Thursday, January 8, 2009

This Day in Sports History (Tonya Harding Wins Tainted Figure-Skating Championship)

January 8, 1994—Two days after rival Nancy Kerrigan had been eliminated from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships through a sudden attack on the kneecap through mysterious assailants, Tonya Harding won the contest.

Now, you would think that the Olympics—which had already seen a massacre by terrorists, a trip-up between two female runners, and such extensive steroid use that one East German female athlete required a sex-change operation afterward—had seen enough violence, cat-fighting and skullduggery to last a lifetime. 

But the Kerrigan-Harding saga proved to be something new, right up there with the Texas mom who tried to rub out a rival for her daughter on the cheerleading squad.

Kerrigan’s assailants had not done their job thoroughly enough. Therefore, even though the swollen knee forced the skater to withdraw from the U.S. competition, she still had six weeks to rehabilitate the injured body part and prepare for the Olympics—and, using an obscure rule, the figure skating association committee decided to place her and Harding among America’s Olympic hopefuls.

A video of the attack led to unsettling questions for Harding on possible associations with the thugs.

The intense speculation—not to mention gathering legal storm—unsettled the Pacific Northwest skater so much that she faltered at the Olympic games in Lillehammer. While Kerrigan came away with a silver medal, Harding finished out of the running in eighth place.

It turned out that Harding had good reason to fear the long arm of the law. It was Harding’s no-good ex-hubby, Jeff Gillooly (with whom she still lived), had hired goons to whack Kerrigan, and eventually she was forced to cop to knowing about the “Battle of Wounded Knee II” and hindering prosecution. She was lucky to escape with three years probation and payment of $160,000 in fines and contributions.

The U.S. Figure Skating Association, however, was in a considerably less forgiving mood than the law.

Harding had initially threatened to go to court after the attack to ensure that she would have the opportunity to go to the Olympics. The aggrieved association, surely remembering this, not only stripped her of her title but banned her for life.

To be sure, there were elements of stereotyping in how the media played up the Kerrigan-Harding rivalry. 

I remember early accounts of Kerrigan comparing her looks to those of a young Katharine Hepburn, bringing to mind a cool patrician elegance that must have seemed odd to this daughter of a middle-class Irish-American welder. 

And, to be sure, all the talk about Harding and her “poor-white-trash” background inspired a countervailing bitter academic critique.

All of this talk about class missed the point. There is nothing wrong with being poor—nor, come to think of it, anything in and of itself that makes it particularly noble.

Harding’s problem in the end was not a poverty-stricken background, but a poverty of values that led her to cut corners to win success—and, in the years afterward, to watch her life continue to careen, without the grace she found, fleetingly, on the ice.

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