Some found Harding’s lack of polish refreshing. Journalists described Harding’s “rough edges” as if they were a charming accoutrement. To some, her eccentricities “made her intriguing” and proved her bright future. “Not Your Average Ice Queen” topped a punchy 1992 Sports Illustrated profile celebrating her quirks. She barely missed medaling at the 1992 Olympic Games and the 1993 Nationals, placing fourth both times. By the time she headed to the Nationals in 1994, she was hungry and poised for the podium.
WHY ME?
On January 6, 1994, before the United States Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, a hit man clubbed Nancy Kerrigan’s leg and fled the scene, crashing through a glass door. The evening news broadcast footage of Kerrigan crumpled on the ground and shrieking “Why?” and “Help me!” in the moments after the attack. One clip cuts to B-roll of her father whisking her to safety, swaddling her like a newborn in his “powerful welder’s arms.” There was requisite pity for Kerrigan, but it wasn’t long before the scoffing began. The “Why?” heard round the world was spliced, replayed, mocked, and parodied. It morphed into “Why me?” on Newsweek’s cover—conveniently editing out the “help” that Kerrigan was calling for—over a close-up of Kerrigan’s anguished face. Glimpsing raw emotion was uncharacteristic in the hermetic world of ladies’ figure skating in the early 90s, which rewarded the projection of virginal girlhood and skaters’ icy veneers. A self-described father of three sporty daughters asked, “Has anyone noticed what a crybaby she is?” in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He called her an “embarrassing sight” and suggested she was “mentally soft.”
Skating purists and journalists lamented that the assault deflowered the princess sport. Kerrigan’s attacker was as guilty of jeopardizing her prettiness as he was of injuring the skater. Her beauty was “distorted as she watched a life’s work perhaps ruined,” lamented Newsweek. “We don’t want to look at Kerrigan and be reminded of how ugly the world can be,” complained the Denver Post. “When the attacker struck Kerrigan, it nauseated us. We felt defiled, too.” The perpetrator “took a crowbar to porcelain legs,” “defaced a beautiful symbol,” and “raped a sports myth by beating Kerrigan.” Sensing that the sport itself was under assault, fans leapt to defend skating rather than the athlete. “You want to believe that the beauty will ultimately win,” sighed a columnist in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A violent act had not only punctured the innocent facade of figure skating—it also made ice princess Kerrigan a commoner and a crime victim. Many were glad to see the fairy-tale fantasy quashed, and were quick to kick the pedestal out from under her. The Denver Post wrote, “The Olympic princess became just another crime statistic,” and claimed that Kerrigan was guilty of “mistakenly believing she was immune to hate.” Some doubted the seriousness of her injury and questioned whether her bruised knee was career-threatening. Others felt she wasn’t beaten up enough to claim real abuse. “The skater’s physical pain wasn’t so severe as that suffered by millions of lesser-known women battered in America every year,” reminded one commenter. Gillooly told the FBI that Kerrigan’s attacker tried to send cops on the trail of a demented fan with a fake ransom note that read “All skating whores will die” in letters clipped from magazines. Gillooly said that the hit man failed to drop the note but did manage to shout, “I just spent 29 hours on a bus for you, bitch,” referring to how far he had traveled to maim her.
Kerrigan’s delicate image and her sport’s decorum stood in sharp contrast to the violence she’d suffered, hence the eagerness with which followers of the story gawked at and bitchified her. They called her entitled and questioned whether she really was a victim at all. The beating also catapulted her to a kind of fame she’d never known, the kind of notoriety being an Olympian previously hadn’t brought. People who didn’t live and breathe figure skating suddenly knew her name. Some accused Kerrigan of profiting from the hardship. Suffering was worth the celebrity it begot. An “almost-anonymous practitioner of a marginal sport” was now “one of the most famous athletes in the world,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The subtext: quit whining. It wasn’t until much later that Kerrigan spoke of the psychological damage of the attack, the nightmares, her rehabilitation under the glare of stalking cameras, and the mounting self-doubt preceding the 1994 Olympics, where she was expected to not only recover, but to skate the best program of her life and win gold.
Indeed, it wasn’t until after Kerrigan had been bludgeoned that the media decided her Olympic gold medal was predestined. It was almost as if she had to get clobbered to deserve it. Meanwhile, Harding, who had won a gold medal at the United States Figure Skating Championship in Detroit, wasn’t immediately implicated in Kerrigan’s takedown. She became linked to the beating a week later when her occational bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt, and her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, were arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy to commit assault. Blame quickly shifted from the men to Harding, despite the fact that she hadn’t been charged. To prove her guilt, detractors cited examples of her failure to be a proper woman, her unsavory character, and the fact that she’d never been welcome in the sport.
Later, Harding revealed that she had known about Eckhardt and Gillooly’s role in the attack, but not until afterward. Despite her failure to come forward with that information, she maintained her innocence then, as she does now. Reports revealed that Harding’s ex-husband, along with a cabal of wannabe hit men, had brainstormed a more gruesome fate for Kerrigan than what befell her. Someone suggested slicing her Achilles tendon or killing her. They had settled on a career-ending blow to her knee, but hit man Shane Stant whiffed, bruising her leg instead. Kerrigan told reporters she considered herself lucky for that.
TONYAGRAMS
By the middle of January, Harding and Kerrigan were everywhere. The obsession with the spectacle filled the news. Nightline anchor Ted Koppel said Harding and Kerrigan were more intensely covered than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Television crews camped out on Kerrigan’s lawn to ambush her when she left or returned home. They trailed her to training and physical therapy, begging her to talk. Updates, no matter how small, kept the story alive. Interest in anything tangential to the tale was so great that Kerrigan’s hometown paper even interviewed a middle-aged resident also named Nancy Kerrigan who couldn’t leave the house without being asked whether she’d been whacked. “In the little way it has affected my life, I just can’t imagine what this must be doing to hers,” she said.
The skaters and their surrogates appeared on Sally Jesse Raphael, Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and many other shows. Connie Chung bagged an exclusive with Harding, and Ted Koppel with Kerrigan. Women were paid to impersonate them. Tonya Harding look-alike Lynn Harris fell into the gig while living in Boston—“Nancy Country.” Harris took skating lessons on her lunch break. Sporting a blonde ponytail and ice skates slung over her shoulder, she was a dead ringer for the embattled skater. She was so frequently stopped on the street that she began to wear a hat and sunglasses so she wouldn’t be “recognized.” “I had to leave home early so talking to people wouldn’t make me late for work,” she told me.
After a newspaper article about her Tonyaness, Harris fielded calls from producers, casting agents, and folks wanting her to deliver “Tonyagrams” or camp out on the real Nancy Kerrigan’s lawn to “see what happens.” Harris won Geraldo Rivera’s “infamous celebrity look-alike contest,” played Tonya Harding in a musical cabaret show in Greenwich Village, and shocked talk show host Ricki Lake’s audience with a surprise faux brawl during an episode feting lesser-known catfights from previous shows. The catfight trope, standardized on daytime television, was useful for understanding that Harding and Kerrigan, already actual competitors in the sports arena, were competing for femininity, too, in the eyes of society.
But femininity can’t be won, of course. Author Leora Tanenbaum says catfights are a societal construct. “The dynamic has nothing to do with chromosomes or hormones; it is rooted in a narrow, constricti
ng view of femininity,” she told me. Her 2003 book, Catfight: Rivalries among Women—from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room, claims the catfight is born of the paradox that society conditions women to compete against one another to achieve peak normative femininity, while warning that competition itself is unfeminine. “We resolve this paradox by competing but pretending not to, and ultimately the indirect aggression bubbles over into what people call a catfight,” Tanenbaum said.
GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT
Harding won’t discuss the 1994 incident in detail, but she did say, “If anyone would have listened to the media, they would have known that I was asleep” when Kerrigan was struck. The Price of Gold hints at a version of the attack story that Harding groupies want to believe—that she didn’t know much about it, or anything at all. “I hope that it’s true what she’s always maintained, that she did not know,” says Elizabeth Searle, who wrote the libretto for Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera. “She was desperate. Coming from a violent background, under the thumb of a violent husband, and this pressure cooker sport. I think the truth often lies in between.”
But Harding’s trashiness and “failure as a woman” implied her guilt in the Kerrigan attack more than any tangible evidence. Critics demanded that Harding be cut from the 1994 Olympic team. Kerrigan’s camp told reporters that it wouldn’t be fair for her to compete alongside Harding, even though Harding hadn’t been indicted. News stories reminded the public that figure skating had “never warmed to the combative Harding,” who was “a little barracuda.” And skating officials wanted her head. “If only Harding could be charged, convicted and incarcerated immediately if not sooner, so the games could go on without evil,” wrote Chicago Tribune writer Bob Verdi, imagining skating officials’ views.
Harding’s oddball, charming “rough edges” sharpened. She even internalized the characterization of herself, and fed it back to the press that had created it. “Despite my mistakes and my rough edges, I have nothing—I have done nothing to violate the standards of excellence, of sportsmanship, that are expected in an Olympic athlete,” she told reporters, pleading her case to compete in the 1994 Games. They wrote that her voice and body were “trembling,” “wavering,” and “quivering.” She was also capitulating to the terminology they had used to define her.
The United States Olympic Committee scheduled a disciplinary hearing to determine whether Harding should compete in the Games, but then canceled it when she threatened them with a $25 million lawsuit. After a vote of confidence from President Bill Clinton, and amid fears that she would wage a legal war if thwarted, Harding was ultimately allowed to compete in the Games. Many were displeased and unwilling to hide their agita, including skating officials. One anonymously told the Washington Post, “I can’t believe she’s actually coming. I can’t believe everyone ended up doing nothing.”
CAT’S EYES AND CHICLET TEETH
In the lead-up to the February 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, the details of the skaters’ lives that had once humanized them in magazines and ad campaigns were now picked apart and scrutinized. After the attack in Detroit, the press seemed to want the pair to finish each other off. Kerrigan tried to keep it classy and direct media attention to her skating, or away from her entirely. She didn’t want to discuss competing against Harding. “I certainly had not gone to Detroit to win a contest against Tonya Harding,” she said. Harding, ever the competitor, lamented being denied the chance to beat Kerrigan after the attack. “I worked my butt off for this, and if anybody wanted to beat Nancy, it was me. Who wanted to compete against her the most? It was me,” Harding said.
Most striking was how black and white the narrative became. Harding’s “dark-hearted sporting she-devil whose claims to innocence have convinced few” was no match for Kerrigan’s “snow-white” purity. “It was the supreme princess versus the trailer trash ignoramus,” recalled Luckow. “It was so rich in its blacks and whites. Nobody did the gray.” A catfight was so widely desired that the women were even described as feline. Harding was “an alleycat” who would “fight and claw.” After the attack, Kerrigan became “a different cat,” according to her coach Evy Scotvold, with a “peaceful determination” and the “confidence of a gunslinger.” Others imagined a slinky, sly Kerrigan with “cat’s eyes and Chiclet teeth.”
Many girls growing up in the 90s chose sides, and were more likely to favor Kerrigan the ice princess than Harding the trashy villainess. Hilary Bauer was firmly on team Kerrigan as a young ice skater in New Jersey. She wore costumes to match Kerrigan’s, and held pictures of her torn from Sports Illustrated while watching her compete on TV. “Nancy was the ice princess. She was so beautiful. Tonya was a loser,” she told me. Bauer describes the attack as “how I learned the difference between right and wrong.” “Honestly, I gravitated toward Nancy because she was so pretty and elegant and I loved her costumes,” Jenna Leigh Green, the actress who portrayed Nancy in the rock opera, told me. “As a small child those are the things important to you.” I haven’t met a woman who followed this story as a girl who identified with Tonya Harding.
BROAD STREAK OF BITCHINESS
As the Lillehammer showdown neared, fans wondered whether the desired catfight would occur. Would the skaters sleep in the same dorm, dine together in the cafeteria, or meet on the rink? New details emerged daily. The number of reporters covering the Games, particularly from American news outlets, increased dramatically—and not just skating journalists, but “a media scrum worthier of Charles and Diana’s wedding, the Israel-PLO peace treaty or Nelson Mandela’s release from jail,” declared one newspaper. The pair shared practice ice, which drew some four thousand fans to watch them warm up. Kerrigan arrived wearing the same dress she was attacked in. Gauntlet thrown. Mark Lund, founder of International Figure Skating magazine, said, “Peace in the Middle East, what was that about? This was like watching Dynasty in real life.”
To the delight of her critics, Harding didn’t medal at all. She abruptly left the ice during her Olympic skate because her boot malfunctioned. Judges let her start again. Coming in a dismal eighth was comeuppance. Kerrigan skated the program of her life and was sure she’d won gold. “For me, in my mind and my heart, I did,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I was great.” Coaches and Kerrigan herself called her routine “flawless.” When the gold medal was instead handed to the sixteen-year-old Ukrainian skater Oksana Baiul, many were shocked.
To the public and the press, Kerrigan didn’t win silver in the 1994 Olympics. She lost gold. Fans immediately turned on her. Kerrigan hadn’t even cleared off the Olympic ice before her princess varnish was blown off. Her “broad streak of bitchiness” first emerged during a delay preceding the medal ceremony, explained Rolling Stone. Officials were searching for a recording of the Ukrainian national anthem to play, but Kerrigan thought that Baiul was causing the delay by applying more makeup. “Oh, come on. She’s going to get out here and cry again. What’s the difference?” Kerrigan said. Little did she know, her mic was on and fans heard the diss. It was a reminder that beneath skating’s sparkles, it was still a game of winners and losers, like any other sport.
Some in the American skating community believe that international judges may have denied Kerrigan the gold medal because of the attack, even though she was the victim. Tackiness and Americentrism tarnished the Games, and Kerrigan was to blame, alongside her attackers, for the luridness. Kerrigan added more boorishness with her dig at Baiul, and later by not marching in the Olympics closing ceremonies, and giving “curt answers at press conferences.” The media would punish her for being a sore loser.
The girl who had mugged for Campbell’s Soup, drank milk out of a champagne flute, and wore designer skating costumes that resembled wedding dresses was now starring in her own horror movie, and those who got off on schadenfreude were eager to see her hacked to bits. When asked to comment on Harding’s program, Kerrigan sniped at her inability to skate at her set time due to a broken lace. “They’re bending l
ots of rules, I guess,” Kerrigan said of the judges. Once she knew the press had soured on her again, Kerrigan didn’t hold back. After telling a teammate that she “sucked” during a skating television special back in Providence, Rhode Island, she turned to the camera and said, “You probably just loved that.” Princess of rectitude no more.
A trip to Disney World to kick off her multimillion-dollar partnership with the Magic Kingdom went afoul when Kerrigan was again caught on a hot mic complaining, “This is so corny, this is so dumb,” alongside Mickey Mouse and Goofy. An executive shared fears that working with Nancy might become “a nightmare,” and wondered if Disney should have chosen a less controversial skater instead. “Overnight, she risked becoming the Shannen Doherty of the skating world,” according to the Washington Post, referring to the 90210 star whose rumored bitchiness launched a club dedicated to hating her. “Is Nancy a bitch?” the paper asked, citing her “cat’s eyes” and “Chiclet teeth” as possible proof. Now that Kerrigan had become the “defrocked Cinderella,” haters piled on.
The news media created a spectacle of Kerrigan’s suffering and then blamed her for causing such a stir. Sports Illustrated admitted she’d “been burned,” but accused her of holding the match. “There is no doubt that many of the burns have been self-inflicted: words that shouldn’t have been spoken, attitudes that shouldn’t have been taken, a defensiveness, almost an animosity toward the great media dance that surrounds her—and helps hype—her booming ice skating career. By now it’s hard to figure out who burned whom.” A Boston Globe columnist called her “a semi-celebrity who, if she couldn’t skate, probably would have been saying, ‘That’s $11.50, please. Pull up to the window for your burgers and fries.’” The champion was now no better than a fast food chain worker. Nancy was getting Tonya-ed.
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