by Adam Johnson
Tonya had disappointed her audience before. She had given lackluster skates, sometimes disastrous ones. She had fallen while attempting her axel or left it out entirely. She knew what it was like to let people down by skating badly. This time, though, she had let the world down by skating well. She had given them their drama for the evening, had let all the confusion and fear and anger of the last six weeks get to her when she should have been most impervious, and had let herself become, for the briefest moment, a spectacle of pain, just as Nancy had six weeks before. But now, like Nancy, she pulled herself together and faced the crowd. This time, she landed as flawless a triple lutz as she had at the US Championships, and skated with some of the same newfound grace and maturity she had displayed there not so long ago. Her triple axel was gone: she would never land it in competition again, would never compete again, and she knew it. But she took her time, seeming to savor the feeling of being out there, of having made it to the Olympic ice at all, and of being able to do, just one last time, the only thing she had ever been great at, and the only thing she had ever loved that had loved her equally in return.
Writing about Tonya’s insistence on skating, Christine Brennan argued that “she had every right under US law to skate in Norway. But the responsible thing would have been for Harding to gracefully withdraw.” Yet if Tonya had to be painted as shameless—and after the last six weeks there was no other role she could play—she could at least put her supposed shamelessness to good use. If the judges she had tried so hard to please had never been able to find any gracefulness in her skating, then why did she have to conduct herself gracefully now? And why—at the end of a career in which everything she did, every role she was allowed to play, and every achievement she was considered capable of was dependent on other skaters—did this moment have to be about anyone but her? She had refused to slink away when the public wanted her to buckle under the pressure not of competition but of humiliation. She had spent her entire life struggling to deliver the performance that was expected of her. Now, expected to do the easiest thing there was—to fall apart on the ice, to be weak, punished, and ashamed—she rebelled, and did the hardest thing that not just she but any woman performing that night could have: she skated the way she wanted to. She finished the Games in eighth place, but in her own way, and on her own terms, she had won.
Reporting from the wreckage of the scandal’s aftermath, journalists would make much of the fact that Tonya had skated her free program to the theme from Jurassic Park. The New York Times suggested she may have felt “that if fictional dinosaurs can be resurrected, so can her career.” Extinction jokes abounded. Beyond the subject matter, authors implied, it was the sort of tacky and unfeminine choice one could expect from Tonya. (Meanwhile, former Olympic champion Katarina Witt didn’t seem to inspire any flak for skating to the theme from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, clad in a tunic and breeches and including a mimed bow and arrow in her choreography.) In Women on Ice, an anthology on the scandal released the following year, Stacey D’Erasmo took a more sympathetic approach, writing that “watching Tonya walk barefoot up and down that long, dark corridor Friday night as the other women in their shiny little outfits passed her by, then watching her skate to the music of Jurassic Park, a movie about extinct animals, I felt that I was witnessing the final act of an American tragedy.”
Yet D’Erasmo, for her embrace of the moment’s pathos, still somewhat missed the point. Watching the Olympics that night, viewers witnessed not just the end of Tonya’s career but the extinction of a whole era of ladies’ figure skating. If Tonya was a T. Rex, lumbering out of her enclosure and bringing chaos to the night’s well-ordered spectacle of heavily regulated female strength, then Nancy was a velociraptor, hissing with stifled aggression as her turf was overrun by tiny, quick-blooded mammals. As Nancy warmed up with the final group, she found herself surrounded by teenagers: Tonya may have famously trained in a mall, but Nancy had to compete against girls who looked like they would have been more at home shopping in one. Nancy delivered a beautiful routine that night, elegant, nervy, and technically flawless. But it was also the skating of a grown woman, and she narrowly lost both the gold medal and the crowd’s favor to Oksana Baiul, the bubbly, crowd-pleasing sixteen-year-old orphan in pink marabou. However much the public had tried to situate Tonya and Nancy as enemies, they remained united, if only in their representation of the sport’s old guard, and of the last gasp of a period during which skaters could just possibly be seen as women and not as girls.
After the Games, Nancy lingered in the spotlight just long enough to see public opinion turn incongruously against her, a phenomenon that might have seemed no stranger to her than the sudden adulation she had recently been the subject of. The process began mere minutes after Nancy skated, as she waited to take her place on the podium. She was ready to receive her medal, and most likely to go home and turn her back on the events of both that night and the previous six weeks, but Oksana was still backstage. As it turned out later, no one could find the copy of the Ukrainian National Anthem they would need to play during the medal ceremony, but at the time Nancy was misinformed that Oksana was having her makeup done, to which she groused, “Oh, come on. So she’s going to get out here and cry again. What’s the difference? It’s stupid.” Was Nancy—radiant Nancy, good Nancy, Nancy who just wanted to go out and skate for herself—being competitive? Was it possible that she was being not just competitive but bitter?
It was. In fact, Nancy seemed to be irritated not just about her loss to Oksana but about—well—us. Soon after the Games, in a homecoming parade at Disney World in which Nancy stood on a float with a Mickey Mouse-costumed employee, wearing her silver medal and a weary smile, she complained: “This is so corny. This is so dumb. I hate it. This is the most corny thing I’ve ever done.” Mickey shrugged mutely. The rules he obeyed while wearing his costume didn’t allow him to say anything, but the rules Nancy had to follow didn’t let her say much more.
Yet the public had an even stronger motivation for its newfound distaste: Nancy had failed. She hadn’t won the silver. She had lost the gold. How, after miraculously recovering from her injuries (which were in fact relatively minor), after training harder than she ever had before, and after gaining the adoration of her country, if not the world—how, after all this, could she fail? She was skating not just for herself but for us, for middle America, for goodness, for sportsmanship, for proper femininity, and she was propelled by the strength of our needs and desires. Wasn’t that enough?
But Nancy’s lack of adherence to her role soon faded into memory: someone had to play the victim, and television abhors a void. Tonya and Nancy reverted back to their old roles within the public eye, and for the next few years wandered in and out of newspaper and tabloid pages with declining frequency. Whenever they turned up, however, they were considerate enough to do what was expected of them. Nancy continued to perform in ice shows and TV specials; Tonya was banned from the sport. Nancy married and had two children; Tonya married her second husband, then had her second divorce. Nancy started the Nancy Kerrigan Foundation and was named as the spokesperson for the Foundation Fighting Blindness; Tonya completed a court-ordered five hundred hours of community service. Their sport went on without them, and teenagers continued to flood the rinks.
Shortly after the Olympics, in the kind of surreal moment Tonya’s career would contain far too many of, Woody Allen briefly considered her for a role in Mighty Aphrodite, but gave up on the idea when he learned that her probation prohibited her from leaving the West Coast. Instead, Tonya made her film debut alongside Joe Estevez in a low-budget 1996 thriller called Breakaway, which earned her ten thousand dollars and a lot of ribbing from the press. The gimmick casting didn’t sell many tickets, but Bill Higgins, the film’s unofficial Tonya-sitter, was still able to sell the story to Premiere magazine. He recalled Tonya’s on-set diet of fifty-nine-cent Taco Bell bean burritos, orange soda, and Benson & Hedges 100s; her wonder at the sight of Aaron Spelling’s f
ifty-four-thousand-square-foot mansion (“Now that’s cool”); her requests to go to Disneyland; and her state of denial, well after her lifelong ban from competitive figure skating and her unofficial ban from exhibition skating and ice shows, as to what life held for her. Acting, she said, was “really fun,” and “the action part,” when she got to beat up a man twice her size, “was really cool,” but as a career it wasn’t for her: “I had, and still have, my career,” she said, “and that’s skating.” Then, scaling back her ambition a bit, she added, “If they do a movie of my life, I would just like to do the skating. Nobody skates like I do.”
She was right. No one did, and in the last twenty years, no one has. Since Tonya became the second woman in the world to land a triple axel in competition, only four others have managed to follow her: Ludmila Nelidina of Russia, Yukari Nakano and Mao Asada of Japan, and Kimmie Meissner of the United States, who landed a triple axel for the first time at the 2005 US Championships, which were held that year, coincidentally, in Portland, Oregon. The women who came after Tonya struggled, much as their predecessor had, to understand how best to use their strength in a sport that had never quite learned what to make of it, let alone whether or not to reward them for it. Neither Yukari Nakano nor Ludmila Nelidina ever medaled at Worlds or made it onto an Olympic team, nor did they rocket to the sort of fame they might have imagined would accompany such a feat. Kimmie Meissner came in sixth at the 2006 Olympics and won a gold medal in the World Championships a few weeks later, but, like Tonya, she had trouble hanging on to her axel, and she was forced into retirement by a string of injuries before she had a chance to compete at another Games. Present at the 2010 Olympics, however, was Mao Asada, who planned—and gorgeously executed—a record-setting two triple axels in her free skate. She had hoped that they would help her to beat Yuna Kim, whose elegance and beauty on and off the ice had made her a favorite for the gold and a millionaire in her native South Korea before the games had even begun. They weren’t. Mao Asada came in second, but anyone familiar with the narratives of figure skating knew what had really happened: she hadn’t won the silver. She had lost the gold.
Clackamas County, Oregon, the roughshod collection of edge cities, mini-malls, and farmland whose communities Tonya shuttled between throughout much of her life—Happy Valley to Milwaukie, Lents to Beavercreek, Oak Grove to Estacada—hasn’t changed much since its fabled daughter’s girlhood. The areas closest to Portland have seen the crowding and expansion that came with the city’s growth into a legitimate metropolitan area: driving from the city center into Clackamas County, you will pass the new-car dealerships and strip malls and condo developments whose signs promise if you lived here, you’d be home by now. But you don’t have to drive far to get beyond the suburban sprawl and into the past. There, as in 1994, you will find ranches and ranch houses; towns with names like Boring and Needy, which don’t so much invite mockery as head it off at the first pass; and roadside farm stands and U-Pick outfits that, in the summertime, erect signs telling motorists WE HAVE BERRIES: BLACKS AND BLUES.
It is a place of freeway exits and depressed communities and temporary living, but it is also a place filled with surprising beauty, home to protected rivers and forests, and so close to Mount Hood that the snow visible on the face of the mountain seems capable of falling straight into people’s yards. It is the sort of place where a young girl whose early life has conspired to make her feel worthless might find comfort and happiness fishing and hunting, splitting wood and fixing cars, and proving that she can be as strong as any boy. It is a place where a girl might learn to rely on her talent and determination rather than her looks, and in that sense it is not an unlikely breeding ground for an Olympic athlete, but it is, perhaps, the most natural place in the world for one to grow up. And if another such athlete comes from this place, and has less experience than her competitors at posing for the cameras, smiling for the crowd, and learning to hide all the desire and effort that go into her sport, one can only hope that she will not be punished quite so harshly as her predecessor.
The rink at Clackamas Town Center, where Tonya Harding learned to skate—and which, Susan Orlean wrote during the scandal, was “the only place in America where an Olympic contender trains within sight of the Steak Escape, Let’s Talk Turkey, Hot Dog on a Stick, and Chick-fil-A”—is now long gone, and the Town Center, once the headquarters of the Tonya Harding Fan Club, has removed all traces of its famous former tenant. But if you venture into Portland’s Lloyd Center mall, you can still find the rink where Tonya skated for the first time. She was not quite three years old. “They had this archway with bars in it,” she recalled fondly, nearly thirty years later, “and there was an ice rink down below. We were walking across it—my mom and me and her son, and I said I wanted to do that, and she said no . . . I sat down and started screaming . . . I had a fit. And I guess they said, ‘OK, fine.’ Went down, put some skates on me, and I sat down on the ice, and I kicked at it and picked it up and was eating it. They told me not to do that because it was bad for me and that I had to get up and do what everybody else was doing. And so I did. I got up and skated around. After that, I told them I liked it and wanted to do it more . . . I told them this was what I wanted to do.” And so she did. Tonya had her first skating lesson on her third birthday, and didn’t stop skating for the next twenty years. And though in that time she would spend thousands of hours learning to do what everybody else was doing—executing pretty spiral sequences and ornate choreography, doing her best to hide her strength and her sweat, smiling for the cameras and the crowds—her instincts would never really change. For the next twenty years, every time Tonya entered the rink, she was guided by the same desire she had felt that first time: to tear the ice’s perfect, shining surface apart, and make her presence known.
RACHEL ZUCKER
Wish you were here you are
FROM The Pedestrians
time isn’t the same for everyone there is
science behind this when you fly into space
you’re not experiencing time at the same rate
as someone tethered to Earth & someone
moving quickly experiences time at a slower rate
even on Earth so as I run through Central Park
at a speed not much faster than walking but slightly
I am shattering fields of time around me
& experiencing time differently from those I pass
last night I saw my son’s adult self &
in the same moment toddler self this really
happened he was playing “Wish You Were Here”
by Pink Floyd on his electric guitar & feeling it
he’s 11 & in between 2 kinds of time on the verge
of worlds I think we are too you & I who are old
young women it’s not all ‘downhill from here’ we are
here you are & I am & this beautiful moment our sons
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH
The Future Looks Good
FROM PANK
EZINMA FUMBLES THE KEYS against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s affections. Her grandmother, overworked to the bone by the women whose houses she dusted, whose laundry she washed, whose children’s asses she scrubbed clean; overworked by the bones of a husband who wanted many sons and the men she entertained to give them to him, sees her son to his thirteenth year with the perfunction of a nurse and dies in her bed with a long, weary sigh.
His step mother regards him as one would a stray dog that came by often enough that she knew its face, but she’d be damned if she’d let him in. They dance around each other, boy waltzing forward with want, woman pirouetting away. She’d grown up the eldest daughter of too many and knew how the needs of a child can drown out a girl’s dreams. The boy sees only the turned back, the dismissal, and the father ignores it all, blinded by the delight of an old man with a young wife still fresh between her legs. This one he won’t share. And when
the boy is fifteen and returns from the market where he sold metal scraps to find his possessions in two plastic bags on the front doorstep, he doesn’t even knock to find out why or ask where he’s supposed to go, but squats in an abandoned half built bungalow he shares with other unmothered boys where his two best shirts are stolen and he learns to carry his money with him at all times. He begs, he sells scrap metal, he steals and the third comes so easy to him it becomes his way out. He starts small, with picked pockets and goods snatched from poorly tended market stalls. He learns to pick locks, to hotwire cars and finesses his sleight of hand.
