That afternoon Kristi Yamaguchi was supposed to win. After all, she had finished second in this competition the past two years. She had just skated her flowing, artistic program and made only one glaring mistake, falling on a triple lutz. But her scores were good enough for gold.
Almost everyone in the stands and the judges’ box at the U.S. Championships expected Harding to fall, too. She always did. She was an “athletic” skater, considered an insult in the skating world and one of the strangest prejudices in sports.
Figure skating ideally combines the best of athletic achievement and balletic movement. But the big jumps often require a big setup by the skater, when the athlete cannot be concerned with flowing arm movements and music synchronization—long seconds when the skater is just poised, coiled, gathering speed for the jump. Tonya Harding was this kind of athlete.
And she kept trying the triple axel, a jump only the best male skaters and only one female, Japan’s Midori Ito, had ever landed in competition. Just seven months before, in this same city during the Olympic Festival, Harding had also tried to land this difficult jump. That’s all anyone waited for in her program—that big jump. And, as usual, she fell. She finished second then behind the only other really good skater there, Nancy Kerrigan, who tried a low-risk, “artistic” program that took advantage of the elegant lines her long limbs trace.
When Harding fell on her early big jumps, some spectators in the stands would start thumbing through their programs. Without those jumps, she wasn’t much to look at. Harding tried high-risk moves and usually lost the gamble.
But this time in Minneapolis it was different. Harding began her program and landed a triple jump, then stroked to the other end of the ice. There, forty-five seconds after the music started, she braced, swung her leg around and rose in the air. She spun three and a half times and landed solidly on her right skate, her mouth open in astonishment, history made.
Everyone in the crowd knew what had happened. A roar erupted, Harding smiled broadly, waved her hands in triumph, went on with her program with more energy than she had ever felt in her life. Her music was an odd mix of the theme from the movie Batman, “Send in the Clowns” and “Wild Thing.” But the crowd was watching, not listening. Harding landed six different triple jumps in all, including a triple-toe, triple-toe combination. Even before the music stopped, 10,000 people were standing, cheering. Harding put her hands to her face, crying and laughing at the same time. Those four minutes of Harding’s program, climaxed with that big jump, would remain one of the sport’s great moments. In the most predictable of games, Harding had scored a huge upset. Her scores contained another surprise: a perfect 6.0 for technical merit from one judge, the first perfect score any woman had received in such a competition in almost twenty years.
It seemed there was nowhere to go but up. Harding was only twenty years old and on her way. “Tonya is a creature of habit,” her coach, Dody Teachman, said after the win. “Once she lands something in competition, she tends to keep doing it.”
But that was the last and only time she landed the triple axel and stayed on her feet throughout a program in a major competition. Almost immediately, things started to go sour for Tonya Harding.
During the awards ceremony, the medals got mixed up. Yamaguchi, her eyes red and swollen from crying over her finish, got the silver medal. Nancy Kerrigan, who finished third, got the bronze. But Harding was given the fourth-place medal in the ceremony. The officials just went on with the ceremony, but Harding knew something was wrong right away—the real medal was much bigger and it was gold.
Afterward, at a news conference, Harding answered questions. She was coughing so much the reporters asked if she had a cold. No, she said, I have asthma. They asked about her health, her jumping, her life. When she said she had called her husband in Oregon to tell him about the win, reporters were very interested. It is unusual, in a sport where the athletes are usually so young and so isolated, to find a competitor who had a life outside the rink. The reporters wanted to know about this husband, his job, how long they had been married, what his name was.
“Jeff Gillooly,” Harding said, obviously annoyed with all these questions that had nothing to do with skating.
Reporters murmured among themselves. “How do you spell that?” one asked.
“Spell what?” Harding said.
“The last name.”
“H-A-R-D-I-N-G,” she said, smiling not at all.
—
Exactly one month later, at the world championships in Munich, Germany, Harding was on the winners’ podium again. This time, though, Yamaguchi was wearing the gold medal, Harding the silver. Once again, Harding had nailed a triple axel, but she had botched three other jumps in her program, landing only four triples.
There was a problem with this ceremony, too—a happy problem. The officials were having trouble finding an American flag. They had only two American flags on hand, but that was not enough; they needed three. Another American—Nancy Kerrigan—had finished third. It was a U.S. sweep, the first for any country at the world championships.
It looked like the start of a golden age for U.S. figure skaters. Both Yamaguchi and Kerrigan vowed that they would add triple axel jumps to their repertoires. Japan’s Ito had done extremely poorly in Munich, literally falling out of the rink. She was clearly too injured to last much longer at the world level.
The 1992 Olympics were less than a year away for the three top American skaters, and the 1994 Winter Games were only three years away. In 1991, everyone was chasing Tonya Harding’s skill level. She was on top. Everything looked shiny bright.
—
After winning the 1991 U.S. Championships, Tonya Harding, the Cinderella skater, didn’t go to the ball. Tom Collins, who produces a big, prestigious traveling ice show, traditionally stages a huge, fancy party for all the winners of the nationals. But when the party was in full swing, Harding was spotted elsewhere, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, wielding a cue, playing pool in a hotel bar. In a sport cloaked in fur and sparkles, Harding has always stood out. The higher she rose in the system, the more stark was the figure she cut.
—
Figure skating is its own small world filled with fiercely loyal devotees. People who can tell a triple loop from a triple lutz are few and far between. The knowledge is specialized and the skills developed over a long period of time, with regimented, lonely training routines. There are many written rules in figure skating, and just as many unwritten ones.
Elite figure skaters are rarely friends in any sense of the word. They usually train in different parts of the country and meet at skating events two or three times a year.
The women are especially competitive. The ladies’ championship is the crown jewel of the sport and they know it. They don’t talk to each other in practice, concentrating instead on their coaches and their work. Sometimes, they skate dangerously close to each other, not entirely by accident. French skater Surya Bonaly caused a small uproar in 1992 when she performed “in your face” backflips—a move banned in competition—when she was on practice ice with her competitors.
Harding is no exception, except that she may be even more competitive. And she talks about it, in front of microphones, breaking another of her sport’s unwritten rules. Harding refuses to follow many rules. And she has always had trouble maintaining the illusion of decorous femininity that has long been seen as synonymous with the sport.
“There is more pressure on females, a stigma to be pretty and glamorous on the ice,” said Elizabeth Manley, the silver medalist at the 1988 Calgary Games. “Tonya is not in that category. She is fast and a little bit more bullish going into her jumps….That’s what makes her different, entertaining. She is a fireball on the ice, not a princess.”
Figure skating is all about illusion. Nothing is what it seems. The competitors perform difficult, athletic feats but smile through pain and disappointment. They must never sweat. Makeup brightens their cheeks, their eyes, covers the nightmare bruises
on their legs. The women’s costumes rely heavily on flesh-colored net, which helps to emphasize a performer’s apparently partial nudity. The athletes should appear to be spangled with wisps of ethereal sparkle and heavenly fabric.
And when the skaters fall, come crashing down, they must immediately pick themselves up and move their arms to the music and smile and go on as if nothing happened. Everything is fine. And when it is over and the winners stand on the podium, they hug each other, kiss the air beside each other’s ears. The best of friends. There are no microphones or reporters near, which is fine, because they usually have nothing to say to each other. Nothing at all.
—
All sports are subjectively judged, one way or another. A home-plate umpire must call balls and strikes. The football referee uses his judgment to decide whether a catch was inbounds, a player offside, whether there was interference. In any organized sport someone, somewhere, determines whether the rules have been followed properly. And these subjective decisions can and do determine who wins and who loses.
Some sports rely more heavily on human judgment than others, of course. And gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming and figure skating, sports that are subjectively judged, often draw harsh criticism from sports “purists.”
It’s silly, they say. It’s unfair. It’s not a “real” sport.
The men who say this (they are, inevitably, men) do not criticize Olympic boxing and wrestling, sports that also rely on judging for scores; and they almost never truly understand the sport they are griping about. But then, few people understand figure skating.
The most athletic thing about the sport is the jumps, but to the untrained eye they are virtually impossible to tell apart. The differences between lutzes, loop and flip jumps are minute, insignificant to almost anyone who hasn’t been trained as a skater. They all depend on whether a skater’s inside or outside edge or toe pick has been used, what the skater’s body looks like going into the jump or upon landing.
In the press section at competitions, the reporters, even veteran Olympic writers, try to sit near figure skating coaches or former skaters turned journalists. These people can identify the jumps and call them out when—and if—they occur.
“What was that?” is a common question in the press area.
“Did she make it?” is another. That’s because sometimes, even if a skater stays on her feet, she may not have technically “landed” a jump. She could have “two-footed” it, instead of landing on just one skate, which means the jump doesn’t count. Or taken an extra step between the two jumps that form a combination, which also is a deduction. These crucial distinctions can be tough to see and tough to judge.
“What color would you call that?” is another question that is often heard. Reporters note the hue of the costumes and their sequins, the musical accompaniment, and the mood of the performer’s gestures. Not the usual sports reporting—but part of the sport of figure skating. How the athlete looks and responds to music is part of the scoring, part of the rules of the game.
All of this is outlined in fat rule books that the judges must be intimately familiar with. At the top levels of skating, the judges are all seasoned and experienced. They know what to look for, can see the minute mistakes made at top speed that the audience sometimes misses. And they know more than the spectator at a single event could ever see.
That is what bothers the sport’s critics the most—those scores that seem to come from nowhere, that seem to come from judges who made up their minds before the competition. And there’s every possibility that sometimes that is indeed the case. Judges go to practice, and what skaters do in practice counts toward their final scores, consciously or not. The judges want to see the skaters perform their routines so they will know what to expect, so they won’t be surprised, so they know when to pay attention, and to what. They do this so they can make more informed decisions about a skater’s performance. But the skaters are not stupid. They know that if they look neat and stylish on the ice at all times, the judges will look on them more favorably. So practice at competitions is very much a fashion show. And the skaters know that their personal comportment is important. This is a sport that likes to maintain a wholesome image, and one where the athletes are usually very young and managed by people who are much older.
Having judges at practice may strike many people like an ethical violation, a compromise of their ability to remain impartial. But it has a compelling sort of logic. If a skater lands a difficult jump consistently in practice and has landed it in other events, judges may well be inclined to view a fall on the same jump, during competition, in a more favorable light. After all, the skater can do it and shouldn’t be too heavily penalized for trying. On the other hand, if the skater can’t do a jump, has never successfully landed a jump, and yet tries it during competition, a judge is likely to roll her eyes and mark a fall with a sterner hand.
That is one reason why, in figure skating, “paying your dues” is all part of competition. Skaters know that when they are up-and-coming, they may see the older champions getting breaks at their expense. But if they stick around long enough, they will see the breaks go their way.
The skaters’ coaches know that the judges are all powerful and they do not complain, except very rarely or off the record, about marks. And the smartest coaches cultivate the judges—seek their advice on their skaters’ performances, music, and costumes. Some judges do not hesitate to let coaches know what their skaters are doing wrong and suggest remedies or improvements. It is another way the sport keeps moving, behind the scenes, just as much a part of the action as trades or deals in baseball. There are politics, of course, but those politics often cut both ways—Tonya Harding, like most skaters, has been both a victim and a beneficiary of judging politics.
But unlike most skaters—unlike any other skater, in fact—she almost totally controls her own destiny. She is the only woman who can do a triple axel, the most difficult and easily recognizable of the triple jumps. If Harding skates a clean program and includes her big jump, she wins, period. No judge, no matter how much he or she may dislike Harding’s costumes or lifestyle, can deny her. No other skater can match that level of difficulty. Harding, with her athletic ability, makes figure skating more of a “pure” sport.
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of sports is the unambiguous character of it all. There are rules, there are boundaries, there are points. You do or you don’t. You win or you lose. The races go to the swiftest, the contests to the strongest. Things are fair. Sport is an escape from real life, which is, as we all know, messy and uncertain.
Figure skating is often criticized for being absurd and unreal. A little fantasy world. But this is exactly wrong. In skating, looks count. Reputation counts. Performance counts, but allowances can be made. More than any other sport, figure skating is like real life.
4
The Harder They Fall
Most skaters take only one serious run at an Olympic medal. The training regimen of an elite skater is too long, too hard, too boring. The money is too tight; the scent of fast bucks made with a traveling ice show is too alluring. One Olympics is all they want, all they have time for.
But not Tonya Harding. Because of the International Olympic Committee’s decision to stop holding the Summer and Winter Games in the same year, an “extra” Winter Olympics was added to the schedule, to be held just two years after the conclusion of the Games in 1992. Tonya now had two Games to focus on—when she would be twenty-one and twenty-three years old—prime ages for a skater.
Curiously, after her triumph at the 1991 national championships and her silver-medal performance at the world championships, Harding seemed to slack off in her training. She didn’t intensify her efforts, as did Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan. Yamaguchi trained in Edmonton, Alberta, and lived with her coach. Far from her home in Northern California, the world champion ran through her new Olympic-year programs almost daily, honing every move, striving for perfection.
Mean
while, Harding lived at home, in Portland, and had a rocky year with her new husband. In June 1991 she filed for divorce from Gillooly and asked for a restraining order to keep him away from her. She would skate well some days, badly on others—and sometimes not show up for training at all. And she had trouble with her coaches. She fired Dody Teachman as her coach in April 1991 and briefly reunited with her former coach, Diane Rawlinson, before going back to Teachman yet again.
Her marriage was on again, off again. A writer from Sports Illustrated came to Portland to do a long feature story about Harding—a sure sign that she had arrived as a major athlete. But she was an athlete with a most interesting story to tell—and she told it, sparing little detail. The assault by the now-dead half-brother, the poverty of childhood, the strained relationship with her coaches and mother, the marital storms. And she posed for pictures with a new man in her life, her new boyfriend, her new love. There she was, she seemed to be saying, take her or leave her.
But her overwhelming talent was still there, still dominant, and in September, at a Skate America International competition, she won, beating Yamaguchi. In October she reunited with Gillooly. Once again, things looked to be on the upswing.
But by winter, with the pressure growing, Harding’s troubles became harder to hide. She was overweight, out of shape. Her training was, at best, sporadic. The magazine’s fact checkers went over the story with her and discovered that she was back again with her husband—photographs had to be reshot for the article and the ending had to be redone. Gillooly declined to be interviewed.
In early January 1992, the Sports Illustrated story came out, entitled “Not Your Average Ice Queen.” It was largely sympathetic to Harding—the basic slant was the old story of a tough cookie who had surmounted incredible odds to succeed in her sport, the basic American dream. While virtually all the information in the story had come from Harding herself, she was devastated. She felt as if her life had been been exposed like an open sore, and she was worried about the effect the story would have on the prim figure skating judges.
Fire on Ice Page 3