On the eve of the long program, Harding was up all night. The dry Arizona air and the frigid skating rink had combined to aggravate her asthma. She couldn’t stop coughing. The next day, she was exhausted and her skating showed it.
To conserve her energy, Harding skated only a brief warmup. She and Rawlinson already had thrown out the triple axel. She didn’t have the strength for that demanding move. Harding hit her opening triple salchow and a double axel-double toe combination, but she looked dispirited and on her next jump, a double lutz, she almost missed the landing. She crashed to the ice on a triple toe loop. With almost ten thousand fans cheering wildly in support of her, Harding left the ice without a smile.
Still, her marks were strong enough to give Harding the lead with four skaters remaining. It appeared that her position on the world team was safe—and that she would win a bronze medal at least—as Nicole Bobek and Tonia Kwiatkowski fell short with the judges. But after Lisa Ervin skated into first with the only clean program of the night among the leaders, and Kerrigan prepared to skate, the leader board changed and Harding dropped to third and, later, to fourth.
Kwiatkowski, an Ohio college student, was moved into third place. Kerrigan took first, despite a pratfall on the ice, and Ervin was second.
“The thing that was really hard was they showed Tonya in first place until the last two skaters,” said Rawlinson, who broke the news to the skater. “We’re disappointed. Tonya has just excelled in so many ways. She’s come so far in her skating, in her attitude.”
Harding, Ervin, and Bobek all received some second-place marks. Ervin hit three triple jumps. Harding and Bobek each had two. Kwiatkowski completed only one.
Many of Harding’s supporters, and quite a few of the fans at America West Arena that night, felt that Harding was unfairly judged. They pointed out that Kwiatkowski had to put her hand on the ice to steady herself once and then fell on an easier jump than the one Harding missed. The judges were against Harding, they said.
Harding was named first alternate to the world championship team, but she didn’t go to Prague. The U.S. team probably could have used her. Kwiatkowski didn’t make it out of the qualifying round. Ervin was thirteenth. Kerrigan, the world heir apparent, skated a dreadful long program and was heard crying, “I wish I was dead,” when she fell into fifth place.
—
In early February 1993, Elaine Stamm wrote a letter to The Oregonian’s new sports columnist, Julie Vader. She had read recent columns and articles about Tonya Harding’s performance at the 1993 national championships and felt sorry for the skater.
“We have big hearts, and we love a champion-in-the-making,” she wrote. “Here is a bona fide one…a plucky, strawberry-blond with an intense love of skating. I’d like to see a Tonya Harding Gillooly Fan Club started, with members supporting her with cards, letters and contributions toward her expenses…Could you mention this idea in your column?”
Parts of Stamm’s letter were reprinted in The Oregonian, and it was enough to get a fan club rolling. The first meeting was on the last day in February; twenty-six people joined. By June, Stamm was able to report that the club had performed several services for Harding. They were listed in The Skater, the club’s official newsletter:
1. Purchased and hung a large banner on the side of the skating rink (Ice Capades Chalet) where she trains, reading “Home of Tonya Harding—U.S. National Champion, World Silver Medalist, Olympian.”
2. Hung a large framed, color photo of Tonya in the rink’s skating apparel shop.
3. Obtained speaking engagements for her with Rotary International (she charms them with her personality and it’s excellent public relations).
4. Nominated her for grand marshal of the Troutdale (Oregon) Parade, the city being excited to get her.
5. Given her small monetary gifts to help with expenses.
6. Regularly sent out news releases to the media.
7. Placed framed pictures in the nicest sports bars in Portland (alongside the Trail Blazers!).
8. Kept up a photo/news album.
9. Helped her with phone calls, letters, errands, etc.
10. Arranged with Pay Less Drugs (through them and the USFSA) for them to underwrite her medication.
11. Arranged her appearance before a local middle school assembly, so she could present the students with the Fan Club’s donation to the school’s “penny drive” for new equipment.”
Harding’s fan club was clearly not a group that wanted to remain removed. They would come to know their star very well indeed.
Dues for membership ranged from twenty-five dollars, for a “business” membership, to ten dollars for adults to one dollar for those under seven years (“Tots for Tonya”). A member would get a TONYA! bumper sticker, a photo button, a membership card and the newsletter every month. But if fans wanted to show their support even further, they were urged to contribute on the membership application:
“I can further support TONYA by: Making phone calls; Sending TONYA encouraging cards; Bringing more people to meetings; Writing letters to editors; Calling sports talk programs; Donations of money; Free photocopying; Film for Club snapshots; Cosmetics; Hair care; Nail care; Clothing.”
The tone of the newsletter was cheerful and chirpy, filled with exclamation points and upbeat news about Harding. There were reports of her new skating programs, costumes and music, new hairstyles, interviews on local radio programs. It was all very positive—at first.
But the tone of The Skater began to change. The newsletter editor, Joe Haran, had been a longtime fan of Harding’s and a longtime dedicated writer of letters to the editors of local newspapers. He described himself as a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and as someone who identified closely with Harding because of his own childhood of abuse and poverty.
He saw enemies to Harding in the media, the skating “establishment,” in other skaters. He thought Harding was badly mistreated by The Oregonian when it printed pictures of her falling down and that she was ignored by Portland’s TV and radio reporters. Even before the fan club’s founding, he had written long letters raging against these injustices. He wrote to skating officials, complaining about the unfair politics of the sport and how they hurt Tonya Harding.
Then, with The Skater to edit, he could cheer Harding and poke at her enemies at the same time. In June 1993, he even enlisted Jonathan Swift in Harding’s cause, quoting the famous satirist as having said: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
Haran, who had for years been a fan who kept his distance from Harding, moved closer and closer. Harding, he later said, began to give him clothes and food and persuaded her father, Al Harding, to let Haran move in with him. It was more evidence of her good and kind nature, he felt.
But Tonya told friends that Haran gave her the creeps, he was so worshipful. Still, she didn’t banish him from her circle.
Haran was incensed when Vader published a column in The Oregonian about Harding’s divorce and turbulent summer. It was a largely sympathetic story, but the writer had seen Harding in a bowling alley one night, smoking cigarettes, and wrote about that as well. Harding had always complained of asthma attacks, and smoking was about the worst habit an asthmatic athlete could have.
Haran wrote an angry letter about the column, claiming that Harding was a battered wife and blameless. Once again, he insisted, the press was out to get his favorite skater.
In October, at the Skate America meet in Dallas, Harding held a pre-competition news conference. She complained about lack of funding. She said she had to wear the same old clothes all the time and it was getting embarrassing. In the past year she’d gotten only $10,000 for training—not nearly enough.
Kristin Matta, an official of the U.S. Figure Skating Association, listened in the back of the room, clearly perturbed. After Harding excused herself, Matta looked through the files and let the reporters know: The ska
ter had received at least $40,000 in training money in the past year, not including the $10,000 Harding had talked about.
The next day, in a press conference after her short program, Phil Hersh of the Chicago Tribune asked Harding about the apparent discrepancy. She explained that she counts her years as beginning and ending with the world championships—and that she’d only gotten $10,000 since last March.
It was a confusing answer—reporters immediately dubbed it the “Harding Fiscal Year”—and unsatisfactory.
When The Oregonian reported this exchange—in a column about the media’s hard time dealing with Harding and vice versa—Haran was angry all over again.
Early in the morning he called Vader’s voice mail at The Oregonian and left a rambling five-minute message. He was upset. He said unkind things about other figure skaters, including Kerrigan. He called Hersh a “lowlife Nazi.” He said Vader was “on a parallel with Joseph Goebbels,” made other personal insults, and said, ominously, “One of these days you’ll pay for all this” and “I hope someday you’re in a lot of pain and hurt.”
Ten days later, Harding herself received a death threat when she was scheduled to skate in a low-level event at the Clackamas Town Center.
The November 1993 issue of the Tonya Harding Fan Club newsletter was dedicated almost exclusively to reporting the death threat. Three pages of Haran’s breathless prose emphasized how the skater “bore herself with dignity throughout” although there were “several days of anguish, pain, stress and soul-searching for Tonya—days when moral support was forthcoming for her, days when rumors were taken as fact, when otherwise intelligent people succumbed to mendacity, when Tonya’s drive and determination overcame her fears and an exhibition at a shopping mall became a testimony to Tonya’s force of will and courage: the will and courage to remain in charge of her own life rather than react to a hateful person’s sick mind.” The anonymous, threatening caller was described as “demented.”
The next month’s newsletter, focusing on the upcoming national championships, took an even darker, more wounded tone. “SKATING CROWNS KERRIGAN,” one article was headlined, and it complained that the national champion was featured on the cover of the official magazine of the U.S. Figure Skating Association: “Gee, we thought Tonya was going for the gold, too! (Tonya’s the only U.S. skater to defeat the world champion.) Hmmm. The timing of the cover, on the eve of the Nationals, is a powerful message indeed.”
Haran was wrong: Harding had never finished in front of the current world champion, Oksana Baiul of Ukraine.
“TONYA ‘EASY TO BEAT’ SAYS KERRIGAN” was another headline, which was an inaccurate representation of rather mild comments Kerrigan had made after a recent competition. “That’s quite a statement,” Haran’s article said, “coming as it does from someone who has been protected from competing against Tonya….Perhaps Kerrigan can defeat Tonya in accounting rooms at tournaments, with media favoritism and Eastern Seaboard hype, but she will never defeat Tonya on the ice, at figure skating!”
Another item in this same newsletter was headlined: “PRO-AM SNUBS TONYA.” It complained that Harding was not invited to a pro-am tournament, even though at a pro-am tournament in 1992 “Tonya outskated everyone but had to settle for second place.”
And yet another article: “TONYA GYPPED IN JAPAN.” “The recent NHK Trophy tournament in Chiba, Japan, saw our friend Tonya ambushed by inexperience—the inexperience of three judges who, unlike their counterparts who’d placed Tonya at or near the top, didn’t seem to know what they were looking at and placed Tonya in seventh place in the technical program!”
The tone of Haran’s newsletter had gone from cheering to griping. Even a little poem for Harding, a fan club newsletter staple, ended on a defensive note:
So when you’re on Olympic ice,
Don’t let them get you down:
Show those judges and those fans —
That night, you’ll own the town!
But perhaps the most alarming items were in the November issue—the special “death threat” issue. The Skater noted that George Steinbrenner had agreed to underwrite some of Harding’s training costs after the death threat. (He did in fact contribute $20,000.)
And the President’s Message column written by Elaine Stamm reported: “Someone recently told Tonya a prerequisite for his firm’s supporting Tonya was that she ‘…forget the Fan Club.’ She refused, primarily because our ‘being there’ is more important to her than financial aid.”
Harding, who had always complained about lack of funding, had apparently chosen these fans over more money, and they were very grateful.
The fan club had set Harding up as the grand marshal of a parade in the little town of Troutdale, Oregon, in the summer of 1993, and after she won her national championship in January 1994, the Troutdale City Council decided to commend her with a special proclamation. Mayor Paul Thalhofer was blissfully unaware of the controversy that would quickly engulf the skater. The Tuesday night after Harding’s win, Mayor Thalhofer read a grand proclamation naming Harding “The First Lady of Troutdale.”
A few hours later, he learned that Harding was under suspicion of having been involved in the attack on Nancy Kerrigan. “I got home that night and watched the news and said, ‘Oh, shit,’” the mayor said. “I stuck both feet into it.”
But all this was in the future. First, Tonya would have to survive the 1993 World Championships. Never before had she felt so much unrelenting pressure to succeed.
6
Rough Skating
Tonya Harding needed strong performances if she was to convince her many skeptics that she had what it took to be the best. The U.S. Figure Skating Association gave her a big boost by assigning her to the top international competition leading to the 1994 national championships. From the standpoint of an athlete training for the Olympics, Harding’s pre-nationals season was almost perfect. The U.S. Figure Skating Association had picked her to participate in a week-long training camp in September 1993 at the Olympic ice rink in Hamar, Norway. The next month, she would travel to Dallas for Skate America International, which brought together all the Olympic favorites except for Nancy Kerrigan. Harding would skate in the NHK Trophy, a somewhat less high-powered event, scheduled to take place in December in Japan, that would be a perfect stage on which to fine-tune her programs. If she used it right, Harding could head to Detroit for the 1994 National Championships in the best competitive shape of her life.
But that perfect season turned into disaster for Harding. Troubled by money and marriage problems off the ice, she also was jinxed at the rink. She had skipped her normal summer vacation to continue training with her coach, Diane Rawlinson, at the Clackamas mall. New asthma medication had made remarkable improvements in Harding’s breathing ability, and she said that for the first time she had an idea of how people with normal breathing felt. She had new music and new routines. As was her habit, Harding turned to movie scores for musical inspiration. Her short program was to the light and romantic theme from Kenneth Branagh’s acclaimed Much Ado About Nothing. The long program would be skated to the brooding, dramatic theme from Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jurassic Park.
Rawlinson, for her part, was looking forward to the training camp in Norway. It wasn’t a competition, but Harding could get used to the peculiarities of the Olympic venue so they would be familiar if she returned in February 1994. The figure skating association, which paid for the athletes’ trip to Norway and for their ice time, had chosen a handful of skaters to participate. Some were likely to make the 1994 Olympic team. Others might make a team in the future, and the camp was both an incentive and a reward for hard work.
Rawlinson and Harding were scheduled to leave from the Portland airport the morning of September 11. They planned to meet at the airport, and Rawlinson was on the freeway when she got a call from Harding on her car phone. The skater said she had spent the night in acute pain in a hospital emergency room. Doctors diagnosed it as a flare-up of an ovarian cyst
, Harding said. She couldn’t go to Norway.
The coach’s immediate concern was for Harding, but Rawlinson knew she also had to contact U.S. Figure Skating Association officials to let them know the skater would have to drop out. Officials were initially sympathetic—until they learned that Harding skated in an exhibition in Cleveland only eight days later. The association considered demanding proof of her illness through medical reports but then decided to accept Harding’s excuse.
“Tonya has talent, and we want to help her along,” said Jerry Lace, the USFSA’s executive director. “But she has to try to help herself.”
Tonya later told reporters she had refused doctors’ advice to have surgery, since it would cost her six weeks of training. Although warned that the cyst could “explode” if she was under too much stress, Harding said that she would survive on pain medication until after the Olympics.
Meanwhile, her fan club raised more than $1,000 for Harding to take to Norway and gave it to her before she was to leave. Harding would never pay it back.
—
Harding arrived in Dallas for the October Skate America competition and immediately barged into controversy. She had dropped “Gillooly” as her last name, but she told reporters that, despite a divorce, “I am married.” She also acknowledged smoking tobacco during the previous summer. “It was a stupid thing,” she said. “I have stress. I’m a normal person like everyone else.” But she drew the ire of skating association officials—and piqued the curiosity of reporters—when she claimed that the lack of financial support might destroy her Olympic campaign.
The skater said she had received only $10,000—from an anonymous donor—for her training that year. Harding made it clear that she blamed the U.S. Figure Skating Association for not supporting her. Unless she got more help, she might have to quit, Harding threatened.
Fire on Ice Page 5