Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
ICE and a slice of scandal
A new film tells the bizarre but true story of skater Tonya Harding and the rival her husband tried to nobble in a vicious attack
They called it ‘the whack heard around the world’ – the moment Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan’s competition hopes were brutally dashed by a stranger who smashed her knee with a metal police baton as she came off an ice rink during practice for the next day’s US Figure Skating Championships.
The attack in January 1994 meant she couldn’t compete, leaving her great rival, Tonya Harding, to win. Suddenly, Kerrigan’s widely predicted gold medal in the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, only a few weeks away, looked a forlorn hope. But Harding had her own problems – and the Olympics was about to be plunged into one of its most astonishing scandals.
The interesting thing about the story, says film producer Tom Ackerley, is that so many people remember it differently from how it actually happened.
‘You can go up to someone in the street,’ says British-born Tom, whose film I, Tonya, about the infamous skating champion, is released on Friday, ‘and they’ll think it was Tonya who hit Nancy or Nancy did it to herself. What we’re trying to do is make people aware that Tonya wasn’t just a redneck who ice skated. She was much more.’
The real Tonya Harding story is more bizarre than you could imagine. It’s the tale of a genius athlete who came from the wrong side of the tracks in Portland, Oregon, and was desperate to outdo her arch-rival, the fairy-tale beauty Nancy Kerrigan. Tonya had a domineering mother and an abusive alcoholic husband, Jeff Gillooly, who conspired with her bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt – who claimed to run a spy ring – to take Nancy down. The assault happened in broad daylight on 6 January 1994, when two thugs hired by Eckhardt walked into a Detroit skating rink, swung a police baton at Nancy’s right leg, and walked out. They were convinced that by taking out
Nancy, Tonya would become champion and they’d all be rich. But it didn’t go to plan – the blow missed Nancy’s kneecap, bruising her leg badly but not fracturing it.
‘People distilled the story down to villainous Tonya versus graceful Nancy, but that’s not the full picture,’ says Tom’s fellow producer Brian Unkeless. ‘Tonya was more rawly powerful, more athletic, and could jump higher than anyone in that world.’ In fact, she was one of the few female skaters to have mastered the triple axel, an all-but impossible jump that means spinning around three times in the air.
‘But she didn’t have the presentational qualities,’ says Brian. ‘The snobby sports elite looked down at her cheap outfits stitched by her mother, her blue nail varnish and penchant for routines to heavy metal music.’
A teeming mass of contradictions – belligerent and vulnerable, talented and tormented – Tonya had won the US Championships in 1991 and finished fourth in the Winter Olympics in 1992. But after the attack, Nancy made a remarkable recovery and – despite her injured leg being the one she landed on after jumps – went on to win silver at the Lillehammer Games the following month, while Tonya came eighth. And when the truth came out, Tonya was banned from skating for life, despite insisting she knew nothing of the attack beforehand.
For Margot Robbie, who portrays Tonya (and is married to Tom Ackerley) and who spent time with her in preparation for the role, Tonya’s reputation is a sad comment on society. ‘We label people all the time,’ she says. ‘Even when I’m given a script for a movie, I’m given three words to sum up this person, “20s, blonde, whatever…”. When the attack on Nancy happened, people forgot all about the rest of Tonya, her childhood, her athleticism. She was labelled a monster and she is not.’
Not yet four when the events happened, Australian-born Margot hadn’t heard of Tonya Harding before she read the script. ‘When I finished it, I felt empathy for her. And when I found out it was a true story, I wanted to do the film 100 times more!’
Although Margot had minimal experience of the sport – ‘Where I grew up we went surfing, not ice skating,’ she says – she tried to acquire an approximation of an ice skater’s body. ‘If you look at Tonya, it’s very clear she’s an athlete – her legs are so muscly! And when I met her I asked, “What was your training regime, because I’m going to do exactly that.” She told me to do hundreds of sit-ups. She seems a very tough, resilient woman. You’d have to be, having gone through what she has, to reach the point where she is now.’
Her troubles started early, as her mother LaVona, a waitress, was merciless in urging her to succeed; Tonya says LaVona abused her mentally and physically, hitting her with a hairbrush during practice at the rink. But actress Allison Janney, who has already won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of LaVona in the film and is nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, says there’s more to LaVona than that. ‘The lengths to which she took it were questionable – according to witnesses, she refused to let Tonya take lavatory breaks, and made her urinate on the ice – but I had to believe she thought she was giving her daughter a chance to get out of her current circumstances.’
I, Tonya takes a loosely mockumentary form, with the actors portraying the characters talking to the camera and giving widely differing accounts of events. This, says Tom Ackerley, is based on screenwriter Steven Rogers’s experiences. ‘He tracked down Tonya and did many hours of interviews with her. Then he found her ex-husband and did the same thing. Both their versions were wildly contradictory!’
On 1 February 1994, Jeff Gillooly pleaded guilty to racketeering – planning a criminal activity – and spent two years in jail. Tonya pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder the prosecution of Nancy’s attackers and served three years probation. Today she lives in Washington state with her third husband and their six-year-old son. ‘Having had a mother like hers made her want to be everything her mother was not,’ says Margot. ‘She loves her kid and she’s a good mum – she takes solace in knowing she has achieved that.’
I, Tonya is in cinemas from Friday.