In the end it wasn’t difficult to find a silver lining (no pun intended) to—what shall we call it?—the Tonya Harding fiasco? controversy? scandal? “Controversy” gives her too much credit, as if her position were defensible. “Scandal” seems too harsh—at least until she’s found guilty of conspiracy in the attack on Nancy Kerrigan. “Fiasco” comes close to suggesting the whole media-circus atmosphere, but makes the actual core incident seem comic, the way “brouhaha” would. In the short term, I opt for the Tonya Harding affair, because it involves her in events without actually implicating her, and because there’s a sexual connotation to the word that is fully intended.
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Now that the issues are on the table, let’s step aside for a moment to say the Harding affair will probably come to occupy a pivotal position in U.S. sports. It already has changed the way we look at female athletes—for the better. The 17th Winter Olympic Games, in Lillehammer, Norway, were where women claimed their place as equals in the U.S. sporting arena. That’s somewhat funny, after women were the only ones to bring gold medals home from the 1992 games in Albertville, France. (The Winter Olympics, usually held every four years, were pushed up to two years this time so they could hereafter be staggered with the Summer Games.) In Lillehammer, however, the women’s events in general were not only as dramatic as but more dramatic than the men’s. And the Harding affair demonstrated, beyond all doubt, that women can be as driven to succeed as any man—if not more so.
With all the attention the Harding affair focused on sex roles and stereotypes, I don’t think I’m the only one who found it humorous and almost pathetic when the media began to refer to Blair as “America’s sweetheart” and “America’s little sister”—the condescending titles traditionally bestowed on successful female Olympians. Let’s just say that she might be the greatest athlete the United States has ever sent to the Winter Games and leave it at that.
Let’s make things clear: Harding should not have been allowed to skate in the Olympic Games. Injuring a competitor, off the field of competition, is an offense far worse than gambling in how it affects a sporting event. In throwing a game, an athlete betrays himself (let’s stick to one gender for brevity here) and the audience. In intentionally injuring an opponent, an athlete corrupts himself, betrays the audience, which is denied the opportunity to see the best possible sporting event, and, of course, harms another person. When an athlete discovers such a plot—whether he had a part or not, whether it was carried out in his name or not, whether after the fact or not—he is obligated to report it to the highest authority possible, just as in a gambling scandal. Remember, Buck Weaver was banned from baseball in the Black Sox scandal even though he didn’t take part and accepted no money, because he had knowledge of the plot and failed to reveal it.
For the record, skating layman that I am, I favored Baiul, although by no larger a margin than she eventually won by (awarded the tiebreaker on artistic expression by the ninth judge to decide a 5-4 vote). It sort of bothered me that so many people—Kerrigan included—made fun of her crying upon her victory. Sportsmanship, I think, took the biggest beating in the Harding affair. It seems such an obsolete word now—and sexist to boot. An athlete doesn’t have to like not winning, but he or she ought to be satisfied with turning in a peak performance and accepting the rest. In the best candid moment of the games, Canadian figure skater Lloyd Eisler, the partner of Isabelle Brasseur, looked up at the judges’ scores and said, “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
