by Adam Johnson
Later, Tonya would claim that the plot had been motivated completely by Jeff’s greed, that she had been aware of it only after the fact, and that she had failed to come forward only because she feared Jeff would kill her if she tried. Jeff would claim it was Tonya’s idea from the beginning, and that he had merely gone along with her wishes so he could help make her dreams come true. The public, given the opportunity to select one story as the more plausible—and juicier—version, overwhelmingly chose the latter. It seemed there was nothing more enjoyable, in prime time or real life, than a devious plot with a manipulative woman at the top.
In his search for someone to carry out the assault, Shawn called his friend Derrick Smith, a Phoenix man who aspired to open a paramilitary survival school in the Arizona desert, and who in turn suggested his twenty-two-year-old nephew, a weightlifter, steroid enthusiast, and aspiring martial artist named Shane Stant. Shortly after Christmas the two arrived at World Bodyguard Services headquarters for a meeting with Jeff and Shawn. The tape that Shawn secretly made of the meeting that night recorded both his suggestion that they hire a sniper to murder Nancy, and Jeff responding, “What can we do less than that?” Figure-skating insider that Jeff was, it was his idea to break her landing leg. Shane would do the job for the bargain price of $6,500, and Derrick would drive the getaway car.
What happened next was soon known to the world, even if the identity of the assailant was not. But Smith’s anonymity wouldn’t last long. The Detroit police—and, to an increasing degree, the public—immediately began suspecting that Tonya and Jeff were involved, but they didn’t have much to go on until an anonymous woman called the Detroit police and voiced her suspicions that Tonya, Jeff, Shawn, and some other men in their employ were behind the attack. She also sent unsigned letters to the FBI, and to KOIN-TV and the Multnomah County DA’s office (both in Portland, Oregon, where Tonya lived) detailing the same suspicions. Later, she would be identified as Patty May Cook, an acquaintance of Shawn Eckhardt’s father, Ron, who called Patty up every few weeks to tell her about his problems and occasionally tried to initiate phone sex. She had barely listened to him as he bragged about his son’s espionage career one night, but she was horrified when, the following day, she turned on the TV and realized Shawn’s plans had come to fruition.
After the attack, though, the gang began to fall apart. Shawn, his initial excitement perhaps turning to guilt, played his tape of the planning meeting for Eugene Saunders, a classmate in his community college paralegal class. Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old pastor, came forward with what he had heard, speaking to both the FBI and the Oregonian. As the story gained notice, reporters started hounding Tonya and Jeff, and Tonya’s practice sessions became jammed with nearly as many TV cameras as the Olympics would be in a few weeks’ time. The FBI also began monitoring their house, and the evidence began mounting against them, though not quite as quickly as the public’s opinion.
Finally, on January 18, 1994, Tonya came forward to the FBI, saying she was frightened of Jeff, and telling them everything she felt she could. Jeff was arrested. The US Olympic Committee notified Tonya that it was reviewing her status, and Tonya secured the services of her coach’s husband, a prominent Portland lawyer, who filed a lawsuit for twenty million dollars in damages in the event that Tonya was kept from going to the Games. On February 13, the USOC announced its controversial decision to keep Tonya on the Olympic team. On the morning after Valentine’s Day, Tonya left for Lillehammer. Before she even landed in Norway, she began the endless round of press appearances that would take up much of her time at the Games, granting an in-flight interview to Connie Chung somewhere over the Atlantic. “I feel really lucky,” she said. For perhaps the first time in her life, Tonya Harding was flying first class.
In 1991, when Tonya Harding became the second woman in the world to land a triple axel in competition and became the US champion in the process, Nancy Kerrigan was standing beneath her on the podium, her crooked teeth hidden beneath a shy smile, and a bronze medal hanging around her neck. A few weeks later, Nancy would win bronze again at the World Championships as Tonya Harding and Kristi Yamaguchi, who had medaled silver at the US Championships, again stood above her. This time, their roles were switched: Kristi won the gold, and Tonya, even after landing a more impressive axel than she had at the US Championships, took home the silver. Despite whatever disappointment Tonya may have felt, it was a landmark moment for American ladies’ figure skating, marking the first time a single nation had so dominated the podium at the World Championships. It also gave each of the podium’s proud young occupants her first true taste of fame—and prepared them, however inadequately, for the pressure and scrutiny they would experience at the Olympics the following year. For Tonya, the 1992 Olympics would seem to mark the beginning of a baffling career decline. For Nancy, they would mark the beginning of an equally swift—and perhaps equally terrifying—rise to fame and fortune.
At that year’s Games, Nancy’s skating was flawed, but her image wasn’t. Though her imperfect performance was good enough to keep her in the medals on a night when not even Kristi Yamaguchi managed a clean skate, the solid and ambitious jumps Nancy did land attracted considerably less attention than her costume: an unadorned white leotard whose elegant lines matched her own, and whose sweetheart neckline seemed to echo all too aptly the role she had begun to play in American life. By this time, the promise Nancy had displayed in 1991 had attracted the attention of some key individuals, including Vera Wang, a former figure skater who designed Nancy’s costumes pro bono. Nancy got her teeth fixed, and began to get acquainted with the feel of the cameras following her every move, though she never grew to like it. Her performance at the 1992 Games was not a triumph of athleticism—though even then Nancy was a far more formidable athlete than anyone gave her credit for—but it was a triumph of image-making. To the commentators, she was “lovely,” “ladylike,” “elegant,” and “sophisticated,” and the audience agreed. Vera Wang had based the design for Nancy’s costume on a dress from her bridal boutique, and as Nancy took the ice in Albertville, France, skating to the theme from Born on the Fourth of July, she seemed to be presenting herself as America’s hopeful young bride. Even her lack of competitive savvy gave her an air of innocence and sincerity: she was radiant when she landed a difficult jump, and appeared near tears after making a mistake. She had the style and grace of a woman, but the bashfulness and sincerity of a girl. She was beautiful without being sexual, strong without being intimidating, and vulnerable without being weak, and in the end she embodied no quality quite so perfectly as she did the set of draconian contradictions that dictated a female athlete’s success. Once again, Nancy went home with the bronze. Tonya, who had finished narrowly behind her, in fourth place, went home with nothing.
As the 1994 Games drew closer, and as Tonya’s skating grew weaker and Nancy’s stronger, singling her out as America’s only serious contender in ladies’ figure skating following Kristi Yamaguchi’s retirement, Nancy signed endorsement deals with Campbell’s Soup, Reebok, Northwest Airlines, Seiko, and Ray-Ban. It was as if the rewards for Olympic championship had already been bestowed on her: she was sure to win, and even if she hadn’t yet, she looked like a winner. Somehow, she had broken the rules that for so long had dictated the shape of a skater’s career: years if not decades of penury and toil, and a reward if and only if you won the gold. Those rules had applied to everyone else, but they didn’t apply to Nancy. She didn’t need the gold medal around her neck so long as she had a neck lovely enough to deserve it.
It was a new variation on an old theme, and one perhaps best exemplified by Peggy Fleming, whose Olympic victory had set the standard for the career—and the fame, and the wealth—a female figure skater might aspire to. Not quite twenty-five years before, at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics, Peggy, coltish and wide-eyed as a young Audrey Hepburn, had become the only American athlete to win a gold medal at the games. Upon her return home, she had been crowned America’s sweetheart.<
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Her subsequent fame was unprecedented, even if her victory was not. Tenley Albright, who in 1956 became the first American ladies’ skater to win an Olympic gold medal, left the sport altogether after her win, attended Harvard Medical School, and became a surgeon. Following her victory at the 1960 Games, Carol Heiss had skated in a few ice shows and appeared in a Three Stooges movie, then retired from skating altogether in 1962, quietly returning to the sport in the 1970s to work behind the scenes as a coach. But Peggy would never have to attempt such strenuous work, or aspire to such anonymity. Her job now was to make a living being—and selling—herself. Over the years, she appeared in ads for L’eggs and Hanes pantyhose, Concord Mariner and Rolex watches, Halo shampoo, Colorado Interstate Gas, Trident gum, Bell Telephone, the United States Postal Service, Kellogg’s cereal, and Equitable Life (“Maybe your girl won’t become a sports star like Peggy Fleming. But every youngster—including yours—can be as physically fit as the most talented athlete”). She met Lyndon Johnson on a trip to the White House, visited Vietnam veterans in the hospital, was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year, and rode through her homecoming parade perched on the back of a convertible, clad in a smart double-breasted skirt suit, cradling a drift of red roses, and looking as dewily innocent as Jackie Kennedy had, sitting in the Dallas sunshine, before the first shot cracked through the air.
In 1973, after Janet Lynn had tried for both the gold medal and the position of America’s sweetheart at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics and finished with a disappointing bronze, Peggy, title still intact, appeared in an hour-long special titled—rather unimaginatively but nonetheless intriguingly—Peggy Fleming Visits the Soviet Union. (Only Nixon could go to China, but only Peggy Fleming could go to the USSR.) Peggy’s career had spanned some of the most frightening years in the United States’ recent memory: the issue of Life magazine on whose cover she appeared, rosy-cheeked and radiant after her gold-medal win, advertised itself with two headlines, schizophrenically promising stories of both OLYMPIC CHARMER PEGGY FLEMING and KHE SANH. Some Americans might have needed the magazine to remind them just who this Olympic charmer was, but the Vietnam combat base required no introduction. But there were no images of the Battle of Khe Sanh on the cover of Life that week, or of the ongoing Tet Offensive, or the recent attack on the American embassy in Saigon, or of Kosygin or Brezhnev or McNamara or Johnson, or of any of the other people and events weighing so heavily on the minds of Americans that winter: there was only a beautiful young girl making her country proud. It was a feat for which she would be handsomely rewarded for the rest of her life.
Now Nancy seemed poised to inherit her crown. She was just as elegant, just as humble, just as stylish, and just as graceful. She was also just as steely a competitor as Peggy had once been, and concealed the same athletic rigor beneath the same veneer of girlish charm, but that was, perhaps, best left unexamined. More important than her skill or her strength or her contributions to the sport, Nancy could make Olympic audiences feel good about being American. Nancy Kerrigan was growing more and more famous simply for being Nancy Kerrigan. And she was also coming to learn, just as Tonya was, that there were certain exceptions to the sport’s rules. Being a winner could make you lovable, but being lovable, it seemed, might also be enough to make you a winner.
Nancy’s family—her gruff but devoted father; her blind mother, whose tough-as-nails and Southie-inflected voice softened only when she spoke of her daughter; and her two boisterous, hockey-playing older brothers—was just as easy to love. When Nancy went to Albertville, all the Kerrigans went with her. Interviewed for the New York Times, Nancy’s mother, Brenda, recalled her daughter’s reluctance to go back to the Olympic Village with the other athletes: “She asked if it was OK. Of course it was OK; this is her time to be with the other kids. Nancy is always so apologetic. I don’t want to say she’s a perfect child . . . but she’s a caring child who loves family.” Nancy, the twenty-two-year-old baby of the family, still lived with her parents in the same modest green house in which she had grown up. When she traveled to competitions, she shared a hotel room with her parents. She didn’t have much time for friends or dating, and didn’t seem to have much interest in either, describing her mother as her best friend. Nancy’s mounting success was a victory not just for her, or even for the Kerrigans, but for a way of life Americans feared was fast shrinking: that of the wholesome, hardscrabble working-class clan. One network profile showed Nancy brushing her mother’s hair. Another showed the Kerrigan family seated around the dinner table, toasting each other with glasses of milk.
But if Nancy got to be a working-class hero worthy of a Horatio Alger story, Tonya had to be pressed into service as her counterpart, and as one of America’s most reviled demographics: white trash. In the weeks and months following the scandal, a new variety of sports journalism emerged that could perhaps most aptly be called the Tonya-bash. It was an easy form to learn, about as simple as a Mad Lib, but far more enjoyable, and almost impossible to avoid. Once an author set down one anecdote or piece of biographical information, he had to add one more, and then another. There seemed to be a greasy, eventually shameful pleasure that came with both writing and reading about not just Tonya’s gaffes or problems but the basic facts of her existence. Her mother had been married six times to six different men, or maybe seven, depending on the journalist’s sources. Tonya owned her first rifle, a .22, when she was still in kindergarten, and had moved thirteen times by fifth grade. She dropped out of high school at fifteen. (In fact, she later obtained a GED.) She drank beer and played pool and smoked even though she had asthma. She raced cars at Portland International Raceway, and was involved in a much-hyped traffic altercation in 1992, when she brandished a Wiffle-ball bat at another driver (reported, inevitably, as a Louisville Slugger). She skated to songs like Tone Lóc’s “Wild Thing” and LaTour’s “People Are Still Having Sex.” She was ordered to change her free-skate costume at the 1994 Nationals because the judges deemed it too risqué. Her sister was a prostitute. Her father was largely unemployed, as was her mother, as was her ex-husband. No matter how journalists added up the details, however, they all seemed to reveal the same motive: Tonya was going nowhere fast, and she had decided to take Nancy with her.
Somehow, in the scandal’s aftermath, the form of the Tonya-bash was able to alchemize even the most chilling details of Tonya’s life into tabloid gold. In a Rolling Stone article published shortly after the scandal, Randall Sullivan chronicled a visit to the Tonya Harding Fan Club, where he met “the [club] newsletter’s editor, Joe Haran, a puffy Vietnam vet with white hair and spooky eyes, [who] said he identified with Tonya through his memories of abuse and poverty suffered as a child. Haran was someone for whom it was not inconceivable that a world-class figure skater might phone the police, as Tonya Harding did in March of 1993, to report that her husband, Jeff Gillooly, had emphasized himself during an argument by slamming her head into the bathroom floor.” More than anything, it seemed, Tonya’s history of abuse proved that she didn’t belong in the world whose acceptance she so craved.
Yet her biography was nothing if not malleable. When Tonya first rocketed to fame by landing the triple axel in 1991, the media had tried to put a more positive—and more salable—slant on her lifestyle, using the same information, which they would later call in as proof of her trashiness, to paint a picture of a spunky, all-American tomboy. In the words of one profile piece, “She’s only five feet one inch . . . and weighs only ninety-five pounds. But as petite as she is, there’s a tomboy streak in her that she’s proud of. She drives a truck and tinkers with her car . . . Yet there’s clearly a young lady coming through in her skating, and her personality.” In 1991, the skating world had no choice but to try to love Tonya: she had done what no other American woman could, and if she continued to grow as a skater—and continued to act more and more like “a young lady”—she could make her country proud at the Olympics, and earn both its love and its money.
Back then, s
he also didn’t need stories of ladylike behavior and quirky tomboyishness to convince her audience that she was worth believing in. At the pinnacle of her career, Tonya was, in a word, spectacular. At the time, the only other woman who had landed the axel was Midori Ito of Japan. Midori was a remarkable jumper, and she made the axel look effortless: launching all four feet nine inches of herself into the air, her body seemed light, buoyant, and meant for flight. Tonya’s axel did not look effortless. It did not even look beautiful. It looked difficult—which, of course, it was.
The axel is the only jump that a skater executes by facing forward and taking off from the front of the skate, but like all other jumps it is landed backward. The skater, having taken off from a position that makes gaining the necessary height that much harder, must also somehow squeeze out another half rotation while she’s in the air. Then she has to land it. Completing three and a half rotations in midair is far from easy, but even more difficult is coming back to the ice with all the speed, power, and momentum you need in order to leave it, to somehow land steadily, and to continue with your routine.
Tonya was tiny, but her presence on the ice was powerful, undeniably muscular, and impossible to ignore. Commentators like to talk about skaters “fighting for each jump”; Tonya seemed to fight the jumps themselves. Later, much would be made in both the press and in parody about Tonya’s thighs: they were huge! They were so fat! How could she pretend to be pretty, or even feminine? But they were, at the end of the day, nothing more or less than the thighs of an athlete. They were thick and powerful because she needed them to be that way to launch herself into the air. When Midori jumped, she seemed to float like a leaf borne on the wind. Tonya, Time magazine wrote during the scandal, “bullies gravity.” They meant it as a criticism of her skating, and, by extension, of her, but one wonders: did this have to be a bad thing? What was inherently wrong with a spectacle of female power in which you could almost taste the athlete’s sweat, and feel her desire, her soreness, and her determination to leave the ground? She wasn’t artful, but it wasn’t her job to make art; she wasn’t soft and feminine, but it wasn’t her job to be those things, to sit still, or to smile passively while the cameras lingered on her face. It was her job to jump and spin, to tear the ice with her speed, to fight and fall and get up and fight again. And for a while—when the axel was a novelty and her country needed a skater who could challenge the Japanese, when the old narrative of American spunk versus a foreign juggernaut was ready to be dusted off for yet another Olympic year, and when Tonya could be counted on to win—the axel was enough to make Tonya enough. For a moment, everything seemed within her reach.
