessed that she had given the athlete the drug without informing her that it was on the International Olympic Committee’s banned list.

Less than five months after Martin was reinstated, she became a silver medalist.

“I beat the odds,” she said. “I’m ecstatic.”

So was Patoulidou, who had celebrated on the track earlier Thursday because she advanced from the semifinals into the final. Until then, the highlight of her career, she said, was when she was leading going over the final hurdle in the Balkan Games at Sofia, Bulgaria, earlier this year. She hit the hurdle and fell.

During her victory lap, she searched vainly in the crowd for her husband, a former weightlifter who finished eighth in the 1980 Summer Olympics at Moscow.

“I think he was somewhere alone, and I think he was crying,” she said.

Track and Field Medalists

* WOMEN’S 100-METER HURDLES

GOLD: Paraskevi Patoulidou (Greece)

SILVER: LaVonna Martin (United States)

BRONZE: Yordanka Donkova (Bulgaria)