Tonya’s back, but don’t ignore the facts
Christine Brennan: Let’s not forget Harding’s downfall was her own fault
Tonya Harding is back. America’s first pop culture cable news villain, a chain-smoking asthmatic who made one bad decision after another to squander opportunities to win two Olympic figure skating medals, is once again back in the news.
This time, thankfully, no one has been attacked. This time, it’s only a movie.
And a dark, outrageous one at that. I, Tonya, which is opening around the country over the next couple of weeks, is filled with knuckleheads and overflowing with scenes of domestic violence. If anything bad happens — and, rest assured, it does — the movie wants you to know it’s definitely not Tonya’s fault. Especially the 1994 attack on rival U.S. skater Nancy Kerrigan, a two-time Olympic medalist.
In the wildest sports story many of us will ever witness, Tonya’s live-in exhusband and his goofball friends actually talked about trying to kill Kerrigan. They stalked her and eventually attacked her on the knee at the 1994 U.S. Olympic trials in Detroit, forcing her out of the event and into a whirlwind recovery reaching the 1994 Winter Olympics, where she lost the gold medal by onetenth of a point on one judge’s scorecard.
It would be natural to ask if I, Tonya makes you feel sorry for Nancy, considering she was the one who actually was attacked.
Of course it does not. Instead, it wants you to feel sorry for Tonya.
Oh, Tonya. I covered every preposterous second of the Tonya-Nancy saga from Jan. 6-Feb. 25, 1994. I’ve seen the movie twice. There were times I laughed out loud. Some of the acting is wonderful. But the movie certainly doesn’t worry about letting the facts get in the way of a good story or bother to tell you that the only person Tonya has to blame for her monumental athletic failures is herself.
Hollywood has every right to tell the story any which way it wants, of course. But in the interest of, well, the truth, I thought it might be helpful to recall a few salient facts about Tonya before everyone gets swept off their feet wanting to forgive her and welcome her back so she can take her rightful place in society, perhaps by replacing Omarosa in the White House.
For a quarter of a century now, popular culture has somehow fallen for the notion that Tonya got a raw deal from figure skating judges and the U.S. Figure Skating Association. This is the oxygen on which I, Tonya survives: Poor Tonya. The bad girl from the wrong side of the tracks got the shaft at every turn.
Nice try, but no. U.S. officials didn’t send Tonya to one Olympics. They sent her to two. She also won two U.S. national titles, one of which was later taken away due to her supporting role in the attack on Kerrigan. (She gave information about Nancy’s Cape Cod training rink to the “hit men,” and later pled guilty to the felony of conspiracy to hinder the prosecution.)
U.S. Olympic and skating officials gave Tonya every opportunity to be a star. And what did she do with those opportunities? She frittered them all away.
Tonya actually was blessed with dollops of athletic good luck, starting with the year she was born, 1970. When the International Olympic Committee decided in 1986 to separate the Winter and Summer Games after 1992, it moved the Winter Olympics to 1994, giving skaters Tonya’s age the unprecedented opportunity to compete in two Olympics within two years in the prime of their careers — 1992 and 1994.
Another bit of good fortune came in 1990, when the sport did away with its compulsory school figures, the painstaking tracings of figure eights, choosing to place a premium on jumping instead. The timing was perfect for Tonya, who was the most talented pure jumper among her generation of U.S. women skaters — and, for that matter, any generation, including today’s.
Tonya arrived at the 1992 U.S. Olympic trials overweight and out of shape. She still finished third and made the team.
Then she didn’t show up at the 1992 Games in the French Alps until just three days before her competition, claiming she never got jet-lagged. After finishing fourth, she admitted that, yes, she was jet-lagged.
Soon afterward, she split with the best coach she ever had and let her soon-to-be-ex-husband help train her — when she actually decided to practice, which wasn’t often. Yet she still was good enough to make the 1994 Olympic team in the midst of the Tonya-Nancy fiasco, but she bombed in Norway, finishing eighth. Among the many ridiculous footnotes? She failed to bring an extra skate lace to the Olympics, which gave the world the iconic image of Tonya’s skate boot propped on the judges’ table when her one and only lace inevitably broke.
Tonya’s lack of respect for the opportunities she was given is as breathtaking today as it was back then. Perhaps that doesn’t make for a good movie, but it does happen to be the truth.