Twenty years later, Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding scandal as shocking as ever  

The ugliest - and certainly the clumsiest - crime in the annals of U.S. Olympic sport cast a pall over the sequined world of figure skating and also proved that scandal sells - while seamy scandals sell even more.NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2014, 7:33 PM

THOMAS KIENZLE/AP

Try as they might, Nancy Kerrigan (r.) and Tonya Harding will never be able to put the events Evil was lurking behind the curtain, but nobody knew it, least of all Nancy Kerrigan. She had just come off the ice at Cobo Hall in Detroit, having finished a practice session for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. It was a little before 3 p.m., on a Thursday. Kerrigan, 24, America’s premier female figure skater and among the favorites for the Olympic gold medal, was walking toward the locker room. When Kerrigan passed the curtain, the assailant pounced, clubbing her on the right knee and vanishing into the Motor City midwinter, leaving in his loathsome wake a sobbing young woman, a repugnant crime scene and undeniable proof of an unfortunate truth:

Scandal sells. And seamy scandals sell even more.

DAILY NEWS

The attack on Nancy Kerrigan gets front-page treatment from the Daily News.

Twenty years ago Monday, the ugliest — and certainly the clumsiest — crime in the annals of U.S. Olympic sport cast a pall over the sequined world of figure skating. On the same day, the Knicks acquired Derek Harper from the Dallas Mavericks and Dan Reeves of the Giants was named NFL Coach of the Year. But the biggest story all over the globe was the hideous attack on Kerrigan, a demure daughter of a Boston welder who, it turns out, was whacked by an associate of Jeff Gillooly, the ex-husband of her arch-rival, Tonya Harding.

By the time the Olympic figure-skating competition was held in the small Norwegian city of Hamar about six weeks later, the women’s short program had a rating of 48.5 and was watched by more than 126 million people — making it the sixth-highest rated program of all time — no matter that it wasn’t even shown live.

SHANE YOUNG/AP

To this day, Tonya Harding denies having knowledge of ex-husband Jeff Gillooly's (r.) plan to attack Nancy Kerrigan.

“The scandal transcended the sports page and captivated an already Olympic-friendly casual viewing audience that made it ‘must-see TV,’” said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. “Take every tool a network uses to hook viewers during sweeps (mega events, cliffhangers, mini-series) and it was all delivered to CBS on a platter with that on-ice drama. Everyone wanted to see the circus.”

In Kerrigan’s anguish on the floor of Cobo Hall, her cry — “Why? Why?” — became not only the stuff of headlines and magazine covers everywhere, but the most central question to the caper. The intent, it turned out, was to maim Kerrigan enough to keep her out of the Lillehammer Olympics, thus clearing the way for Harding, a supremely gifted athlete from a hardscrabble background who was one of the few women to land a triple axel in competition, to reap the glory and financial bonanza that comes with winning gold in the most glamorous sport in the Games.

Nancy Kerrigan recovers in time to win silver at the 1994 Winter Olympics Lillehammer.

Not only did it not work — Kerrigan competed and came within a skate blade of winning gold that went to the Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul — it evolved into a sordid whodunit that landed Gillooly and his associates, among them Shane Stant, the clubber, in jail. Harding maintained she had no advance knowledge of the plot, but pleaded guilty to a felony of hindering the prosecution, paid $160,000 in fines and completed more than 400 hours of community service.

Not only was Harding stripped of the 1994 national figure-skating title she won after Kerrigan couldn’t compete, she was kicked out of the sport.

JOHN VINCENT/AP

Shane Stant (c.) serves 14 months for clubbing Nancy Kerrigan in the knee.

The attack also had a predictably chilling effect on athletes’ sense of their own safety, coming just over nine months after Monica Seles was stabbed on a tennis court in Hamburg, Germany.

“I do think those events set the stage for more separation between athletes and fans,” Swangard said. “(They led to) more security measures to protect the athletes that probably come at the expense of the fan-athlete interaction that was a fixture of sports in the U.S. for decades.”

TOM TREICK/EPA

Tonya Harding's (l.) post-skating career includes a stint as a female boxer.

Today, Kerrigan is the mother of three in the Boston area, married to Jerry Solomon, who is also her agent. She was a huge draw in skating exhibitions for some years afterwards, ironically profiting from the attack, although she chafed at the notion that somehow that made it less wicked.

“Attack on an opponent for personal gain can never be seen as a good thing,” Kerrigan said in a television interview last year.

Harding lives in rural central Oregon, and has found sporadic work over the years as a professional boxer, an actor and a celebrity commentator on a crime show on truTV. She was also booed off stage in Portland, Ore. when she appeared with a singing group called the Golden Blades. These days, she does occasional woodworking jobs with her husband. She told a reporter recently that even though money is tight, she loves being the mother of her 3-year-old son.

Neither Harding nor Kerrigan is in any rush to commemorate the anniversary of the knee-clubbing heard ’round the world.

“I really don’t look back unless someone asks me to look back, and then I have to,” Kerrigan told USA Today recently. “Otherwise, why would I? I was attacked.”

Said Harding in the same article, “It was 20 years ago and I don’t remember lots and lots of it. I know it was a horrible time for everyone involved. It was a bad streak, going through all the crud, and I was able to rise above it. I think Nancy and I have good lives now.”

 Source:-     http://www.nydailynews.com