Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were fierce rivals in the world of figure skating, but a shocking attack on Kerrigan changed everything.
Learn about the scandal, the investigation, and the media frenzy that followed, forever linking these two athletes in sporting history.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part mini-series on controversial sportspeople and sporting controversies.
[00:00:28] In case you missed it, part one was on the self-destructive footballing icon, George Best, part three is going to be on Lance Armstrong, and today’s episode is going to be on Tonya Harding.
[00:00:41] She was a phenomenally talented figure skater and someone who almost had it all, before a nasty incident changed everything.
[00:00:50] So, let’s not waste a minute and get talking about Tonya Harding,
[00:00:57] At half past two, on January 6th, 1994, a 25-year-old American lady called Nancy Kerrigan had just finished practising her skating routine at Cabo Arena, in Detroit.
[00:01:12] She was one of the best skaters in the country, and a camera crew was there to watch her train.
[00:01:20] You can see the footage on YouTube. Kerrigan is skating around in a white dress and black gloves to classical music.
[00:01:29] The camera follows her as she gets off the rink, and puts on the protective sleeves for her ice skates.
[00:01:37] With telltale 90s music in the background, she heads through a blue curtain towards her dressing room. The cameraman switches off his camera, no doubt thinking that he's got the footage he needs, and he can clock off for the day, or go and have a cup of coffee on a freezing January afternoon.
[00:01:59] But seconds later, just after Kerrigan passed through the curtain, he heard a deathly scream.
[00:02:07] It's Kerrigan.
[00:02:09] He switches on the camera again and rushes through to find this star athlete on the ground, screaming out in pain.
[00:02:19] Confused onlookers try to help her, asking “What happened”.
[00:02:25] All she can do is repeat “Why, why, why?” over and over.
[00:02:32] The pain, the grief, it is plain to see on her face and hear in her voice. This is the look of a young woman who has been viciously attacked for seemingly no reason.
[00:02:46] She describes what happened.
[00:02:48] She was walking and she felt a huge pain in her right leg.
[00:02:53] As she fell to the ground, she saw a guy rushing away carrying what she described as “some sort of hard black stick”.
[00:03:04] The video footage then follows men, presumably her trainers and coaches, who rush around the arena trying to track down this “white guy in a leather jacket”.
[00:03:16] To no avail, there is no sign of him.
[00:03:19] The attack resulted in serious bruising to her knee and damage to the tendons on her right leg, her “landing leg”, the leg on which she would land first after a big jump.
[00:03:32] Fortunately, the blow didn’t break any bones, or shatter the knee.
[00:03:37] If it had, it could have meant she never skated again.
[00:03:42] Nevertheless, it was a bad injury and she was forced to pull out of the tournament she was training for, the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, which was scheduled for two days later.
[00:03:57] Kerrigan was one of the favourites to win, and instead, with Kerrigan unable to participate, the Gold Medal went to her main rival, 24-year-old Tonya Harding.
[00:04:11] Naturally, there was a police investigation into the assault.
[00:04:15] The first question was the one that Kerrigan repeated again and again.
[00:04:20] Why?
[00:04:22] What reason would anyone have to attack her?
[00:04:25] They weren’t trying to steal anything from her, it wasn’t like she was involved in crime or this was the work of a jealous former lover.
[00:04:33] It seemed that the objective of the assault was to injure her, presumably so that she wasn’t able to compete. Remember, the blow was struck to the right leg, her landing leg.
[00:04:47] And who would want her not to be able to compete?
[00:04:51] Well, all eyes turned to who would stand to benefit with Kerrigan out of the picture.
[00:04:59] The obvious candidate was her main rival, Tonya Harding, the woman who had taken first place in the competition.
[00:05:07] Harding and Kerrigan were fierce rivals, they were right at the top of their game as two of the undisputed best skaters in the United States.
[00:05:18] But they were very different people.
[00:05:21] Nancy Kerrigan looked like how people expected a skating champion to look.
[00:05:28] She was a classic beauty, full of grace and style. A big smile, flowing dark hair, and a petite figure.
[00:05:38] She had not grown up with much money around her, and her father worked multiple jobs to pay for her skating lessons, but she was seen as a classy, a sort of fairy-like ice princess.
[00:05:52] As a result, she was flooded with commercial deals to promote a wide range of products, everything from sportswear to watches.
[00:06:02] This was important because skating was and still is an expensive sport.
[00:06:09] Not only is there all of the gear, the fancy clothes and sequined dresses, but there’s all the travel, the competitions, the hotels, and so on.
[00:06:20] At this point it was still a relatively poorly paid sport in terms of the money you got from winning competitions, so top skaters would take any commercial endorsements they could.
[00:06:32] Now, Tonya Harding, on the other hand, didn’t look like how the American public or the American Skating Association expected a skating champion to look.
[00:06:44] She wasn’t a classic beauty, she was muscular, fast and strong rather than dainty and graceful.
[00:06:53] She didn’t behave how the American Figure Skating Association thought a champion skater should behave. She smoked, she drank, and she went on fishing and hunting trips with her father.
[00:07:07] She had grown up very poor, and as the media started to report on Kerrigan’s assault, and contrast the two women, Harding was branded as “white trash”, someone who shouldn’t be anywhere near the middle-class sanctuary of an ice rink.
[00:07:24] Her personal life in terms of her relationships also didn’t fit with the public expectations of what a young sportswoman should be doing.
[00:07:34] She had got married young, at 19, and had filed for divorce a year later.
[00:07:40] She was, reportedly, talked out of it by the American Figure Skating Association, as being a divorced skating champion just didn’t fit the mould. In a country that prides itself on family values, this was unacceptable.
[00:07:58] See, particularly at the time we’re talking about, the late 1980s and early 1990s, women’s skating was all about appearance. Women had to meet certain standards not just of beauty and style but of lifestyle and behaviour and Tonya Harding didn’t look or act the part.
[00:08:21] When she realised that she would never meet these ridiculous standards of femininity, she started to lean into her own more tomboy, bad-girl style.
[00:08:33] She wore blue eyeliner, she would dance to the Batman soundtrack, she was tired of pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
[00:08:42] Whatever her appearance, she was undisputedly an exceptional athlete.
[00:08:49] She was stronger and faster than most other skaters. She was the first American woman to successfully land something called a triple axel jump, where you spin around three times in the air, in fact, you spin around 3.5 times, doing a 1,260-degree spin.
[00:09:10] Now, I am no skating expert, but to underline quite how amazing this is, and what an achievement it was, only 3 American female skaters have ever successfully managed one in a competition, and Tonya Harding was one of them.
[00:09:28] It requires speed, strength and balance in very high quantities, and Tonya Harding had this extremely rare combination of all three.
[00:09:38] So, you have these two rivals, both very talented and skilful but completely different, and in the aftermath of the attack, the American media relished in comparing and contrasting the two women.
[00:09:54] Kerrigan, the graceful and flawless one, the one who looks like a princess and who ticks all the boxes about how a skating champion should look and should behave.
[00:10:05] And of course, the victim of a violent attack.
[00:10:09] And then Harding, the athletic and powerful one, but the one who has really had to fight to get to where she was, battle against the snobbery of the American skating system and is still something of an outcast.
[00:10:24] And the one who had all to gain from her rival being injured.
[00:10:29] Now, back to our story.
[00:10:32] The assault took place on the afternoon of January 6th, and Nancy Kerrigan was forced to withdraw from the National Figure Skating Championships.
[00:10:41] Two days later, her arch-rival, Tonya Harding, won first place and therefore qualified for a place on the US Olympic team that would go to Norway the following month.
[00:10:54] And a week later, on January 13th, the police made an announcement.
[00:11:00] They had made an arrest, or rather, arrests.
[00:11:05] They announced that they had arrested two men in conjunction with the assault: Shane Stant was the man the police believed had carried out the attack, the man who had dealt the blow.
[00:11:17] And the second was a man named Shawn Eckardt.
[00:11:23] This man, the man who had facilitated the attack, just so happened to be…Tonya Harding’s bodyguard.
[00:11:32] Now, we won’t get into all of the details about the arrests and how they were caught, but these two men were far from professionals. They had left tonnes of clues and evidence behind. The media referred to them as “hitmen”, but they were amateurs and opportunists. As a result, it didn’t take long for the police to track them down.
[00:11:57] With the arrest of Tonya Harding’s bodyguard, this set off all sorts of alarm bells.
[00:12:03] Something about the attack had seemed fishy before.
[00:12:07] But surely, surely this couldn’t have been the work of one of her fellow skaters?
[00:12:13] To arrange a violent attack on a rival so that she was out of the picture, this was the stuff of fiction, of Hollywood movies, not of real life.
[00:12:24] In the days following the arrests, the dominoes started to tumble, the suspects started to talk and tell all.
[00:12:34] It was revealed that the ultimate architect of the plot was none other than Tonya Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly.
[00:12:44] Now, I should tell you a bit about this relationship, because it's both important and complicated.
[00:12:51] Tonya Harding had met Gilloly when she was 15. It was a passionate relationship, but, according to Harding, an abusive one.
[00:13:01] Her husband would physically and mentally abuse her, but Harding stayed with him.
[00:13:08] At the time of the assault, January 1994, they were still living together despite having got divorced the year before.
[00:13:17] And when Gillooly, the ex-husband, was questioned by the FBI, he broke down and admitted everything. He was the mastermind, or at least the main organiser, of the entire thing.
[00:13:31] He had organised and paid for the attack.
[00:13:36] But the question on everyone’s lips was “was he really acting alone, or was he covering up his ex-wife’s involvement? How involved was the woman who stood to gain the most from it?”
[00:13:50] Gillooly claimed that it wasn’t his wife’s idea, but that she knew about it before it happened and had supported it when he told her, saying that it was a “good idea”.
[00:14:02] To this day, Tonya Harding has denied having any knowledge of the plan before it took place.
[00:14:09] She would have been horrified, she says, to have found out that they were planning to do such a thing.
[00:14:15] Harding and Kerrigan were competitors, not rivals, and she didn’t need to injure her competitor to win the competition fair and square.
[00:14:25] But, she hadn’t been telling the complete truth…
[00:14:29] On January 26th, 1994, 20 days after the assault, Tonya Harding gave a press conference where she admitted that she had discovered that “persons close to her” were involved in the attack, but she didn’t immediately report this to the authorities.
[00:14:48] In other words, she had found out that her ex-husband organised the assault but she kept this hidden from the police.
[00:14:57] Now, while all of this was going on, there was still the big question of who was going to go to the Winter Olympics in Norway the following month.
[00:15:07] Under normal circumstances, the first and second place in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships would have won a place on the team.
[00:15:15] But Kerrigan, one of the favourites, had been assaulted and therefore wasn’t able to compete, and Harding was living under this cloud of suspicion of being involved in the assault.
[00:15:28] As you’ll remember, Tonya Harding did win the national championships, she came first, so she automatically qualified for the Olympics.
[00:15:37] And a 13-year-old child prodigy called Michelle Kwan came second.
[00:15:43] As a quick side note, Michelle Kwan has had a super interesting life. She has guest-starred in both The Simpsons and Family Guy, and is now the US Ambassador to Belize. But that’s a story for another day.
[00:15:58] Taking it back to 1994, it was decided, partly because Kerrigan had been assaulted, and also because Kwan was so young, to give Kwan’s place on the Olympic team to Kerrigan, assuming she could recover in time.
[00:16:13] After intense physio and rehabilitation and even more intense training, she was considered fit enough to go to the Winter Olympics.
[00:16:23] As to Tonya Harding’s place on the team, there were some loud voices pushing to revoke it, to kick her off the team, but as there was no proof of her involvement in the assault, these came to nothing.
[00:16:37] She hadn’t been officially charged with anything; it was strongly suspected that she was involved in some way, and it seemed incredibly fishy, but nothing was official.
[00:16:50] The two representatives of the United States of America in the Winter Olympics were, therefore, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
[00:16:59] As you might imagine, or as you might remember from the time, this was a media story that wrote itself. Nancy Kerrigan was the “good one”, the one who had recovered from this violent assault, and Tonya Harding was the “bad one”, the one who many suspected had ordered the hit on her rival.
[00:17:21] So, what happened?
[00:17:23] Well, Kerrigan put in an absolutely stellar performance on the ice, wowing the crowds.
[00:17:30] And she almost claimed the gold medal, only narrowly losing out to the 15-year-old Ukrainian skater, Oksana Baiul, who put in a jaw-dropping performance.
[00:17:43] As for Tonya Harding, she was disappointing, finishing in eighth place.
[00:17:49] And on her return to the United States, things went from bad to worse.
[00:17:55] Failing to tell the police about her husband’s involvement was a serious crime.
[00:18:02] On March 16, 1994, a couple of weeks after the Olympics, it was announced that Tonya Harding had pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to hinder prosecution”, which included helping concoct a cover story for her ex-husband and lying to the FBI.
[00:18:20] She was given three years of probation, a $100,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.
[00:18:30] That was the official, criminal punishment.
[00:18:33] But the bigger punishment was the complete obliteration of her skating career.
[00:18:40] She was stripped of her gold medal at the nationals and given a lifetime ban from American professional skating.
[00:18:48] And throughout this entire story, she was hounded by the media, portrayed as the dark and angry woman who tried to cheat her way to the top.
[00:19:00] Given the time that has elapsed since the event, and how she was painted during this media circus, she is remembered by many as not just the person who ordered the assault, but as the person who dealt the blow, the person who swung the baton herself.
[00:19:18] In recent years there has been a renewed interest in telling the truth of Tonya Harding’s story, and in many cases, she is painted more as an unwitting victim than as a violent and angry cheat.
[00:19:34] If she is to be believed–and for the absence of doubt, this is the official position of the authorities–she never wanted this assault, she never knew about it before it took place, and had she known about it beforehand, she would have done everything she could to stop it.
[00:19:52] The fault lies squarely with her ex-husband who thought this could be her ticket, and therefore his ticket, to riches.
[00:20:01] He did it without her consent, and the end result was that her career was destroyed and she was publicly vilified as the woman who attacked her rival.
[00:20:13] Tonya Harding was always an outsider.
[00:20:16] She looked different, talked differently, behaved differently and skated differently.
[00:20:21] Yes, she could have told the police what she knew earlier, but is that enough for a $100,000 fine and a lifetime ban from doing the only thing she had ever loved?
[00:20:34] I’ll let you be the judge of that.
[00:20:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
[00:20:43] As a reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on controversial sportspeople. Part one was about the self-destructive footballer, George Best, and part three will be on another sportsperson who had a crashing fall, Lance Armstrong.
[00:20:59] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:03] Do you remember this event, and how the media treated Tonya Harding? Do you think she is telling the truth, and do you think her punishment was deserved?
[00:21:12] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:16] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:24] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:29] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part mini-series on controversial sportspeople and sporting controversies.
[00:00:28] In case you missed it, part one was on the self-destructive footballing icon, George Best, part three is going to be on Lance Armstrong, and today’s episode is going to be on Tonya Harding.
[00:00:41] She was a phenomenally talented figure skater and someone who almost had it all, before a nasty incident changed everything.
[00:00:50] So, let’s not waste a minute and get talking about Tonya Harding,
[00:00:57] At half past two, on January 6th, 1994, a 25-year-old American lady called Nancy Kerrigan had just finished practising her skating routine at Cabo Arena, in Detroit.
[00:01:12] She was one of the best skaters in the country, and a camera crew was there to watch her train.
[00:01:20] You can see the footage on YouTube. Kerrigan is skating around in a white dress and black gloves to classical music.
[00:01:29] The camera follows her as she gets off the rink, and puts on the protective sleeves for her ice skates.
[00:01:37] With telltale 90s music in the background, she heads through a blue curtain towards her dressing room. The cameraman switches off his camera, no doubt thinking that he's got the footage he needs, and he can clock off for the day, or go and have a cup of coffee on a freezing January afternoon.
[00:01:59] But seconds later, just after Kerrigan passed through the curtain, he heard a deathly scream.
[00:02:07] It's Kerrigan.
[00:02:09] He switches on the camera again and rushes through to find this star athlete on the ground, screaming out in pain.
[00:02:19] Confused onlookers try to help her, asking “What happened”.
[00:02:25] All she can do is repeat “Why, why, why?” over and over.
[00:02:32] The pain, the grief, it is plain to see on her face and hear in her voice. This is the look of a young woman who has been viciously attacked for seemingly no reason.
[00:02:46] She describes what happened.
[00:02:48] She was walking and she felt a huge pain in her right leg.
[00:02:53] As she fell to the ground, she saw a guy rushing away carrying what she described as “some sort of hard black stick”.
[00:03:04] The video footage then follows men, presumably her trainers and coaches, who rush around the arena trying to track down this “white guy in a leather jacket”.
[00:03:16] To no avail, there is no sign of him.
[00:03:19] The attack resulted in serious bruising to her knee and damage to the tendons on her right leg, her “landing leg”, the leg on which she would land first after a big jump.
[00:03:32] Fortunately, the blow didn’t break any bones, or shatter the knee.
[00:03:37] If it had, it could have meant she never skated again.
[00:03:42] Nevertheless, it was a bad injury and she was forced to pull out of the tournament she was training for, the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, which was scheduled for two days later.
[00:03:57] Kerrigan was one of the favourites to win, and instead, with Kerrigan unable to participate, the Gold Medal went to her main rival, 24-year-old Tonya Harding.
[00:04:11] Naturally, there was a police investigation into the assault.
[00:04:15] The first question was the one that Kerrigan repeated again and again.
[00:04:20] Why?
[00:04:22] What reason would anyone have to attack her?
[00:04:25] They weren’t trying to steal anything from her, it wasn’t like she was involved in crime or this was the work of a jealous former lover.
[00:04:33] It seemed that the objective of the assault was to injure her, presumably so that she wasn’t able to compete. Remember, the blow was struck to the right leg, her landing leg.
[00:04:47] And who would want her not to be able to compete?
[00:04:51] Well, all eyes turned to who would stand to benefit with Kerrigan out of the picture.
[00:04:59] The obvious candidate was her main rival, Tonya Harding, the woman who had taken first place in the competition.
[00:05:07] Harding and Kerrigan were fierce rivals, they were right at the top of their game as two of the undisputed best skaters in the United States.
[00:05:18] But they were very different people.
[00:05:21] Nancy Kerrigan looked like how people expected a skating champion to look.
[00:05:28] She was a classic beauty, full of grace and style. A big smile, flowing dark hair, and a petite figure.
[00:05:38] She had not grown up with much money around her, and her father worked multiple jobs to pay for her skating lessons, but she was seen as a classy, a sort of fairy-like ice princess.
[00:05:52] As a result, she was flooded with commercial deals to promote a wide range of products, everything from sportswear to watches.
[00:06:02] This was important because skating was and still is an expensive sport.
[00:06:09] Not only is there all of the gear, the fancy clothes and sequined dresses, but there’s all the travel, the competitions, the hotels, and so on.
[00:06:20] At this point it was still a relatively poorly paid sport in terms of the money you got from winning competitions, so top skaters would take any commercial endorsements they could.
[00:06:32] Now, Tonya Harding, on the other hand, didn’t look like how the American public or the American Skating Association expected a skating champion to look.
[00:06:44] She wasn’t a classic beauty, she was muscular, fast and strong rather than dainty and graceful.
[00:06:53] She didn’t behave how the American Figure Skating Association thought a champion skater should behave. She smoked, she drank, and she went on fishing and hunting trips with her father.
[00:07:07] She had grown up very poor, and as the media started to report on Kerrigan’s assault, and contrast the two women, Harding was branded as “white trash”, someone who shouldn’t be anywhere near the middle-class sanctuary of an ice rink.
[00:07:24] Her personal life in terms of her relationships also didn’t fit with the public expectations of what a young sportswoman should be doing.
[00:07:34] She had got married young, at 19, and had filed for divorce a year later.
[00:07:40] She was, reportedly, talked out of it by the American Figure Skating Association, as being a divorced skating champion just didn’t fit the mould. In a country that prides itself on family values, this was unacceptable.
[00:07:58] See, particularly at the time we’re talking about, the late 1980s and early 1990s, women’s skating was all about appearance. Women had to meet certain standards not just of beauty and style but of lifestyle and behaviour and Tonya Harding didn’t look or act the part.
[00:08:21] When she realised that she would never meet these ridiculous standards of femininity, she started to lean into her own more tomboy, bad-girl style.
[00:08:33] She wore blue eyeliner, she would dance to the Batman soundtrack, she was tired of pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
[00:08:42] Whatever her appearance, she was undisputedly an exceptional athlete.
[00:08:49] She was stronger and faster than most other skaters. She was the first American woman to successfully land something called a triple axel jump, where you spin around three times in the air, in fact, you spin around 3.5 times, doing a 1,260-degree spin.
[00:09:10] Now, I am no skating expert, but to underline quite how amazing this is, and what an achievement it was, only 3 American female skaters have ever successfully managed one in a competition, and Tonya Harding was one of them.
[00:09:28] It requires speed, strength and balance in very high quantities, and Tonya Harding had this extremely rare combination of all three.
[00:09:38] So, you have these two rivals, both very talented and skilful but completely different, and in the aftermath of the attack, the American media relished in comparing and contrasting the two women.
[00:09:54] Kerrigan, the graceful and flawless one, the one who looks like a princess and who ticks all the boxes about how a skating champion should look and should behave.
[00:10:05] And of course, the victim of a violent attack.
[00:10:09] And then Harding, the athletic and powerful one, but the one who has really had to fight to get to where she was, battle against the snobbery of the American skating system and is still something of an outcast.
[00:10:24] And the one who had all to gain from her rival being injured.
[00:10:29] Now, back to our story.
[00:10:32] The assault took place on the afternoon of January 6th, and Nancy Kerrigan was forced to withdraw from the National Figure Skating Championships.
[00:10:41] Two days later, her arch-rival, Tonya Harding, won first place and therefore qualified for a place on the US Olympic team that would go to Norway the following month.
[00:10:54] And a week later, on January 13th, the police made an announcement.
[00:11:00] They had made an arrest, or rather, arrests.
[00:11:05] They announced that they had arrested two men in conjunction with the assault: Shane Stant was the man the police believed had carried out the attack, the man who had dealt the blow.
[00:11:17] And the second was a man named Shawn Eckardt.
[00:11:23] This man, the man who had facilitated the attack, just so happened to be…Tonya Harding’s bodyguard.
[00:11:32] Now, we won’t get into all of the details about the arrests and how they were caught, but these two men were far from professionals. They had left tonnes of clues and evidence behind. The media referred to them as “hitmen”, but they were amateurs and opportunists. As a result, it didn’t take long for the police to track them down.
[00:11:57] With the arrest of Tonya Harding’s bodyguard, this set off all sorts of alarm bells.
[00:12:03] Something about the attack had seemed fishy before.
[00:12:07] But surely, surely this couldn’t have been the work of one of her fellow skaters?
[00:12:13] To arrange a violent attack on a rival so that she was out of the picture, this was the stuff of fiction, of Hollywood movies, not of real life.
[00:12:24] In the days following the arrests, the dominoes started to tumble, the suspects started to talk and tell all.
[00:12:34] It was revealed that the ultimate architect of the plot was none other than Tonya Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly.
[00:12:44] Now, I should tell you a bit about this relationship, because it's both important and complicated.
[00:12:51] Tonya Harding had met Gilloly when she was 15. It was a passionate relationship, but, according to Harding, an abusive one.
[00:13:01] Her husband would physically and mentally abuse her, but Harding stayed with him.
[00:13:08] At the time of the assault, January 1994, they were still living together despite having got divorced the year before.
[00:13:17] And when Gillooly, the ex-husband, was questioned by the FBI, he broke down and admitted everything. He was the mastermind, or at least the main organiser, of the entire thing.
[00:13:31] He had organised and paid for the attack.
[00:13:36] But the question on everyone’s lips was “was he really acting alone, or was he covering up his ex-wife’s involvement? How involved was the woman who stood to gain the most from it?”
[00:13:50] Gillooly claimed that it wasn’t his wife’s idea, but that she knew about it before it happened and had supported it when he told her, saying that it was a “good idea”.
[00:14:02] To this day, Tonya Harding has denied having any knowledge of the plan before it took place.
[00:14:09] She would have been horrified, she says, to have found out that they were planning to do such a thing.
[00:14:15] Harding and Kerrigan were competitors, not rivals, and she didn’t need to injure her competitor to win the competition fair and square.
[00:14:25] But, she hadn’t been telling the complete truth…
[00:14:29] On January 26th, 1994, 20 days after the assault, Tonya Harding gave a press conference where she admitted that she had discovered that “persons close to her” were involved in the attack, but she didn’t immediately report this to the authorities.
[00:14:48] In other words, she had found out that her ex-husband organised the assault but she kept this hidden from the police.
[00:14:57] Now, while all of this was going on, there was still the big question of who was going to go to the Winter Olympics in Norway the following month.
[00:15:07] Under normal circumstances, the first and second place in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships would have won a place on the team.
[00:15:15] But Kerrigan, one of the favourites, had been assaulted and therefore wasn’t able to compete, and Harding was living under this cloud of suspicion of being involved in the assault.
[00:15:28] As you’ll remember, Tonya Harding did win the national championships, she came first, so she automatically qualified for the Olympics.
[00:15:37] And a 13-year-old child prodigy called Michelle Kwan came second.
[00:15:43] As a quick side note, Michelle Kwan has had a super interesting life. She has guest-starred in both The Simpsons and Family Guy, and is now the US Ambassador to Belize. But that’s a story for another day.
[00:15:58] Taking it back to 1994, it was decided, partly because Kerrigan had been assaulted, and also because Kwan was so young, to give Kwan’s place on the Olympic team to Kerrigan, assuming she could recover in time.
[00:16:13] After intense physio and rehabilitation and even more intense training, she was considered fit enough to go to the Winter Olympics.
[00:16:23] As to Tonya Harding’s place on the team, there were some loud voices pushing to revoke it, to kick her off the team, but as there was no proof of her involvement in the assault, these came to nothing.
[00:16:37] She hadn’t been officially charged with anything; it was strongly suspected that she was involved in some way, and it seemed incredibly fishy, but nothing was official.
[00:16:50] The two representatives of the United States of America in the Winter Olympics were, therefore, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
[00:16:59] As you might imagine, or as you might remember from the time, this was a media story that wrote itself. Nancy Kerrigan was the “good one”, the one who had recovered from this violent assault, and Tonya Harding was the “bad one”, the one who many suspected had ordered the hit on her rival.
[00:17:21] So, what happened?
[00:17:23] Well, Kerrigan put in an absolutely stellar performance on the ice, wowing the crowds.
[00:17:30] And she almost claimed the gold medal, only narrowly losing out to the 15-year-old Ukrainian skater, Oksana Baiul, who put in a jaw-dropping performance.
[00:17:43] As for Tonya Harding, she was disappointing, finishing in eighth place.
[00:17:49] And on her return to the United States, things went from bad to worse.
[00:17:55] Failing to tell the police about her husband’s involvement was a serious crime.
[00:18:02] On March 16, 1994, a couple of weeks after the Olympics, it was announced that Tonya Harding had pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to hinder prosecution”, which included helping concoct a cover story for her ex-husband and lying to the FBI.
[00:18:20] She was given three years of probation, a $100,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.
[00:18:30] That was the official, criminal punishment.
[00:18:33] But the bigger punishment was the complete obliteration of her skating career.
[00:18:40] She was stripped of her gold medal at the nationals and given a lifetime ban from American professional skating.
[00:18:48] And throughout this entire story, she was hounded by the media, portrayed as the dark and angry woman who tried to cheat her way to the top.
[00:19:00] Given the time that has elapsed since the event, and how she was painted during this media circus, she is remembered by many as not just the person who ordered the assault, but as the person who dealt the blow, the person who swung the baton herself.
[00:19:18] In recent years there has been a renewed interest in telling the truth of Tonya Harding’s story, and in many cases, she is painted more as an unwitting victim than as a violent and angry cheat.
[00:19:34] If she is to be believed–and for the absence of doubt, this is the official position of the authorities–she never wanted this assault, she never knew about it before it took place, and had she known about it beforehand, she would have done everything she could to stop it.
[00:19:52] The fault lies squarely with her ex-husband who thought this could be her ticket, and therefore his ticket, to riches.
[00:20:01] He did it without her consent, and the end result was that her career was destroyed and she was publicly vilified as the woman who attacked her rival.
[00:20:13] Tonya Harding was always an outsider.
[00:20:16] She looked different, talked differently, behaved differently and skated differently.
[00:20:21] Yes, she could have told the police what she knew earlier, but is that enough for a $100,000 fine and a lifetime ban from doing the only thing she had ever loved?
[00:20:34] I’ll let you be the judge of that.
[00:20:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
[00:20:43] As a reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on controversial sportspeople. Part one was about the self-destructive footballer, George Best, and part three will be on another sportsperson who had a crashing fall, Lance Armstrong.
[00:20:59] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:03] Do you remember this event, and how the media treated Tonya Harding? Do you think she is telling the truth, and do you think her punishment was deserved?
[00:21:12] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:16] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:24] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:29] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part mini-series on controversial sportspeople and sporting controversies.
[00:00:28] In case you missed it, part one was on the self-destructive footballing icon, George Best, part three is going to be on Lance Armstrong, and today’s episode is going to be on Tonya Harding.
[00:00:41] She was a phenomenally talented figure skater and someone who almost had it all, before a nasty incident changed everything.
[00:00:50] So, let’s not waste a minute and get talking about Tonya Harding,
[00:00:57] At half past two, on January 6th, 1994, a 25-year-old American lady called Nancy Kerrigan had just finished practising her skating routine at Cabo Arena, in Detroit.
[00:01:12] She was one of the best skaters in the country, and a camera crew was there to watch her train.
[00:01:20] You can see the footage on YouTube. Kerrigan is skating around in a white dress and black gloves to classical music.
[00:01:29] The camera follows her as she gets off the rink, and puts on the protective sleeves for her ice skates.
[00:01:37] With telltale 90s music in the background, she heads through a blue curtain towards her dressing room. The cameraman switches off his camera, no doubt thinking that he's got the footage he needs, and he can clock off for the day, or go and have a cup of coffee on a freezing January afternoon.
[00:01:59] But seconds later, just after Kerrigan passed through the curtain, he heard a deathly scream.
[00:02:07] It's Kerrigan.
[00:02:09] He switches on the camera again and rushes through to find this star athlete on the ground, screaming out in pain.
[00:02:19] Confused onlookers try to help her, asking “What happened”.
[00:02:25] All she can do is repeat “Why, why, why?” over and over.
[00:02:32] The pain, the grief, it is plain to see on her face and hear in her voice. This is the look of a young woman who has been viciously attacked for seemingly no reason.
[00:02:46] She describes what happened.
[00:02:48] She was walking and she felt a huge pain in her right leg.
[00:02:53] As she fell to the ground, she saw a guy rushing away carrying what she described as “some sort of hard black stick”.
[00:03:04] The video footage then follows men, presumably her trainers and coaches, who rush around the arena trying to track down this “white guy in a leather jacket”.
[00:03:16] To no avail, there is no sign of him.
[00:03:19] The attack resulted in serious bruising to her knee and damage to the tendons on her right leg, her “landing leg”, the leg on which she would land first after a big jump.
[00:03:32] Fortunately, the blow didn’t break any bones, or shatter the knee.
[00:03:37] If it had, it could have meant she never skated again.
[00:03:42] Nevertheless, it was a bad injury and she was forced to pull out of the tournament she was training for, the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, which was scheduled for two days later.
[00:03:57] Kerrigan was one of the favourites to win, and instead, with Kerrigan unable to participate, the Gold Medal went to her main rival, 24-year-old Tonya Harding.
[00:04:11] Naturally, there was a police investigation into the assault.
[00:04:15] The first question was the one that Kerrigan repeated again and again.
[00:04:20] Why?
[00:04:22] What reason would anyone have to attack her?
[00:04:25] They weren’t trying to steal anything from her, it wasn’t like she was involved in crime or this was the work of a jealous former lover.
[00:04:33] It seemed that the objective of the assault was to injure her, presumably so that she wasn’t able to compete. Remember, the blow was struck to the right leg, her landing leg.
[00:04:47] And who would want her not to be able to compete?
[00:04:51] Well, all eyes turned to who would stand to benefit with Kerrigan out of the picture.
[00:04:59] The obvious candidate was her main rival, Tonya Harding, the woman who had taken first place in the competition.
[00:05:07] Harding and Kerrigan were fierce rivals, they were right at the top of their game as two of the undisputed best skaters in the United States.
[00:05:18] But they were very different people.
[00:05:21] Nancy Kerrigan looked like how people expected a skating champion to look.
[00:05:28] She was a classic beauty, full of grace and style. A big smile, flowing dark hair, and a petite figure.
[00:05:38] She had not grown up with much money around her, and her father worked multiple jobs to pay for her skating lessons, but she was seen as a classy, a sort of fairy-like ice princess.
[00:05:52] As a result, she was flooded with commercial deals to promote a wide range of products, everything from sportswear to watches.
[00:06:02] This was important because skating was and still is an expensive sport.
[00:06:09] Not only is there all of the gear, the fancy clothes and sequined dresses, but there’s all the travel, the competitions, the hotels, and so on.
[00:06:20] At this point it was still a relatively poorly paid sport in terms of the money you got from winning competitions, so top skaters would take any commercial endorsements they could.
[00:06:32] Now, Tonya Harding, on the other hand, didn’t look like how the American public or the American Skating Association expected a skating champion to look.
[00:06:44] She wasn’t a classic beauty, she was muscular, fast and strong rather than dainty and graceful.
[00:06:53] She didn’t behave how the American Figure Skating Association thought a champion skater should behave. She smoked, she drank, and she went on fishing and hunting trips with her father.
[00:07:07] She had grown up very poor, and as the media started to report on Kerrigan’s assault, and contrast the two women, Harding was branded as “white trash”, someone who shouldn’t be anywhere near the middle-class sanctuary of an ice rink.
[00:07:24] Her personal life in terms of her relationships also didn’t fit with the public expectations of what a young sportswoman should be doing.
[00:07:34] She had got married young, at 19, and had filed for divorce a year later.
[00:07:40] She was, reportedly, talked out of it by the American Figure Skating Association, as being a divorced skating champion just didn’t fit the mould. In a country that prides itself on family values, this was unacceptable.
[00:07:58] See, particularly at the time we’re talking about, the late 1980s and early 1990s, women’s skating was all about appearance. Women had to meet certain standards not just of beauty and style but of lifestyle and behaviour and Tonya Harding didn’t look or act the part.
[00:08:21] When she realised that she would never meet these ridiculous standards of femininity, she started to lean into her own more tomboy, bad-girl style.
[00:08:33] She wore blue eyeliner, she would dance to the Batman soundtrack, she was tired of pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
[00:08:42] Whatever her appearance, she was undisputedly an exceptional athlete.
[00:08:49] She was stronger and faster than most other skaters. She was the first American woman to successfully land something called a triple axel jump, where you spin around three times in the air, in fact, you spin around 3.5 times, doing a 1,260-degree spin.
[00:09:10] Now, I am no skating expert, but to underline quite how amazing this is, and what an achievement it was, only 3 American female skaters have ever successfully managed one in a competition, and Tonya Harding was one of them.
[00:09:28] It requires speed, strength and balance in very high quantities, and Tonya Harding had this extremely rare combination of all three.
[00:09:38] So, you have these two rivals, both very talented and skilful but completely different, and in the aftermath of the attack, the American media relished in comparing and contrasting the two women.
[00:09:54] Kerrigan, the graceful and flawless one, the one who looks like a princess and who ticks all the boxes about how a skating champion should look and should behave.
[00:10:05] And of course, the victim of a violent attack.
[00:10:09] And then Harding, the athletic and powerful one, but the one who has really had to fight to get to where she was, battle against the snobbery of the American skating system and is still something of an outcast.
[00:10:24] And the one who had all to gain from her rival being injured.
[00:10:29] Now, back to our story.
[00:10:32] The assault took place on the afternoon of January 6th, and Nancy Kerrigan was forced to withdraw from the National Figure Skating Championships.
[00:10:41] Two days later, her arch-rival, Tonya Harding, won first place and therefore qualified for a place on the US Olympic team that would go to Norway the following month.
[00:10:54] And a week later, on January 13th, the police made an announcement.
[00:11:00] They had made an arrest, or rather, arrests.
[00:11:05] They announced that they had arrested two men in conjunction with the assault: Shane Stant was the man the police believed had carried out the attack, the man who had dealt the blow.
[00:11:17] And the second was a man named Shawn Eckardt.
[00:11:23] This man, the man who had facilitated the attack, just so happened to be…Tonya Harding’s bodyguard.
[00:11:32] Now, we won’t get into all of the details about the arrests and how they were caught, but these two men were far from professionals. They had left tonnes of clues and evidence behind. The media referred to them as “hitmen”, but they were amateurs and opportunists. As a result, it didn’t take long for the police to track them down.
[00:11:57] With the arrest of Tonya Harding’s bodyguard, this set off all sorts of alarm bells.
[00:12:03] Something about the attack had seemed fishy before.
[00:12:07] But surely, surely this couldn’t have been the work of one of her fellow skaters?
[00:12:13] To arrange a violent attack on a rival so that she was out of the picture, this was the stuff of fiction, of Hollywood movies, not of real life.
[00:12:24] In the days following the arrests, the dominoes started to tumble, the suspects started to talk and tell all.
[00:12:34] It was revealed that the ultimate architect of the plot was none other than Tonya Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly.
[00:12:44] Now, I should tell you a bit about this relationship, because it's both important and complicated.
[00:12:51] Tonya Harding had met Gilloly when she was 15. It was a passionate relationship, but, according to Harding, an abusive one.
[00:13:01] Her husband would physically and mentally abuse her, but Harding stayed with him.
[00:13:08] At the time of the assault, January 1994, they were still living together despite having got divorced the year before.
[00:13:17] And when Gillooly, the ex-husband, was questioned by the FBI, he broke down and admitted everything. He was the mastermind, or at least the main organiser, of the entire thing.
[00:13:31] He had organised and paid for the attack.
[00:13:36] But the question on everyone’s lips was “was he really acting alone, or was he covering up his ex-wife’s involvement? How involved was the woman who stood to gain the most from it?”
[00:13:50] Gillooly claimed that it wasn’t his wife’s idea, but that she knew about it before it happened and had supported it when he told her, saying that it was a “good idea”.
[00:14:02] To this day, Tonya Harding has denied having any knowledge of the plan before it took place.
[00:14:09] She would have been horrified, she says, to have found out that they were planning to do such a thing.
[00:14:15] Harding and Kerrigan were competitors, not rivals, and she didn’t need to injure her competitor to win the competition fair and square.
[00:14:25] But, she hadn’t been telling the complete truth…
[00:14:29] On January 26th, 1994, 20 days after the assault, Tonya Harding gave a press conference where she admitted that she had discovered that “persons close to her” were involved in the attack, but she didn’t immediately report this to the authorities.
[00:14:48] In other words, she had found out that her ex-husband organised the assault but she kept this hidden from the police.
[00:14:57] Now, while all of this was going on, there was still the big question of who was going to go to the Winter Olympics in Norway the following month.
[00:15:07] Under normal circumstances, the first and second place in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships would have won a place on the team.
[00:15:15] But Kerrigan, one of the favourites, had been assaulted and therefore wasn’t able to compete, and Harding was living under this cloud of suspicion of being involved in the assault.
[00:15:28] As you’ll remember, Tonya Harding did win the national championships, she came first, so she automatically qualified for the Olympics.
[00:15:37] And a 13-year-old child prodigy called Michelle Kwan came second.
[00:15:43] As a quick side note, Michelle Kwan has had a super interesting life. She has guest-starred in both The Simpsons and Family Guy, and is now the US Ambassador to Belize. But that’s a story for another day.
[00:15:58] Taking it back to 1994, it was decided, partly because Kerrigan had been assaulted, and also because Kwan was so young, to give Kwan’s place on the Olympic team to Kerrigan, assuming she could recover in time.
[00:16:13] After intense physio and rehabilitation and even more intense training, she was considered fit enough to go to the Winter Olympics.
[00:16:23] As to Tonya Harding’s place on the team, there were some loud voices pushing to revoke it, to kick her off the team, but as there was no proof of her involvement in the assault, these came to nothing.
[00:16:37] She hadn’t been officially charged with anything; it was strongly suspected that she was involved in some way, and it seemed incredibly fishy, but nothing was official.
[00:16:50] The two representatives of the United States of America in the Winter Olympics were, therefore, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
[00:16:59] As you might imagine, or as you might remember from the time, this was a media story that wrote itself. Nancy Kerrigan was the “good one”, the one who had recovered from this violent assault, and Tonya Harding was the “bad one”, the one who many suspected had ordered the hit on her rival.
[00:17:21] So, what happened?
[00:17:23] Well, Kerrigan put in an absolutely stellar performance on the ice, wowing the crowds.
[00:17:30] And she almost claimed the gold medal, only narrowly losing out to the 15-year-old Ukrainian skater, Oksana Baiul, who put in a jaw-dropping performance.
[00:17:43] As for Tonya Harding, she was disappointing, finishing in eighth place.
[00:17:49] And on her return to the United States, things went from bad to worse.
[00:17:55] Failing to tell the police about her husband’s involvement was a serious crime.
[00:18:02] On March 16, 1994, a couple of weeks after the Olympics, it was announced that Tonya Harding had pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to hinder prosecution”, which included helping concoct a cover story for her ex-husband and lying to the FBI.
[00:18:20] She was given three years of probation, a $100,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.
[00:18:30] That was the official, criminal punishment.
[00:18:33] But the bigger punishment was the complete obliteration of her skating career.
[00:18:40] She was stripped of her gold medal at the nationals and given a lifetime ban from American professional skating.
[00:18:48] And throughout this entire story, she was hounded by the media, portrayed as the dark and angry woman who tried to cheat her way to the top.
[00:19:00] Given the time that has elapsed since the event, and how she was painted during this media circus, she is remembered by many as not just the person who ordered the assault, but as the person who dealt the blow, the person who swung the baton herself.
[00:19:18] In recent years there has been a renewed interest in telling the truth of Tonya Harding’s story, and in many cases, she is painted more as an unwitting victim than as a violent and angry cheat.
[00:19:34] If she is to be believed–and for the absence of doubt, this is the official position of the authorities–she never wanted this assault, she never knew about it before it took place, and had she known about it beforehand, she would have done everything she could to stop it.
[00:19:52] The fault lies squarely with her ex-husband who thought this could be her ticket, and therefore his ticket, to riches.
[00:20:01] He did it without her consent, and the end result was that her career was destroyed and she was publicly vilified as the woman who attacked her rival.
[00:20:13] Tonya Harding was always an outsider.
[00:20:16] She looked different, talked differently, behaved differently and skated differently.
[00:20:21] Yes, she could have told the police what she knew earlier, but is that enough for a $100,000 fine and a lifetime ban from doing the only thing she had ever loved?
[00:20:34] I’ll let you be the judge of that.
[00:20:38] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.
[00:20:43] As a reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on controversial sportspeople. Part one was about the self-destructive footballer, George Best, and part three will be on another sportsperson who had a crashing fall, Lance Armstrong.
[00:20:59] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:03] Do you remember this event, and how the media treated Tonya Harding? Do you think she is telling the truth, and do you think her punishment was deserved?
[00:21:12] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:16] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:24] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:29] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
