Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 21

Leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, ice-skating was so big that the US federation had just signed a ten-year $100m television deal to bring it into the top rank of non-team sports. A major reason for its popularity was the forthcoming confrontation between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. For most viewers Stateside the two American ice dancers were virtually assured of the gold and silver medals, it was just a question of which finished first and which came second.

Kerrigan versus Harding was the sort of contest on which America would love to gorge at every Olympics. It was a clash of opposites: Harding, the brash, white trailer trash from Portland, Oregon, versus Kerrigan, the refined Ivy League sorority queen from the American equivalent of the Home Counties. Skating was well-established as one of the blue ribband events of the games and with two Yanks ruling the roost, the contest pushed all the right buttons for the public and their networks in the land of the free.

Happy to prevail by fair means or foul, Harding chose the latter. As the then 21-year-old said the year before the Olympics, ‘I’ve had to overcome many obstacles, but I’ve never given up hope. I didn’t come with a silver spoon in my mouth. I’ve had to work for what I have. This is for anybody. If you have a dream, go for it. There’s always a way to make it come true.’ And that way was to cheat. Harding had been beaten regularly by Kerrigan in the run up to the Games and set out to ensure it didn’t happen again. She had decided that, one way or another, it would be her face leading the news headlines after the medal ceremony. In that, if in nothing else, she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

The incident which would make Harding endure in sporting infamy was caught live on video tape on 6 January 1994 at the US National Trials. Kerrigan was just about to climb onto the ice when a low blur appears from rightfield and the brunette skater goes down, screaming. As onlookers rushed to Kerrigan, who was holding her right knee in agony, a figure makes a hasty exit. Quickly apprehended, he was identified as Shane Stant.

The conspiracy began to unravel at once. Stant, along with his uncle-cum-getaway-driver Derrick Smith, ‘bodyguard’ Shawn Ekert, and Harding’s on-off husband Jeff Gillooly, formed a none-too-bright four-strong team of conspirators who aimed to put Kerrigan out of action ahead of the Olympics in the next month. In that they failed as the injury sustained by Kerrigan from the assault was relatively minor. Initially kicked off the US team, Harding threatened a $25m lawsuit and made the plane to Norway amid fevered media interest.

In the event, neither skater won gold—that honour went to unsung Oksana Baiul of Ukraine—but the long arm of the law soon caught up with Harding. Gillooly got two years, with the other conspirators getting eighteen months each and the judge roundly condemning them as ‘greedy, dishonest, even stupid’. Although the hatchetfaced caravan-dweller continued to insist that she was innocent of all charges m’lud, that quickly wore thin; she changed her plea to guilty to conspiracy to hinder prosecution in an attack on Kerrigan, copping three years’ probation, $160,000 in fines, and 500 hours of community service.

Banned for life from skating for the USA, Harding has tried various means of scraping a living. There was topless ice skating in Vegas, appearing as a skating Santa Claus, minor league ice hockey, a walk on role in the low-budget movie Breakaway, a boxing career that saw her appear on a Mike Tyson undercard, wrestling in Japan, and even an abortive attempt to skate for Norway or Sweden. (‘With her blonde hair and blue eyes, she looks Norwegian or Swedish,’ said agent David Hans Schmidt. ‘My client would still like to win the gold medal she never got. If it has to be as a Norwegian or Bolivian, that’s fine with us.’)

But mainly there was trouble. She was arrested for throwing a hubcap at her live-in boyfriend before repeatedly punching him in the face, leaving him needing hospital treatment. She even claimed to have been abducted at knifepoint outside her home by a ‘bushy-haired stranger’, although no one was ever arrested.