by Adam Johnson
When Tonya took off, you were never sure if she was going to make it as far as she needed to: she struggled for every inch of clearance, and as she completed her rotations her body often tilted in the air, her physical power overwhelming her attempts to control it. Sometimes she seemed impossibly tilted, and still, somehow, she was able to dig her skate in and swing her free leg as hard as she could as a counterbalance, saving her landing and skating on. Sometimes she wasn’t. Increasingly, she wasn’t. And eventually it seemed she had lost the ability to land the jump at all.
After the 1992 Olympics, at which Tonya had fallen on both her axel attempts—sliding painfully across the ice and receiving a 0.5 deduction from each judge—she stopped constructing her programs around the jump and began working on the kind of elegance and artistry that had eluded her for so long. In an interview later that year, she suggested, hopefully, that this would be enough: “I still have all the jumps without the triple axel right now, and I have more style . . . I mean, if other people can do it without a triple axel, why can’t I?”
But if Tonya couldn’t bring the axel, we weren’t interested. She wasn’t rewarded for working on her artistic impression, and no one cared if she landed a triple lutz or a triple-triple combination that would have garnered high praise for any other competitor. She tried to remake herself as a skater, and perhaps it was when it became clear to her that this wasn’t enough—that it was the axel, and not Tonya herself, that the people loved—that she began to have real trouble competing. It was all too easy for the skating community to write her off as a once-promising has-been: the sport, after all, was littered with them. Tonya gained weight, and began replacing even her easiest triple jumps with doubles. She started competing under the name Tonya Harding-Gillooly, then divorced her husband in 1993, only to reconcile with him soon after. Later, when it came time to fit her life story into the scandal’s narrative, journalists delighted in using this detail as proof of Tonya’s tackiness. Despite her allegations of abuse, despite the restraining orders and 911 calls she placed, and despite her claims that she feared for her life both before and after the assault on Nancy, few phrases had quite the same cachet, or were quite so gleefully suggestive as white-trash lifestyle, as live-in ex-husband.
As the quickly accepted press narrative also had it, the assault on Nancy Kerrigan was only a hop, skip, and a failed jump away from Tonya’s disappointment at the 1992 Games and her growing frustration thereafter. She was trash: trash cheats. Trash wants reward without working. Trash is dangerous. Trash doesn’t care about other people’s dreams. Why question a story that made such easy sense, and provided so much to laugh at along the way?
The only thing missing from the media accounts of Tonya’s life was her own version of the story, and it would remain missing for a very long time. For a period in the late ’90s, Tonya worked with ghostwriter Lynda Prouse on a memoir, but for various reasons the project fell apart and wasn’t released until 2008, when a small press published a collection of the interviews that were to have formed the basis of the book. The collection, titled The Tonya Tapes, met with very little fanfare and even less in the way of sales, despite the fact that it provided something the public had been missing for nearly fifteen years: Tonya’s own detailed account of her life and her role in the scandal. The picture she painted of her role in the assault—or rather, her lack thereof—was shocking not so much for its deviations from the publicly accepted image of her as for its unsettling plausibility.
In the interviews, Tonya described her mother using her skating trophies to store loose change, calling her fat and ugly, gulping down a thermos full of brandy as she drove Tonya to the rink in the morning, and hitting her or sending her to her room without dinner as punishment for a bad skate, preparing Tonya for the relationship she would eventually have with her husband. “My mom hit me, and she loved me,” Tonya recalled thinking. “[Jeff] hits me, he loves me. It’s just the way life goes.” She described marrying Jeff—at the time the only man she had ever dated—at nineteen, largely because she was so desperate to get out of her mother’s house. She described her half brother—who was later arrested for child molestation—attempting to rape her when she was fifteen, and how her mother refused to let her testify against him. She described Jeff’s abuse—abuse that was corroborated by her friends and by police reports available to the press at the time of the scandal, but generally utilized only as proof of Tonya’s trashiness—and how neither her family nor her coach was willing to believe her claims. She described leaving Jeff and coming back to him, leaving him again and coming back again, because he was “always saying the right things to get me back, and I’d be stupid enough to go back and get beat up again.” As with so many other women at the center of a scandal, the media did an exceptionally good job of selling Tonya as an extraordinary specimen, a woman unique in her shamelessness, greed, and brutality. Her talent aside, however, she was not unusual at all, but merely one of the countless American women attempting to escape, or at least endure, an abusive marriage. Her relationship with Jeff may have become famous for its explosive ending, but it was identical to millions of others unfolding without the aid of tabloid headlines or prime-time specials.
In the book, Tonya also maintained her innocence in the scandal’s planning, telling a version of the story that seemed just as plausible as the one that had quickly gained acceptance during the event’s coverage. She said she had attempted reconciliation with Jeff following their divorce, in 1993, because a representative from the United States Figure Skating Association told her to do so “unless I didn’t want the marks. If I wanted to make the Olympic team, I need to make myself a stable life . . . They said I had a stable life when I was with him—married, settled down . . . And they wanted to make sure I was still going to be that way to go to the Olympic Games.”
In a sport where judges routinely give skaters criticism on their hairdos and costumes and earrings and eye makeup and teeth (and suggest that failing to change such details might well result in lowered scores); in a sport where, to this day, very few gay male skaters can afford to be openly gay and deal with inevitable backlash not just in the media but in their scores; in a sport where women are sometimes rewarded more for salability than skill; in a sport where gender roles are policed so rigidly, on and off the ice, that Tonya Harding, a petite, blond, white woman, was somehow butch enough to register as a threat to skating’s femininity—in a sport where all this went on, and was in fact common knowledge, the idea that the USFSA would attempt to control a skater’s marital status is hardly implausible. It wanted Tonya to be proper, or at least as proper as she could be. They wanted her to train hard and skate reliably so she could compete well at the Olympics if she remained the only American skater who could match Nancy’s maturity and skill—a very plausible prospect at the time, even if the USFSA didn’t want to admit it. If the representative Tonya says she spoke to had been aware of Jeff’s abuse, there must have seemed too much at stake to give Tonya’s claims much credence. Tonya was abused by her mother, her husband, and finally her sport, whose criticisms of her—she wasn’t pretty; she was too fat; she didn’t deserve to be here; why couldn’t she do anything right?—savagely echoed the criticism she had been enduring for her entire life.
In discussing her failure to come forward upon finding out about Jeff’s role in the assault after the fact—the only crime of which she was eventually convicted—Tonya said that Jeff’s abuse had only grown more severe following the attack on Nancy. He had put the plot in motion, she believed, because he was angry that she had reunited with him only at the USFSA’s request, and that she planned to leave him as soon as she had competed at the Games. “When he found out,” she said, “he came unglued . . . He told me he’d ruin me.” If this really was his plan, he could hardly have been more successful.
After the attack, Tonya told her interviewer, Jeff decided to threaten her by holding a gun to her head, letting two other men rape her, and then raping her himself, telling
her he would kill her if she took her story to the FBI. Even if one finds reason to disbelieve this claim, Tonya’s history of abuse, her justifiable lack of trust in authority figures, and her equally justifiable fear of how the public might treat her if she came forward with what she knew all make her failure to act seem perfectly fathomable.
As for Tonya’s claims about her own innocence in the plot itself, any attempt to dismiss her version out of hand somewhat falls apart once one realizes that the dominant version of the story—the story the press picked up and popularized, and the story that endured largely for that reason—was Jeff’s. Tonya’s version of events is implausible only because it contradicts the story we’ve been familiar with for the last twenty years. Telling it nearly fifteen years after the scandal took place, she also had far less of a reason to lie than Jeff did while he was still trying to strike a deal with the prosecution. Eugene Saunders, the pastor to whom Shawn Eckhardt confessed his role in the plot, told the press that Shawn made it seem as if Tonya had been uninvolved in planning the assault. Shawn had said the same when he was first interviewed by the FBI, and though he changed his story later, the backpedaling testimony of a scared would-be hit man hardly seems as unimpeachable as the public made it out to be.
Beyond Jeff’s, and, eventually, Shawn’s testimony, there was relatively little to link Tonya to the attack’s planning at all. The only involvement Tonya had that could be corroborated by any witnesses beyond Jeff, Shawn, Shane, and Derrick was insignificant: she called a friend who wrote for American Skating World to find out where Nancy practiced, saying she had a bet with Jeff; she went along to Shawn’s house when Jeff delivered the information on Nancy and the up-front pay Shawn had requested before the attack, but stayed downstairs, making small talk with Shawn’s mother; and she asked for Nancy’s room number from the desk clerk at the Detroit Westin where she and Nancy were both staying during the US Championships. These instances were enough to arouse suspicion, but were hardly damning. Jeff could, in fact, have made a bet with Tonya as to where Nancy skated, and she could have found out what he needed without suspecting he planned to put the information to such a use. She was also likely used to waiting around at Shawn’s house while he and Jeff played at being assassins, and when questioned as to why she had asked for Nancy’s room number, she later claimed that she had wanted to slip a poster under the door so Nancy could autograph it for Tonya’s friend and fan-club founder, Elaine Stamm. This wasn’t especially unlikely behavior for Tonya, who, despite the press’s seemingly endless reports of her anger issues, tantrums, and ruthless competitiveness, had always been friendly with Nancy, and made an effort to keep things that way even as the scandal progressed.
She was also remarkably good-natured in her dealings with the press for the weeks leading up to the Olympics, but even her politeness and positive attitude could easily be used against her: saying it had always been “her dream” to return to the Olympics meant she didn’t care whom she had to step on to get there, or at the very least that she was deeply delusional. Being kind to the press meant she craved its attention no matter what the cost. And attempting to show kindness to Nancy, as she did when she said she wanted to give her a hug on her arrival at the Olympic Village, was the worst of all. The media had a field day with the statement, suggesting it was further proof of Tonya’s cold-blooded intimidation tactics—a hug from Tonya, the newscasters’ arch tones suggested, would no doubt have involved a knife between the ribs—but it could also be read as the well-meaning suggestion of a woman who desperately wanted to act as if nothing was wrong, and who believed, more than a little naively, that she might still be able to convince the world, or at least her alleged victim, of her innocence. By then, however, it was far too late. Nancy declined the offer, and the two women never actually spoke for the duration of the Games.
Tonya had famously arrived late to the 1992 Olympics, but she was right on time in 1994. Her ability to compete at the Games despite the mounting suspicions against her seemed, to viewers, both an affront to decency and sportsmanship and an unimaginable boon. Something was coming—something good. In the six weeks since the attack, media coverage of the scandal had built Tonya up from a somewhat tactless young woman into a bloodthirsty fiend; when she and Nancy appeared together on the ice for the first time after the assault, their practice session was glutted with reporters, the constant snapping of the cameras’ shutters sounding like nothing so much as the shuffling and reshuffling of a deck of cards.
But whatever reporters had been hoping for—accusations, hair-pulling, a bloodbath right there on the ice—didn’t happen. The conflict, it seemed, could be resolved only through competition, a belief widespread enough to make the ladies’ short program the fifth most watched television broadcast of all time. Forty-five million viewers in the United States alone tuned in to watch Tonya deliver a lackluster skate, seeming strained and exhausted in a glittery red costume. She was in tenth place at the end of the night, while Nancy, skating cleanly, and looking calm and happy to be on the ice, easily glided into first place. Anyone who wasn’t on tenterhooks as they waited for a confrontation between Tonya and Nancy may have noticed an impossibly polished performance turned in by an impossibly young skater named Oksana Baiul. But forty-five million Americans didn’t sit through a ladies’ figure skating competition just to watch some ladies figure skate. They wanted anger, screaming, tears. And if an actual fight was impossible, they at least wanted more of what had made the scandal itself so compelling: the spectacle of female pain.
Three days later, when Tonya’s name appeared on the marquee to announce the beginning of her free skate, her audience was ready for her, but Tonya wasn’t ready for them. Her lace had broken during the warm-up, and now she couldn’t find a replacement: because of her jumps, Tonya’s skates were specially designed, and required longer laces than those other female skaters used. As Tonya tried to make do with a regular lace, the clock ticked down the seconds she had to appear on the ice before being automatically disqualified. The arena audience waited, confused, while the audience at home watched Tonya backstage, the cluster of people around her growing, her expression inscrutable in the murky light.
Tonya made it onto the ice with seconds to spare, went into her opening jump—a triple lutz—and completed only a single rotation. Not just her jump but her body seemed to come apart in the air, her legs and arms splaying toward opposite points as she froze for a moment above the ice, looking almost as if she was about to be drawn and quartered—which, in a very real sense, she was. She landed, looked down at her skate, and attempted to continue, but a few seconds later, as her music came to a fluttering crescendo, she dropped her head and began to sob. After making her way over to the judges’ table, she lifted her skate up to show them her lace, her lucky gold skate blades glinting in the stadium lights.
Tonya had done everything the protocol demanded: in such an event it was a skater’s job to go to the judges, tell them what was wrong, and get permission to fix it. Later, her problems would be overwhelmingly presented as a last-minute ploy for attention and the second chance she didn’t deserve. Anyone who had watched her historic performance at Skate America in 1991, however—the event at which she had landed two of the best triple axels of her career—would know she had dealt with the same issues years before. Leaving the ice after her flawless free program at Skate America, Tonya, screaming with joy, plowed into her coach’s arms. The last words the cameras picked up from her before the commercial break were the untroubled afterthoughts of a girl too flush with good fortune and newfound evidence of her own invincibility to think of anything else. “You know what?” she told her coach as she relaxed her embrace. “I broke my boot again.”
It was clear the problem was one she had dealt with for years, and that she had long ago come to realize that her sport’s equipment simply wasn’t designed to contain her strength. But that night at Skate America it didn’t matter. Despite the fact that she had broken an eyelet—and her fears that her
boot wouldn’t hold her during her triples—she had skated a perfect program, and ended the night with two 6.0s for technical merit and a gold medal for the event. But on that night, the whole world was behind her, urging her to land the axel, urging her to win. Little more than two years later, Tonya took to the ice knowing that the world now wished just as fervently for her failure.
After Tonya explained that her skate lace was too short to hold her on her jumps, the judges allowed her to go backstage and fix her skate with the longer lace her coach had finally found for her, while Canadian skater Josée Chouinard took Tonya’s place in the lineup. She was a beautiful skater in all the ways Tonya wasn’t—graceful, stylish, and stunning in a Fosse-esque ensemble of pink leotard and gloves—but that night she had a hard time dragging the cameras away from Tonya as she sat backstage, coughing and staring numbly at her skate. Tonya moved several spots down in the lineup, and was greeted by more than a few jeers when she finally took to the ice. Yet anyone who had come to the stadium or turned on their TV hoping to witness one more night of Tonya performing the role of Tonya—trashy, shameless, greedy, lazy, and above all entertaining—couldn’t help feeling their appetite had only been whetted by her earlier problems. That had been the appetizer; now for the entrée. Would she try to find another excuse to get off the ice? Would she cry again? Would she fall—again, and again, and again? Would she hurt herself? Something would happen—something had to happen.
