28.09.2020
00:08
Her mother, from whom she suffered violence, put her on an ice rink at the age of three. She was also abused by her husband. It marked an era in skating, but her ways and problems were marginalizing her. The rivalry with Nancy Kerrigan, her nemesis, drove her crazy, to the point of starring in “one of the biggest scandals in the history of sports”
By Sergio LevinskySeptember 28, 2020 Share on FacebookShare Share on TwitterTweet Share on WhatsAppShare
Harding, on the track. His story was turned into books and movies; one of them (“Yo, Tonya”), multi-award winning and Oscar winner
“I have no intention of splitting any adversary with an iron rod to win,” warned Barack Obama in his presidential campaign before coming to power in 2008 and it was not a casual date. He was referring to the figure skater Tonya Harding , a definitive symbol of cheating in the United States and rejected to this day in any social activity after, in 1994, someone close to her hired a hit man to attack her maximum adversary, Nancy. Kerrigan , to shut her out of the Winter Olympics in the Norwegian city of Lillehammer.
Harding’s story became so famous that it already appears in several books, social science research theses, a rock opera and even in movies, to the point that in the most famous, the biographical “I, Tonya” (Yo, Tonya) , released in late 2017 and directed by Craig Gillespie, Australian actress Margot Robbie , who played her role, was nominated for a Golden Globe and Oscar for best actress, and Alisson Janey , in the role of her mother, got the Oscar for best supporting actress.
Some critic rightly argued that despite her being evil to most Americans, there is no doubt that Tonya Harding’s life seems designed for a movie because it fits perfectly with the parable of the good guys and the bad guys, although events do not happen for their own sake, but have a multiplicity of causes.
Tonya Maxene Harding was born in Portland, Oregon, on November 12, 1970 and was raised by her mother, Lavona Golden , who was unable to consolidate any marriage. With Albert Gordon Harding she was on the fifth attempt, but she did not prosper either because her husband left the house scared when he saw the scenes of verbal and physical violence by his wife towards their daughter from an early age.
Tonya was taken to her first figure skating class at the age of three and there she discovered that in that world, perhaps, she could take refuge in a home with too many personal and financial problems, to the point of leaving more and more formal education until abandoning it in high school when he was in his sophomore year at Milwauke High School to focus on skating, and then take equivalency tests.
In that environment of misery in which she was raised by her surly, unfriendly and foul-mouthed mother Lavonia, who among other things called her “ugly”, “fat” and “failed” and even refused to go to the bathroom in training because She considered that she paid for her classes so that they would not have interruptions, Tonya desperately wanted to escape and then, in the few years with her father, she learned from him to hunt, and auto mechanics and even tried to leave the house with him, but she did not succeed.
She was then immersed in that sordid world with her mother, who earned her living as a waitress and who sewed skater suits by hand because the economic situation did not allow her to buy them. She herself acknowledged, over time, having hit her around the ice rink, and Tonya admitted that it was already part of her “normality” to receive this kind of abuse, to the point of not being able to make friends with other girls on the slopes. because their mother called them “enemies.” He conveyed competitiveness to her in such a way that Tonya often did not accept the judges’ grades well.
Between her 15 and 18 years of age, between 1986 and 1989, she was climbing positions in the national figure skating tournaments until she won the “Skate America” competition in 1989 and was the United States champion in 1991 with the first 6.0 of the event. awarded to a single skater for technical merit. That year, she became the first woman in her country to achieve a triple Axel (a jump with a twist of three and a half revolutions, considered the most difficult) in the short program, and the second in history, behind the Japanese Midori Ito, in addition to being the first to successfully execute two triple Axels in a single competition, and the first to complete a triple Axel combination with the double toe loop (parallel jump).
At the 1991 World Cup, she again completed the triple Axel although she finished second behind Kristi Yamaguchi and ahead of Nancy Kerrigan. It was the first time that a country took the full podium in this type of figure skating competition.
However, from there, Tonya began to decline in her productions and could never repeat those achievements. He had a physical problem: he suffered from constant flu and asthma and although his free skating was powerful, it greatly diminished his potential in the obligatory figures.
Tonya Harding’s “triple Axel”
In 1989, she had decided to replace her coach Diane Rawlinson, with whom she had been working from a very young age, in 1973, to start with Dody Teachman although she returned with the first in 1992, when she finished third in the United States championship and fourth in the Albertville Winter Olympics in France after spraining his ankle in practice. She was also second in the World Cup that year, although in 1993 she did not get good results in the National tournament and then she did not qualify for the World Cup.
In January 1994 she would have a new chance to qualify for the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and there the decisive plot of her history would take place, when her rivalry with another compatriot, Nancy Kerrigan, appeared on the scene , who represented the opposite of her and perhaps that generated a greater animosity to him .
If Tonya showed an image considered by the context as less feminine (disheveled bangs, very marked face), which prevented her from reaching advertising agreements, added to the fact that the clothes were sewn by her mother, Kerrigan represented the fineness and sweetness, the elegance, with clothes in tune with a sport that requires skill and good manners. He wore Vera Wang jerseys and was the image of corporations such as Revlon , Campbell’s Soups or Reebok .
It was the perfect rivalry for a soap opera that played with the collective imagination: beauty and the beast, the swan and the ugly duckling. Harding herself described it in 2014, twenty years later: “Nancy was a princess and I was a load of shit . “
And that rivalry would hatch in the early days of 1994 when on January 6, Kerrigan was attacked in a training session for the Detroit National Championship by Shane Stant, who had been hired by Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and his bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt, to break his right leg so that he could not compete in the Lillehammer Winter Games.
Since Stant did not find Kerrigan at his training rink in Massachusets, he followed her to Detroit and leaving the ice rink after a training session at Cobo Arena, hooded, he snuck behind a nearby curtain in a hallway and struck three centimeters above the knee with a 53-centimeter long telescopic baton.
A TV camera managed to capture the exact moment of the attack, which was repeated ad nauseam and generated a great commotion, while Nancy Kerrigan shouted “why? Why me?”, And her father carried her in his arms , dressed as a swan, and was thus shown on the news. That moment was registered in the memory of the public. It was the perfect plot that faced the two United States, the most hard-working, economically difficult, and the prosperous. Those who barely made ends meet and the wealthy.
Tonya Harding had married, at 19, with Gilloly with whom she met when she was just 15 , probably with the desire to escape soon from the harsh reality of her home, but the marriage lasted three years and was too tumultuous, with beatings that he gave, and a significant amount of reconciliations. And it was not surprising then that her ex-husband participated months after the separation, in this attempt to remove Kerrigan from the Olympic competition.
Anyway, the plan did not go perfectly, and as if it were part of a movie with good guys and bad guys, Kerrigan’s leg did not break although he did force her to withdraw from the national tournament in which there was no competition at the highest level. , Harding was champion, but the decision of the jury was to vacate the title and anyway, invite Kerrigan – who was admitted to the hospital – to participate in the Lillehammer Games. In this way, the skater who had finished second in the national competition, Michelle Kwan, was left without a chance to represent the United States as there were two places for the Norwegian Games. This meant that in no time, the two faces of history, Harding and Kerrigan, would compete under the same flag on Olympic ground.
Those four weeks between the American competition and the Winter Games were hectic. The media shifted all their resources to cover the information because the story had penetrated deeply in the United States. Once recovered, Kerrigan accentuated her victimhood by pointing out that “I will never understand why they did this to me, because I am not capable of thinking in such a twisted way”, while Harding practiced on free ice rinks in shopping centers because, despite being the number one in the country, still did not get sponsorship. The trainings were packed with people curious to see the protagonists up close and Harding pleaded with them to believe in her and her innocence, embroiled in a judicial investigation for which her ex-husband Gillooly ended up pleading guilty on February 1, when he accepted testify against Harding. Both he and Eckhardt. Stant and Derrick Smith, the driver of the car in which they escaped, were arrested and Eckhardt was given 18 months in jail for extortion, but he was released four months before leaving, in September 1995.
If Eckhardt was arrested it is because he was bragging about having been the one who attacked Kerrigan and called himself the leader of the gang “The Hit Team” (“The Coup Team”) , which registered in hotels with the real names of its members and they paid with credit cards registered in their names. It took the police just a few days to arrest them and they all agreed to point to Harding as the mastermind of the operation.
In those weeks of preparation, many journalists did everything to obtain information from the two competitors: they punctured their phones, called the tow truck to take the car out of their homes or permanently rang their bells in order to have their statements. , before an expectant country.
Meanwhile, the US Olympic Committee invited Harding to withdraw from the Lillehammer Games due to growing suspicions that she had been the architect of the attack, but she only responded by threatening the entity to initiate a trial for 10 million dollars, arguing that she had not been formally charged and that there was no reliable evidence against her.
Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding, in the 2017 film
Back in Norway, the two skaters never spoke to each other and it seems no coincidence that Kerrigan used the same jersey for training she was wearing when she was attacked. It was quite a declaration of intent, while 400 American journalists were accredited to witness the competition.
The final between Harding and Kerrigan was watched by 48.5 million Americans and was the third-most-watched sporting event in American history. And the place was still reserved for another movie scene, albeit in real life, because it seemed like Harding was not going to show up. They were calling her over the loudspeaker, which repeatedly repeated her name, but she did not appear. There were 30 seconds left to be disqualified but she entered just in the last second, began to perform her exercises and began to cry. Then, he explained to the judges that what happened is that he had a broken boot and although they allowed him to fix it, he received a very loud boo from the public. When he returned, he did not have a great performance.
Quite the opposite happened with Kerrigan, the “good” of the film, who shone with perfect movements that received an ovation, and although she was the favorite to win, she was second behind the Ukrainian Oksana Baiul, which was resisted by the public who accused the judges of having everything organized against the delegation of the United States, for the mismanagement of the internal situation between the two skaters of the delegation.
The point is that while Kerrigan was on the podium, Harding was only eighth and when she returned to the United States, she pleaded guilty to obstructing Justice in the investigation of the case and, although she said she did not know details of the planning of the attack, she discovered them after the fact but withheld them from the police. The New York Times argued that what happened on January 6, 1994 was “one of the biggest scandals in the history of sports” in the country, while Kerrigan was the cover of magazines such as Time or Newsweek .
Harding received three years of probation, was assigned 500 hours of community service and a $ 100,000 fine, and also had to agree to withdraw from the 1994 National Figure Skating Championship and resign from the American Figure Skating Association . For its part, the USFSA (US Figure Skating Association) carried out its own investigation and on June 30 – the same day that Diego Maradona’s positive doping jumped in the World Cup, also in the United States – took away the title and the She was suspended for life to participate in her events as both a skater and a coach.
The Simpsons ridicule Tonya Harding
The USFSA concluded that Harding knew of the attack before it occurred and yet “showed a clear disregard for fairness, good sportsmanship and ethical behavior” and while the USFSA has no say in non-competitive skating events it also became unpleasant person in that area because no one agreed to compete with her, although after her case there was a boom in ice skating.
In her 2008 autobiography, “The Tonya Tapes”, she acknowledged that she wanted to contact the FBI to reveal what she knew, but decided not to because her ex-husband allegedly threatened to kill her after a gang rape, pistol in hand and with two other people she did not know. He later changed his name from Gillooly to Jeff Stone and called the rape allegations “absurdly ridiculous.”
Eckhardt also changed his name to Brian Sean Griffith after being released from jail, and died at age 40, in 2007. But the torments did not end for the former skater: Gillooly even sold a video having sex with her on TV , and stills from the tape were published by Penthouse magazine in September 1994 and a few months earlier, in June, Harding appeared on a professional wrestling show as manager of “Los Gringos Locos” in Portland, Oregon, but she and her band, the “Golden Blades” were booed in their only performance, also in Portland, in 1995.
Later, Harding starred in the low-budget film “Breakaway” (1996) and seemed to reconcile with part of society when he came to the rescue of an 81-year-old woman by giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (Alice Olson, who suffered a seizure in a bar while playing to video poker). In 2008 he became a TV commentator on “The Smoking Gun Presents: World’s Dumbest, on Tru TV .
After his expulsion from skating, Harding tried to stay linked to other sports, besides wrestling. In 2002 she became a professional boxer, and her career consisted of 3 wins and 3 losses but she had to give up due to asthma, and because her rivals were always cheering .
He also participated in auto racing to the point where on August 12, 2010 he set a speed record for a vintage gas coupe driving a 1931 Model A Ford called “Lickity-Split” on the Bonneville Salt Flats. And in 2018, she was one of the celebrities on the TV show “Dancing with the stars”, paired with professional dancer Sasha Farber. They reached the final and finished third.
After leaving skating and boxing, she was a welder, painter at a metal company, and hardware sales clerk at “Sears” and resides in Washington state. In an appearance on the Ellen De Generes show in February 2018, she stated that she continues to skate three times a week and even did some stunts for part of the show.
About Harding there are numerous films, books, academic theses and all kinds of cultural references. In 2014, Matt Harkins and Viviana Olen created the “Museum of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding” in their apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and they maintained that they were captivated when they learned what happened, and said that it is “the most American never told ”.
On TV the movie “Tonya and Nancy, The inside Story” (1994) was broadcast, and Harding was referenced in the chapter “The Understudy”, in “Seinfeld”, as well as appears in several songs, and in May of 2006 they dedicated a rock opera to him, “Tonya and Nancy” by composer Abigail Al-Doory and directed by Meron Langsner. And in 2014, ESPN released its documentary called “The Price of Gold” in which Kerrigan refused to participate.
In 1995 the book “Women on ice, Feminist Essays on the Tonya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan spectacle” was released, and in another 2017 book, Sarah Marshall wrote the very interesting “Make an Ice Queen” (“Create an ice queen”).
After a turbulent stage, in which she was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, and had a suicide attempt, Harding was able to rebuild her life. She remarried Michael Smith in 1995 but divorced in 1996, and had another marriage to Joseph Price in 2010 and had a son, Gordon, in February 2011. “You weren’t supposed to have kids, so it’s a miracle . I love being a mother and I like to go for a walk in the summer in nature and I also make bonfires where I heat scented wax and use it to decorate pineapples, ”she commented on one of the TV programs she attended as a guest.
Harding ended up participating in “Dancing with the Stars” in the United States and achieved a creditable third place. She was also a boxer and participated in wrestling events
About the soap opera that made her famous, she also had a more distant look, and a message for all those who insist on the subject and in 2014 she suggested: “Get over it. 20 years have passed. I’m sure Nancy Kerrigan has gotten over it, and so have I, “but her former adversary said she still hasn’t received an apology from Harding, but at this point, she doesn’t care. “I only saw her at an event in 1998, but we didn’t talk to each other.” Indeed, at that charity event, Harding was booed.
Harding’s intention to make the public forget what happened with Kerrigan does not seem easy and even The Simpsons alluded to the subject. In one episode, Homer and Bart escape the Apocalypse in a space shuttle that takes them to another planet, but on the ship, instead of going aboard important figures of civilization, go the controversial comedian Rosie O’Donell, the hated singer and widow of Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Tonya Harding. This one, with an iron bar in her hand and a pouting face. This is how it was portrayed in popular culture.
