Tonya Harding

‘Sure, We Were Competitors… but We Were Just Friends Out There Trying to Do the Best That We Could Do at What We Do’

- Michelle Davies

Coined the ‘trailer trash’ figure skater, she was accused of masterminding an attack on her Olympic rival. But, as a new film reveals, poverty and domestic abuse took their toll long before her fall from grace Thursday, 6 January 1994 is a date recorded in sporting history – despite no event, heat or race being staged that day. In fact, it was the eve of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, a competition to decide which skaters would compete at the Winter Olympics in Norway, seven weeks later.

Nancy Kerrigan, 24, was the favourite to win and left her practice session at the Cobo Arena confident of qualifying. But, on her way to the changing rooms, a man stepped out of the shadows and clubbed her right leg with a baton before fleeing. Kerrigan slumped to the ground in agony and, in footage broadcast in the aftermath, was heard screaming, ‘Why, why, why?’ as she clutched her injured leg. It was a question that reverberated around the world. Figure skating was the most genteel of sports, celebrated for its sequin-trussed, Disney-like enthralment. Why would anyone want to hurt Kerrigan, the talented, princess-pretty athlete with a megawatt smile? When the FBI went in search of a culprit, they looked no further than across the ice – to Kerrigan’s rival and the sport’s black sheep, Tonya Harding.

Today, 24 years on, the biopic, I, Tonya, starring Margot Robbie, is re-examining the events surrounding that day. The film explores Harding’s actual complicity versus the media narrative – that she was mastermind of ‘The Whack Heard Round The World’, as the attack on Kerrigan became known.