NEW YORK — Jennifer Rodriguez circled the Rockefeller Center rink as her parents, Joe and Barbara, watched. Every winter this is what the Rodriguezes do, throughout the world. As if on cue, they step into their assigned roles, like actors in a long-running production.

This year it was different, despite the family's best efforts at acting as if everything were normal. The Rodriguez women swapped roles. Barbara became the tireless fighter, succeeding against improbable odds, and Jennifer, her inspiration and her pillar.

The Rodriguezes' two-day visit to New York earlier this month was a business trip for Jennifer, a Miami native who was talking up a family-friendly Olympic program initiated by one of her sponsors, Bank of America, and taking one last lap for the news media before returning her energy and focus to long-track speedskating. She has a pre-Olympic tuneup this week in Salt Lake City, followed by a trip to Turin, Italy, for her third Winter Games.

For her mother, the trip to New York from Miami was a blessing. That much was evident even before she said so, by the bewitched look on her face as she stared at the magnificent Christmas tree.

"I've been dying to come here for years," Barbara Rodriguez said, meaning Rockefeller Center during the holidays. "Time gets away from you, and you never do it. But here I am, standing looking at the Christmas tree and all the decorations."

Time has taken on added significance for Barbara Rodriguez, who had a bilateral mastectomy before the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and found out last year that the cancer was back and had spread to her liver.

If Rodriguez, 29, tracks time by the Olympic calendar, her mother measures it in chemotherapy cycles. For the better part of this year, nothing the doctors tried seemed to work. "We were dealing with the issue of, this thing is not really progressing the way we want," Joe Rodriguez said.

So Barbara Rodriguez was put on a different form of chemotherapy. She takes a pill and once a week gets a drip. The early results have been encouraging. The first Wednesday in December, she met with her doctors. They told her that a tumor in her chest wall had gotten smaller during the first cycle and that there was no sign of cancer on her liver.

Six days later, Barbara Rodriguez sat in a 24th floor boardroom in a Midtown Manhattan office with intoxicating views of the city and spoke in a voice as dispassionate as a train conductor's.