Everyone knew Detroit would be Nancy Kerrigan’s show.
The elegant, beautiful Kerrigan already was the American Olympic hopeful when she tumbled badly during the 1993 World Championship, finishing a crushing fifth in Prague. When she came off the ice after skating a ninth-place performance in her long program, a distraught Kerrigan asked her coach if she could skate it again. Because of Kerrigan’s poor performance, the United States would send only two women to the Olympic Games instead of the three it had sent to the last four Winter Games. Kerrigan already had an Olympic medal, the bronze she had won in 1992. She was—or would become—a wealthy woman, with endorsement contracts with Campbell’s Soup, Seiko, Reebok and Evian. She had her gap-toothed smile fixed with caps.
Many saw Kerrigan’s classic looks—the high cheekbones that made her look more like Katharine Hepburn with every passing year—and assumed the skater was from blueblood stock. But her upbringing was strictly blue collar. Her father, Dan, had had to take on extra jobs to pay for his daughter’s skating. Her mother, Brenda, was legally blind. Kerrigan learned to skate at a nearby community rink and often joined her brothers in hockey games. The family took out a second mortgage on their home so Kerrigan could pursue her dream.
Kerrigan and Harding’s upbringing might have been similar, but Nancy had something Tonya searched in vain for: family support. The Kerrigan family always was close; her parents always were around to help pick Nancy up and comfort her. Kerrigan and Harding rose at the same time in national-level skating. Harding was the better skater, most with knowledge of the sport agreed, but her inconsistency showed in head-to-head competitions, where Kerrigan held a 7-2 edge. In 1993, with Kristi Yamaguchi skating for money in professional shows, the shy Kerrigan, uncomfortable with the newfound attention, ascended the nation’s ice throne.
After the debacle in Prague, Kerrigan returned to her Cape Cod home determined to overcome doubts about her mental and skating strength. She began seeing a sports psychologist, who helped the skater build self-confidence and concentration. On the ice, Kerrigan worked on her jumps. She would prove that she wasn’t just a pretty skater, as some detractors said.
Only a season ago, Kerrigan did run-throughs of her programs, always leaving something out—a jump, a spin, or footwork. It wasn’t because she couldn’t do it. She was afraid—of failing. In the weeks before Detroit, Kerrigan did perfect, complete run-throughs. Once she even had her coach rewind the music so she could do her long program three times in a row. She nailed seventeen of eighteen triple jumps.
Kerrigan wasn’t afraid anymore.
“She’s never worked this hard in her life,” her coach said. “When she skates, I really see someone who needs a bigger ice rink—and that’s the essence of ice skating.” Kerrigan told reporters she expected to win. “I’ve trained really hard for this and I’ve worked for a long time.”
Someone asked her to compare her style to Harding’s. “I’m glad I’m not a judge,” Kerrigan said. “They all have their own opinions. It’s not like we’re running against a clock. You’d have to ask the judges.”
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A sprinkling of snow had turned into a blizzard that first week of January 1994 in Detroit.
About two hundred people, including groups of children from Detroit-area schools, sat bundled against the cold in the Cobo Ice Arena to watch the championship women practice. Practices were free, and for many fans it was their only chance to see skaters up close. People wandered around the arena looking for good spots to take pictures or to get the autograph of a skater. Although there were skating officials and coaches around the rink, there were no security guards in sight.
Group B of the championship women was sheduled to begin its practice at 1 p.m., Thursday, January 6. Tonya Harding, looking relaxed and smiling, was among the group. One by one, the skaters’ long program music was played so they could practice their routine. Harding was last, and she stood in place at center ice as the ominous opening notes of her music from Jurassic Park rumbled out of the loud speakers.
Harding started to skate her routine, then stopped and said loud enough for spectators to hear, “That’s not my music.” She skated over to the practice official and argued that the tape being played was not the right version of her music.
Normally, a piece is played through only once. Officials agreed to play a different tape of Harding’s music, but her good mood was gone. Rawlinson later discovered the error—a music mixing company had sent in the wrong version of “Jurassic Park” without the coach’s approval—and made sure officials had Harding’s correct music. Harding left the rink to go to her hotel for a nap as Group C of the championship women, including Nancy Kerrigan, took the ice for their practice session.
The practice was uneventful. Kerrigan, wearing a white costume with lacy, long sleeves and with a white tie holding her hair back, skated through her long program while her parents watched.
Dana Scarton was waiting for Kerrigan to come off the ice. Scarton, a sports reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was going to cover her first Olympic Games in Lillehammer. She had never reported on figure skating before and was hoping to grab a quick interview with Kerrigan.
The U.S. Figure Skating Association normally is protective of its skaters during the championships. Reporters had to wear picture identification and were restricted to certain areas. Skaters were brought to a press room after a competition, or reporters could make requests for certain athletes through the association’s media relations staff. But practices were more relaxed. Even though Scarton was in an area that was off-limits to reporters, no one questioned her presence.
Kerrigan was the last skater to leave the ice. She put plastic guards on her skate blades and stepped through a curtain where Scarton waited to introduce herself.
No one noticed the man in the black jacket and jeans stand up from his seat as Kerrigan walked below him with an ABC cameraman following her. When the cameraman set his camera on the floor, the man walked past him and then past two other men who were talking in the hallway.
Just as Scarton was about to ask a question, the burly man rushed from behind the women, crouching to club Kerrigan above her right knee. He swung the weapon with both hands like a baseball bat. People out in the arena heard the blow.
Then they heard Kerrigan’s screams.
The man rushed past startled witnesses down a hallway to a set of locked doors and used his head as a battering ram to break through a Plexiglas window, escaping into the snowy city.
People immediately gathered around the sobbing Kerrigan. Dan Kerrigan lifted his daughter in his arms.
“It hurts, Dad,” Kerrigan cried. “It hurts so bad.”
Kerrigan was rushed to a hospital, where an initial examination showed that the blow had badly bruised, but did not seriously damage, the muscle just above her right knee. She was able to walk and went back to her hotel.
The fact that the attack was clearly aimed at Kerrigan’s skating ability—she takes off from and lands her jumps on her right leg—wasn’t lost on reporters, who gossiped that it looked like the work of a rival’s fans. A Sports Illustrated writer joked, “Probably Tonya Harding’s thugs.” But Abby Haight of The Oregonian was more specifically worried. What did the attacker look like? she asked Scarton. When Scarton described the man as at least six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Haight was relieved. That ruled out Joe Haran, Harding’s obsessed supporter.
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Meredith Meyer was outside the Cobo Ice Arena when she heard the crash of the Plexiglas panel hitting the ground. “I heard these screams,” Meyer later said. “Then someone was yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!’ ”
Meyer saw the man crawl through the door. He stood only a few feet from her, both hands gripping what she thought was a crowbar. She couldn’t see his face, but he was frightening. Before Meyer could react, the man dashed in the direction of the Joe Louis Arena, near the Detroit River waterfront.
Meyer and other witnesses gave detectives
the description of a powerfully built man, but their accounts varied wildly. Four said he was white; two said the thug was a light-skinned black. The police eventually issued two composite drawings of their suspect. When reporters saw them they laughed. One drawing looked like a square-jawed white man. One drawing looked like a delicate, oval-faced black woman.
The man with the club could be anyone.
Never mind, police indicated. Technology would come to the rescue. Through special “space age” techniques, video taken right after the attack would provide a clear picture of the assailant. Computers would enhance the tiny, blurred image of the man fleeing from the downed skater.
For days, the Detroit police talked about this miracle of science, but when it was finally done the result looked only vaguely human—reporters dubbed it “the shroud of Detroit.” Police, however, declared that their suspect was conclusively white and had long hair. (The eventual confessed assailant fit neither of these specifics.)
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The attack threw the championships into turmoil.
When it was clear Kerrigan wasn’t seriously injured, the U.S. Figure Skating Association called a press conference with Kerrigan’s agent, Jerry Solomon; Dr. Steven Plomaritis, who treated the skater; Atanas Ilitch, the vice president of Olympia Arenas, which operated the Cobo Ice Arena; and Cliff Russell, a representative of Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer.
The men answered questions about security—“Security was very high,” Ilitch said, which led to the inevitable question: High on what?
Kerrigan’s coach said he had run up and down a hall looking in vain for an officer after Kerrigan was hit, and reporters knew that identifying credentials were rarely checked.
Russell said Detroit police already were working feverishly to find the assailant. Plomaritis described the injury in physician’s jargon, and when reporters complained that they couldn’t understand him, Plomaritis used a reporter’s knee to show where the blow fell.
But no one knew why the attack had occurred.
“She’s never been threatened,” Solomon said. “She gets a lot of letters that say a lot of things. There are a lot of crazy people saying crazy things out there, but there’s never been anything that has fightened her or I.”
For Kerrigan, the attack did more than damage her leg. She would probably not be able to skate in the championships and risked losing a sure spot on the Olympic team and her chance to prove herself to an international audience. USFSA rules allow a medical waiver for an athlete to join an Olympic squad, but only if the athlete had won a medal in the previous world championships. Claire Ferguson, president of the USFSA, said it looked as if Kerrigan would have to skate.
By Friday morning, skating was out of the question for Kerrigan. Physicians drained blood and fluid from her knee, but it still was swollen and tender. She could not count on the knee to hold her on a glide, let alone a jump.
“She was not able to bend the knee fully,” said Dr. Mahlon Bradley, an orthopedic surgeon for the USFSA, who examined Kerrigan on Friday morning. “She certainly did not have strength in her knee. When we asked her to do a simple hop test, she couldn’t even control that.”
At the same time, Ferguson said Kerrigan could indeed be appointed to the Olympic team. Reporters scanning the association’s rule book the night before had found a simple answer to Kerrigan’s eligibility problems. The rule stated that the association’s forty-five-member International Committee could appoint any skater it wanted to the Olympic team. The appointment couldn’t be made until after the women’s championship was completed, but for all intents and purposes, Kerrigan was Lillehammer-bound.
Ferguson said the young women preparing to skate that night in the technical portion of the championships knew they might be fighting for only one Olympic berth.
“I told them they had worked hard,” Ferguson said. “They had earned their position. And even though this could be very hard, I wanted them to do their best.”
By midday Friday, the skating association had issued 250 additional media credentials. When Kerrigan walked stiff-legged, but without a limp, to a table to answer reporter’s questions, the press room was jammed.
No, she had no idea who could have carried out the brutal attack. Brenda Kerrigan earlier had mentioned that her daughter had received two letters from a fan in Ontario, Canada, across the river from Detroit. The first letter, sent after the Olympics, was smutty, Brenda Kerrigan said. The second was angry that the skater hadn’t replied. Nancy Kerrigan didn’t remember the letters as vividly as her mother. She had never been afraid of fans.
Kerrigan made a pitch to the International Committee. “I’ve worked so hard. I’ve never worked so hard as I did this year,” she said. “I’ve won both competitions I’ve been in this year. I train really hard. I’ve never skated as well as I’ve been skating.”
She wanted back on the ice. She wanted the chance to show people that Prague was just four bad minutes—not a career. Kerrigan was not afraid to skate. The attack had nothing to do with being on the ice, she said.
“I know I’m going to be okay,” she said. “It’s really hard to be less of a public person. Since this happened, I’ve been on the news every half-hour. If people didn’t know who I was before, they do now.
“It’s hard to say how long I’ll look over my shoulder to see who’s behind me.”
—
Meanwhile, Tonya Harding had tried hard to put the attack out of her mind. It was always easy for her to focus on skating, to block out distractions except for the applause. Nancy Kerrigan and the still-unidentified attacker were distractions. As she glided to the center of the rink at Joe Louis Arena the next night, it was only Tonya and the ice.
She was in the same red costume she had worn at the 1993 national championships, the one that had embarrassingly come apart on a jump. Harding had designed it, as she did all her newer costumes. Her sister-in-law, Michelle Enyardt, did the sewing.
Figure skating is a sport of illusion, and wearing the same costume twice—especially at such a major event—broke an unwritten fashion rule. Harding looked gauche.
But she skated like the champion she intended to be. From the soaring triple lutz-double toe jump combination that opened her technical program to the dizzying spin that closed it, Harding looked confident. All nine judges ranked her first.
“I had a lot of speed and confidence,” Harding said later. “Everything flowed right together. I have the experience, and maybe that gives me an edge. But nobody expected me to do anything here.”
Nicole Bobek, a sixteen-year-old known for her unpredictable but crowd-pleasing skating, was second behind Harding. But with Kerrigan watching from a private skybox, Harding clearly owned the competition.
—
Tonya Harding had a new dress for the long program. Her coaches had not seen it; it was Harding’s own design and she was excited. Figure skaters usually bring backup costumes to big competitions, but the notoriously stubborn Harding had brought just this one. Harding had to do things her way, even if it was the wrong way. The USFSA Rulebook stipulated, “Costumes must be modest, dignified and appropriate for athletic competition. Costumes, however, may reflect the character of the music chosen.”
Diane Rawlinson cringed when she saw the outfit. The deep purple dress was sleeveless, trimmed with gold sequins. The flesh-colored net in the front not only plunged to Tonya’s navel, it stretched from armpit to armpit. The illusion was not elegant; the curves of the underside of her breasts were clearly visible.
When Harding stepped onto the ice for her warm-up, one reporter quipped that the costume looked as if it belonged on a hooker. At least two judges marked Harding down for the trampy outfit, but it didn’t matter. Tonya Harding was the U.S. champion.
Harding was the last on the ice. She knew it would take a major mistake to lose the gold, and she had no intention of risking that. There would be no triple axel. She would skate conservatively. “I was on automatic,” she later recalled. “It was ju
st, go out there and do the program the way I’ve trained for it.”
Harding opened with a sweeping triple lutz jump. Skating to the other end of the rink, she planned to do a double axel. Instead, she turned the jump into a single axel, making a face as she landed on the ice. Instead of falling apart, Harding hit four more triple jumps and a double axel, lit up the center ice with her spins and then pumped her fist with the certainty that the title was hers.
Harding smiled and waved in the embrace of more than 17,000 cheering fans. She was back in control and back on top, as she had planned.
The skater started coughing as she waited in the kiss-and-cry area for the scores that would confirm what everyone in the arena knew. When ABC commentator Julie Moran put a microphone into Harding’s face, the skater gasped out, “I proved I am the Tonya Harding who everyone always believes in. I know who my real friends are,” before breaking into another coughing fit. Reporters watching the scene on a television in the pressroom wondered at the bizarre statement. Who were Tonya’s real friends? Michelle Kwan finished second. As expected, Kerrigan was appointed to the Olympic team and Kwan, the U.S. hopeful for years to come, graciously deferred to Kerrigan. “What I got was incredible, already,” the thirteen-year-old said.
Harding’s hacking fit delayed the medal ceremony but, still coughing, the skater finally made it to her press conference with the gold medal around her neck.
It wasn’t an asthma attack, Harding insisted. Suddenly stopping after such physical exertion had brought on the fit. Her answers to reporters were punctuated by coughing and gasping.
The victory wasn’t complete, Harding acknowledged. “It won’t be a complete title without being able to go against Nancy,” she said.
But the night was complete in other ways. Jeff Gillooly had arrived at Harding’s hotel late that afternoon and was able to watch his ex-wife skate and, later, join her celebration.
Fire on Ice Page 8