Thin Ice

by Frank Coffey

  Her training was supposedly going well in late 1991, after her separation from Gillooly. In addition to on-ice workouts, Harding lifted weights (she can bench press 110 pounds) and ran. She was in the best shape of her life—prepared, she thought, for the intensity of Olympic competition. A first-place finish at Skate America only served to solidify her reputation as a leading contender for a gold medal the following winter in Albertville, France.

  Moreover, her personal life was on the mend. She invited a young man she had met in Vancouver, British Columbia to come to Portland for a few days. He met Tonya’s parents. They liked him. Close friends observed that Harding seemed almost blissful after his visit.

  Then, inexplicably, just a few days later, Harding announced that she was reconciling with Jeff Gillooly.

  “I’m a complete person now,” she explained. “I know it seemed like I was happy, but something was missing, and now I know what it was. Jeff and I love each other more than ever. We’re going to get a counselor and work it out.”

  They tried. Harding even took Jeff’s last name for a while, becoming Tonya Harding Gillooly in competition. On the ice and off, though, the next two years were filled with more pain than pleasure for Tonya; more failure than success.

  According to Teachman, Harding virtually abandoned her training regimen after getting back together with Gillooly. She did not resume serious workouts until one month before the 1992 nationals, which would serve as the Olympic Trials. She was unprepared for the competition, and no amount of bravado could hide that fact. Twice she attempted her famed triple Axel, and twice she fell. Harding was fortunate to hold on to third place.

  “Reconciling with her husband became the most important thing in her life,” Michael Rosenberg told The San Francisco Examiner.

  “I don’t think anyone can argue with those priorities. She continued to stay in shape, relatively speaking. She didn’t just sit at home and get fat and lazy. But she didn’t train to the extent that she probably should have.”

  The pattern of undisciplined behavior continued through the Albertville Olympics. Harding reportedly trained without a coach until two weeks before the Games. She arrived in France just three days before the figure skating competition was scheduled to begin—barely enough time to recover fully from the jet lag associated with a nine-hour time difference.

  “If she had had a couple more days, she would have had her legs under her a little better,” Teachman said.

  She also would have had a bit more time to familiarize herself with the ice surface and to become desensitized to the potentially paralyzing aura of importance that surrounds any Olympic event. But Tonya Harding was typically stubborn. She wanted to do things her own way. So what if she’d never competed in the Olympics before? Skating was skating. She’d be fine. As for the time difference? No problem. Tonya had been all over the world and had never once suffered from jet lag.

  The day before her short program, however, the veneer of confidence was stripped away as Harding tumbled roughly to the ice during a practice session. It was her habit during such mishaps to rise quickly and go on skating. This time she broke out in tears, sobbing uncontrollably.

  It was not an encouraging sign.

  By contrast, Harding’s U.S. teammates, Yamaguchi and Kerrigan, had been in the Olympic village for ten days. Their problem was one of restlessness—how to fill all the hours without obsessing on the competition that lay ahead. Yamaguchi’s answer was a three-day training trip to Megeve, located some 35 miles from Albertville. Kerrigan’s answer was to come down with a nasty case of the flu. While hardly as enjoyable as Yamaguchi’s diversion, it also chewed up three days.

  Yamaguchi and Kerrigan each skated beautifully in the short program—which would account for one-third of the competitors’ total score—finishing one-two. Harding and Japan’s Midori Ito, considered less elegant, but more athletic, than Kerrigan and Yamaguchi, fared less well. Ito, usually a courageous and daring skater, decided at the last moment to substitute a safe triple Lutz combination for her famous triple Axel combination. It should have been a simple maneuver for Ito, a former world champion. Kerrigan had executed it in the afternoon; so had Yamaguchi. For Ito, there would be no problem. Remarkably, though, Ito fell during the triple Lutz, a blunder so stunning that a wave of silence fell over the audience. Ito, the favorite, stood fourth after the short program.

  Bad as Ito’s performance was, it was better than Harding’s. The worst fears of the U.S. skating community, which suspected that Harding was not ready for the event, were realized. Unlike Ito, Harding stubbornly attempted her triple Axel; like Ito, she fell. Crashed was more like it. She wound up sixth and left without speaking to reporters.

  “She’s a little down,” Teachman said. “She wanted to land that jump as much to prove it to herself as she missed it at nationals. But she’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  Teachman’s assumption was wrong. Two nights later, in her long program, Harding attempted another triple Axel and fell again. Overall, she skated well enough to finish fourth, but it was undeniably a disappointing performance, especially in light of her ascent to the top of the heap one year earlier. Her teammates, Yamaguchi and Kerrigan, finished first and third, respectively. Ito skated brilliantly in her long program to win the silver.

  Tonya went home empty-handed.

  “I certainly hope she learned from the experience,” said Dody Teachman. “It would be a shame to have that whole experience be a waste.”

  If it was an education, her response to the lesson was not so much one of humility and self-awareness as of anger. Tonya lashed out. Three days after bombing in Albertville, she showed up at Teachman’s home. They talked briefly. Actually, Harding did most of the talking; Teachman listened. What she heard, for the second time in less than a year, was this:

  “You’re fired.”

  Fine, Teachman thought. Have it your way.

  “She’s taken enough of my time,” Teachman told The San Francisco Examiner. “I love Tonya. There will always be a special place in my heart for her. But she has a lot of growing up to do.”

  The explanation given by Harding—concern that Teachman’s pregnancy would restrict the time she could spend with Harding—was flimsy, considering that in recent months it had been Tonya who was reluctant to practice. The deal was done, though, and Harding soon returned to Diane Rawlinson.

  “Tonya wants to be the best she can be and realizes she has not had her training program,” Rawlinson told the Associated Press.

  “It has to be a team effort. She knows I am a tough coach and she feels she would like to do it. She feels she is not the best she can be.”

  At the 1992 world championships in March, Harding began the process of re-creating herself. In addition to rehiring Rawlinson, she ditched all her old Olympic programs and showed up with new ones, even though she’d have only a month to perfect them. Her moves were new, her music was new (ZZ Top was exchanged for Frank Sinatra). So was her name: for the first—and only—time in a major international competition, she skated as Tonya Harding Gillooly. To further impress upon the world that their marriage was rock-solid, Jeff (who had by now quit his job at the liquor authority to devote himself full-time to Tonya’s career) accompanied his wife to Oakland; it was the first time he had ever joined her at a competition.

  “A month is not a long time,” Rawlinson said of the sweeping changes. “But Tonya is involved in a heavy training effort. Conditioning, running, sprints. She has made a commitment to work harder. She’s had a really rough year, but she realizes she can do so much more.”

  Tonya agreed.

  “I’m more focused,” she said at the time. “I have a team working for me. I’m more artistic. I’m real happy about everything that’s going on.”

  Her joy was short-lived. The downward spiral that had begun at the nationals continued in Oakland. Harding skated conservatively in the short program, not even attempting a jump until the routine was nearly half over, and was fourth going int
o the final. There, her athleticism deserted her again.

  Harding skated last that day, making her performance all the more dramatic. Several women ahead of her in the standings had skated poorly, leaving room for Harding to at least snatch a medal, if not complete victory. Her routine was a mess, though. A sad, unpolished mess. Harding landed only two triple jumps; she doubled out of four others. The combination that sealed her victory at the 1991 nationals, the triple Axel, failed her again. For the fifth time in 1992, she attempted the move, and for the fifth time she missed.

  When the scores were tabulated, Tonya Harding was in sixth place. Afterward, in an attempt to show that she could now handle disappointment, Harding tried to put a positive spin on the event.

  “I’m a little bit disappointed, but I’m thrilled with the marks I got for style,” she said.

  Harding’s coach, who knew what Tonya was capable of doing, who had watched her as a child, was not so gracious.

  “She tried too hard and she choked,” Rawlinson said. “It’s been a rough year for her. There’s been a lot of changes and I think she’s learned from them.”

  Meanwhile, the new Tonya was getting low marks off the ice as well as on. Santa Rosa Press Democrat columnist Michael Silver bemoaned Harding’s transformation, saying, among other things, that while Harding appeared to be at peace during a preevent press conference, she also seemed “numbingly subdued, like the lobotomized Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…. Harding’s retreat from her customary boldness is disturbing. It’s like seeing James Bond shed his gadgets and surrender, or watching Pete Rose slide into home feet-first.”

  In other words, it was unnatural, and that bothered people. Here was another dose of irony. Tonya Harding, who had so often angered people simply by being herself, had decided to join the ranks of the conservative. She had decided to be exactly what they said she was supposed to be: sweet, demure, artistic. After all these years, she was trying to squeeze herself into the mold.

  And now they were telling her the mold didn’t fit.

  She had no luck.

  Fortunately, she also had no real desire to make the mold fit. The attempted transformation had been half-hearted at best, and it didn’t last. It was fake, just like the image of domestic tranquility she and Jeff Gillooly tried to present to the public. He was supposed to be Tonya’s emotional and spiritual anchor, but he was turning out to be something else entirely.

  The rancor in their relationship continued unabated, though it was largely hidden from the public. From 1992 to 1994, their names appeared regularly in Portland police files, usually with Tonya listed as the victim, Gillooly as the suspect. One of their nastier arguments escalated into violence in March, 1993, when, according to Harding’s version of the story (as chronicled by the Portland Oregonian), Gillooly grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face into the bathroom floor several times. She tried to run away, but Gillooly pursued her in his pickup truck.

  A friend found Tonya in the middle of the night and brought her home. She was frightened. Clumps of hair had been pulled out. Her fingers were swollen—the result, she said, of having been slammed in a car door by Gillooly. She promised to leave him. Then. That very night.

  Not long after, Gillooly presented his side of the story to the police.

  He said he would never hurt his wife, the report stated.

  He did not hit her or pound her head into the floor.

  It was Gillooly’s contention that he only wanted to calm Tonya down. He followed her in his truck because he, too, feared for her safety. He wanted her to come home.

  Harding was again granted a restraining order barring Gillooly from coming near her. She claimed, however, that he repeatedly violated that order. He continued to follow her in his truck, to threaten her, and she continued to call police for help.

  “It has been an abusive relationship for the past two years and he has assaulted me physically with his open hand and fist,” Harding wrote in a July 1993 affidavit. “Also he has put me down to the floor on several occasions. He is not in the right frame of mind, and he follows me and he has broke into my house and into my truck and I am afraid for my safety.”

  Harding claimed Gillooly stole a leather jacket from her house. She also said she received secondhand death threats. Gillooly denied all the charges.

  According to one report that surfaced in late January, though, Gillooly wasn’t the only one supposedly threatening bodily harm. The Portland Oregonian reported that when harding’s truck was stolen in the summer of 1993, she suspected her husband. Harding was so angry that she approached two men with whom she worked out at a local gym and asked them if they might be interested in helping her “take care” of Gillooly. The men weren’t sure what Harding meant. She had talked to them before about serving as bodyguards to protect her from her husband, but now, as they understood it, she was contracting a hit.

  The two unnamed men, according to The Oregonian, were shocked. They said Harding mentioned a figure of $100,000, implying that she thought it could be done for less than that. A few days later, she returned and altered her request: Rather than having Gillooly killed, she now merely wanted him injured. The man interviewed for the story (though he was not quoted directly) said he was appalled; shortly thereafter, he said he stopped working out with Harding.

  Neither Harding nor Gillooly would comment on the allegations. And, in fact, there is no police report to support the story, no separate allegations. There is no proof that the conversation took place, or that Harding was serious even if it did take place.

  In August of 1993, a divorce was granted, but that was not to be the end of their relationship. Although she had dated other men during their separation, Tonya clearly had never purged her system of her love for Jeff Gillooly.

  “She couldn’t stop talking about him,” Tom Arant, with whom Harding had shared a brief, intense relationship, told The Oregonian. “If I don’t like someone, I don’t talk to him. But she had to talk with him at least three or four times a week.”

  Arant said Harding seemed distracted much of the time. She repeatedly expressed her contempt for Gillooly and dealt with stress by smoking a lot—an interesting observation in light of the fact that Harding has always denied having any sort of nicotine habit.

  In time, she went back to Gillooly, just as she had in the past, just as everyone suspected she would. But even their reconciliation was acrimonious.

  It came in October of 1993. Harding left her apartment at three o’clock in the morning, following what neighbors described as a loud argument. Harding was putting her belongings in Gillooly’s truck when neighbors heard a gunshot. Witnesses at the apartment said they saw a man pick a woman up off the ground and force her into the truck. They called the police, fearing the woman had been shot.

  The truck was stopped. Inside, police found Harding and Gillooly, along with a shotgun and a handgun. Most reports stated simply that the two were taken into custody, but that no charges were filed. The Oregonian, however, reported a more detailed, and more alarming, version of the story.

  A police officer handcuffed the world-class figure skater to the front of his patrol car and read her the Miranda rights. He talked with Gillooly in the back of his car, then with Harding. They said that the gun had gone off accidentally when Gillooly was carrying it, but their stories didn’t match. The couple admitted that Harding fired the gun, but they didn’t want that known, fearing the publicity. Gillooly admitted they had been fighting. About some woman he had been seeing. But he didn’t press charges.

  No one knows why Harding was drawn to Gillooly, or why she was unable to break away. There are, however, theories.

  “The question I always had when I was having problems with Tonya was how much of it was Tonya and how much was Jeff?” Michael Rosenberg—who cut his ties with Harding in the fall of 1993—told The Oregonian. “Because when Jeff was not around, everything seemed to go much smoother.

  “I think she loves him and holds onto
him and she hates him and is afraid of him.”

  The violence in Harding’s adult life has not been restricted to altercations with Gillooly. There was a widely-publicized incident in Portland in 1992, for example, just a few days after she returned from Albertville, in which Harding got into a slapping match with a female motorist. The argument began when the other driver failed to turn right at a red light. Harding, in the car behind the other woman, and in a hurry, lost her temper. When Clackamas County sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene, they found Harding wielding a baseball bat.

  “Ms. Harding told me the other car was trying to run her off the road,” the deputy wrote. “And she grabbed the baseball bat to protect herself.”

  Harding later tried to soften the negative publicity that naturally accompanies such an incident, but she did a lousy job of it. First, she argued that it wasn’t really a baseball bat, but a whiffle bat; second, she apologized through her agent, who said, “while it wasn’t her fault, she regrets the incident and is sorry that it happened.”

  She did, however, pay for the cost of repairing the other driver’s eyeglasses, which were broken during the argument.

  Another strange incident occurred in November, 1993, when Harding received a death threat just an hour before she was scheduled to compete in the Northwest Pacific Championships at the Clackamas Town Center ice rink. An anonymous caller had phoned the rink and said that if Harding competed, she would be shot.

  According to a story in The Oregonian, tournament officials and many of the skaters did not believe the threat was real. They felt Harding was trying to back out of the event because she didn’t want to skate in a minor qualifier before the nationals.

  “It was belittling for her to skate in this event,” one organizer told The Oregonian. “She was a former national champion, had been to three championships and to the Olympics, and she was far and away the best skater in the group. Technically, she had to compete because she hadn’t placed high enough in a previous event. They could have made an exception and let her go straight to the nationals, but because of her personality, they made her go by the rules and compete.”