On the Tonya-Nancy anniversary, skating limps along
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About a week before the 1994 Winter Olympics, after it had become apparent the Tonya-Nancy affair was going to drive CBS’ Olympic ratings through the roof, a friend who worked for the TV network jokingly told me, ‘If we hadn’t thought of that, we should have.’’
That, of course, is what happened exactly 15 years ago today in Detroit, the failed attempt by associates of figure skater Tonya Harding to knock U.S. teammate Nancy Kerrigan out of the Olympics. Fortunately for eventual silver medalist Kerrigan, they were the gang who couldn’t whack straight, a bunch of buffoons too pathetic even to be glorified as picaresque.
Now, figure skating’s leaders can only dream about those halcyon days, for the only thing they have thought of since is a scoring system so impenetrable it has all but driven the sport from television.
The soap operatic consequences of the attack on Kerrigan artificially pushed the sport to levels of popularity it never could sustain. But the plunge from those heights has been dizzying, to a point far, far below where skating was before 1994.
But in considering why interest in the sport has diminished so drastically, especially over the past five years, I immediately think not only of the scoring system but of Michelle Kwan.
It seems more than coincidental that the Kwan era was quietly beginning in 1994, when she was an alternate to the U.S. Olympic team. As the sport exploded into the public consciousness, Kwan was on the verge of a decade-long run in which she became the most decorated U.S. skater in history and one of the country’s most recognizable athletes.
Kwan’s (apparently?) final departure from the spotlight, which occurred when she pulled out of the 2006 Olympics because of an injury, deprived skating of its only transcendent star, and no replacement has emerged.
As for the two principals in the drama that consumed the country for nearly two months in 1994, their lives have stayed on predictable paths.
Harding, the hardscrabble kid from the wrong side of the tracks who wasted her immense talent, shows up regularly on police blotters in her native Oregon for reasons real (drunk driving, eviction) and imagined (she once claimed to having been stalked by golfers driving a white Lincoln Town Car). She has boxed, sung, collaborated on an autobiography and been the butt of a million jokes.
Kerrigan, the blue-collar ice princess, married her twice-divorced agent, Jerry Solomon, in 1995. They have three children -- sons, 12 and 3, and a daughter, 7 months. She has kept a relatively low profile, remaining near her roots in suburban Boston, skating occasionally in benefit shows and doing commentary for icenetwork.com.
Which sums up where the sport is 15 years after Kerrigan wailed, ‘Why me? Why? Why? Why?’’ when Shane Stant clubbed her in the knee as she came off the practice rink ice.
On webcasts.
-- Philip Hersh
