LaVona’s angry, controlling personality was exacerbated by her dependence on brandy my mother’s was a product of undiagnosed psychosis. The Hardings collected empty bottles around the neighborhood and LaVona waitressed at night to pay for skating my mother worked graveyard shifts as a care aide and dragged my absentee father into divorce court multiple times a year to chase more skating money. Realizing my odds of winning were greater with a partner to hold me up, Mum switched me to compete in ice dance at age 14. But while Tonya was known for her fearlessness, I found competition paralyzing, and would often fall out of jumps. Our bodies were compact and muscular, suited for powerful jumps. LaVona dominated the household, despite her fifth husband’s best efforts to inject balance my father split after my first birthday, leaving my mother as the unchallenged ruler of the roost. I could tell she screamed at her daughter the way mine eviscerated me when she felt I hadn’t skated well enough. But I also noticed this: Her mother, LaVona, was wound tighter than the revolutions of a double axel.

That was my impression after she sailed past me to victory in Seattle. In my own experience, until someone outside of my family acknowledged the trauma I’d lived, I never truly felt “seen.” By putting the harrowing details of her life on the big screen, I, Tonya asks us to reconsider her legacy through a different lens: that of Harding as a survivor. I was also crying out of relief for Harding. After watching I, Tonya, I found myself stifling sobs as the credits rolled, triggered by scenes that hit too close to home. I was barely 9 when I competed against a 7-year-old Tonya in Seattle, but had since realized that the two of us shared more than just our sport in common: We’d both grown up with abusive mothers. The other had a longer, quieter history of suffering. One became so in an instant, as television cameras rolled. I also felt like there were two victims in the story. Skaters are competitive on and off the ice, and over the years, I’d heard of women finding their competition costume slashed to ribbons in the dressing room, or their skate blades dulled by rocks. The United States Figure Skating Association (USFSA) banned her for life, the death-penalty equivalent for a skater.Īs a former national-level skater in Canada who once faced Tonya Harding, I was especially riveted by the tawdry drama. In the weeks that followed, Harding pled guilty to hindering the prosecution, and was fined and sentenced to probation and community service. But the stunt to knock out Kerrigan had failed: She won the silver medal, while a vilified Harding finished eighth. Harding’s attendance in the Games turned them into a media circus-the women’s skating competition became the third-highest-rated sports event in TV history. Though Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, named her as a co-conspirator in the assault, both young women would later make the 1994 Olympic team bound for Lillehammer. Badly bruised, Kerrigan had to withdraw, and Tonya Harding won. The movie is underpinned by the 1994 assault on competitor Nancy Kerrigan, when a hired thug clubbed her knee at a practice for the U.S. Our fascination with a 20-plus-year-old scandal has been reawakened this year with I, Tonya, a cinematic recounting of Tonya Harding’s rocky trajectory to figure-skating champion and convicted criminal.

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