You're Wrong About - Tonya Harding Part 1

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

Sarah tells Mike the story of a world-class figure skater who worked at a mall potato restaurant. Digressions include “Sleepless in Seattle,” mall walkers, synchronized diving and the difficulty of skating a perfect pentagram. This episode unfortunately contains descriptions of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Tonya deserved better. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

People do not understand that like both of us are like curled up in extremely bad recording positions and that like our backs hurt and like we just have to take a break. And that we love Tanya Harding but we're also in our 30s. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we spin around but always keep our eyes focused on what spot. Wait, no, I fucked it up. What? Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we spin around furiously but keep our eyes on one spot so we never get dizzy. Well, I had three weeks to come up with that. You can't look at any one thing when you're spinning. No, but isn't this how they do it to keep from getting dizzy or do they just get really dizzy?

No, I think your inner ear just changes. You just, when you start doing the fast spins and after a while your body adjusts. Oh, really? I think so. I was also going to say welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we do a triple lutz through history. Oh, that's nice. I think they're both bad anyway. I like triple lutz through history using our toe picks to set the record straight. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm working on the book about the Satanic Panic. And if you want to support the show, we are on patreon.com slash You're Wrong About and today we are talking about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. Yes. This is our Ulysses. Yeah, thank you for not psyching me

out at all. This is our no-hitter. And it's also our 50th episode. It's our 50th episode. Can you believe that we're golden girls as of this episode? And even after recording 50 episodes of a show that has brought amazing people into our lives and allowed us to connect with human beings in a wonderful way, I'm still recording on the floor of my closet in my teenage bedroom. Some things don't change, which is reassuring in this hurly-burly cosmos. But this is like a big episode for us because the story of Tonya Harding is like how we met, basically, that you wrote this article about Tonya. Tonya Harding is the Colin radio show in the sleepless in Seattle of our lives. Yes. So background, Sarah wrote an incredible article. What is it, four years ago now?

That was five and a half years ago. And that is basically how we met because I wrote you an email after that I had never heard of you and I wrote to you saying, you are amazing. I can't wait to see what you do next. And then we started chatting. And I read that article maybe once a year, twice a year. Really? Yes, because I credit you with starting this whole thing that we're in the middle of, which I love, of recapturing the maligned women of the 1990s. I credit you with basically starting that entire genre of entertainment. Thank you. This was an article, the Tonya Harding article. I was pitching this for years before anyone wanted it. And the response that people always had was like, why? Who cares? Why would anyone want to read an article about Tonya

what's there? And I was like, what's there is that we were all wrong about her. Some people were like, if you can get an interview with her, then sure. And I reached out to her through her website and through her manager and she was like, no, Tonya's not interested in doing that. So there was just nothing to tie it to. And so there was this, it was like the ski lift coming by. It was the 20th anniversary of Nancy Kerrigan being assaulted. And I was like, okay, this is my moment when someone will publish this article. I felt compelled to share this thing that I saw that I couldn't see anyone else expressing publicly, like it was essentially that she was a human being. Yeah. As someone who grew up in the Northwest, because Tonya Harding, of

course, is from Oregon, did you have an experience of her at the time that she became momentarily the most famous girl in the world? I mean, I think I swallowed the narrative that everyone in America swallowed. I mean, it wasn't until I read your piece, till I realized how much coded language there was in the story of Tonya Harding about sort of her being trashy and her being sort of skanky somehow. I mean, this is why the piece was so revelatory to me and why I think these pieces resonate so much with people now is because all it takes is for somebody to point something out to you and it immediately clicks that I did hate her because I kind of thought she was white trash. And as soon as somebody points that out to you, you're like, oh, shit, that is what I was

doing. Yeah. So Tonya Harding became notorious after Nancy Kerrigan, who was her primary rival in the US figure skating world, they had been competing against each other for like seven years at the time, was assaulted at the 1994 US figure skating championships by someone who appeared out of nowhere and clubbed her on the thigh. Later turned out he was going for her knee, he was trying to break the knee of her right leg so that she couldn't land her jumps anymore, I wouldn't be able to compete. Instead, he hit her on the thigh and gave her a bad bruise. So she avoided far graver injury because the hit man was incompetent because of her telling detail about this whole affair. Almost immediately, the police and the media connected the assault on Nancy to

Tonya Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Galooly, who she was also living with at the time. Pretty soon after nationals, the media cottons to this idea of this figure skater and Tonya Harding who was known for having costumes that the judges didn't like and for being quote unquote white trash and being seen as rebellious for all sorts of reasons that we will dissect in minute detail, saw a narrative that pitted her against Nancy Kerrigan who was the favorite daughter of US figure skating at the time and the favorite going into the Olympics. And so it was a narrative where two women were at odds, one had allegedly sabotaged the other and called out for her to be assaulted and here in a sport where the women were supposed to be icons of pristine femininity. And in six

weeks, it was going to be the Olympics. And during those six weeks between nationals and the Olympics, the media just had an absolute free for all and it was everywhere. And it was just like endless late night jokes, you know, Leno, Letterman, endless Saturday Night Live routines. Like I think there was a tiny Harding joke every week during the time the scandal was in the news. It was all anyone was interested in talking about. There is something that is hard to explain to younger people now of the way that we would talk about the same story for six weeks back then. And that there would be jokes about something in the media over and over and over again for months. Months. And we liked it, I think, because in the

same way that people love all watching the same show, even in 1994, there's like five or six networks. And as we talked about in the Murphy Brown episode, we would have these sweeps week events that something like 20% of the population would tune in for. Like some huge percentage of Americans would have seen the episode where Murphy Brown has a baby and then the next day it could be like, hey, Murphy Brown had a baby and Dan Quayle is not too happy, you know. And it was just something that people could talk about because we would all experience it together. And even I, whose whole thing is taking up arms against over simplistic media narratives, there was something so great about everyone having the same thing to talk about for some

period of time. Like I was talking about OK with people and I was six years old. I mean, one of the other things that I remember about this at the time, and I think is one of the other reasons why it resonated so much, is because it was sort of two versions of femininity. It was like, I remember Nancy Kerrigan being this like beauty pageant queen. She was conventionally attractive. She was like graceful. She had all this, all the feminine stuff that we pack into figure skating and that we expect of figure skaters, that daintiness, the sort of slow graceful ballet style movements. And then on the other hand, we've got Tanya Harding, who is kind of seen as like somewhat more masculine.

She's more powerful. She's sort of a little bit more like thickly built. Like she's less conventionally Abercrombie and Fitch attractive. And so no one ever put it this way, I don't think. But it's like the way a woman is supposed to be. And then this like usurping force of femininity, of like, there's this other type of woman who is like doing womanhood wrong. She's like Bane or something. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so amazing because the rhetoric of the time is so sad. Like no one ever came out right and said this, but it was always implied that she was somehow monstrous. And she was this like 23 year old girl with like blonde hair and a big ponytail. She was five foot one.

She was like 100 pounds. And like I was just rereading her memoir and like the most she ever weighed was 126 pounds. And she had, you know, like just these beautiful, powerful, muscular thighs. So she was famous for jumps. Tanya Harding's calling card was that in 1991, she became the first American woman and the second woman in the world after Midori Ito from Japan to land a triple axel jump in competition. The axel is the hardest jump because all of the other jumps, let's toe loop, flip, et cetera, you come into backwards, you skate to get your momentum, you turn backwards and then you take off backwards and land the jump backwards. So you complete three revolutions. And when you do the axel, you take off facing front and then complete

three and a half revolutions and land backwards. You need that much more lift. You need that much more time in the air. So you need that much more power to get off. And then a lot of other jumps when you take off backwards, you use your toe pick, which we all know from the cutting edge. It's a little rough part at the front of the skate that you use on the ice to get traction and to kind of dig in and get momentum. If you are taking off for a triple axel, you don't dig into the ice with the point of your skate. You take off from the flat of your skate blade. So imagine like, you know, jumping into the air, not from like the ball of your foot, but just from like flat-footed nests. Like it's that much more difficult to do. She landed a triple axel at the National

Championships in 1991. And it's this very interesting moment. Actually, do you want to just, can we just watch it? Sure. If you just search like 1991 Nationals, Tonya Harding. Oh, there it is. Okay. Triple Lutz. Crowd loves it. Oh. She like does it and then she's immediately overjoyed. She's like overwhelmed with happiness and she does like a little arm pump like, yes, I did it. Yes. Which is not part of her choreography. She just like couldn't restrain herself. She had to like celebrate in the moment before she skated on. Oh, yeah. That's a really nice moment. Yes. This is a really interesting moment in skating because Tonya has been competing since she was a tiny child. One of the things she says in a memoir

book of hers called The Tonya Tapes, which came out to very little ceremony about 10 years ago, and is just the transcripts of interviews that she was doing with a biographer named Linda Prowse for a project that never came to fruition. One of the things she says in there is that she was skating for the US Figure Skating Association, the USFSA, for as long as she can remember. Like since she was four, she's been competing under their governing body. Yeah. She's always been a USFSA kid. What does that mean? It means that they've always been in charge of her life because the US Figure Skating Association is very focused on policing the morals and lifestyles and appearances and behaviors of its female skaters. So there was this interesting little

ripple in media a few years ago when Brian Boitano came out as gay and everyone who didn't follow figure skating particularly was like, obviously, that's implied. He's an Olympic champion figure skater and everyone who was in the figure skating community or paid attention to it was like, this is actually amazing. It was also, as you recall, this major thing that Johnny Weir was openly gay in competing at the Olympics and many people believe that he received lower presentation scores than he would have if he had behaved more straightly essentially because he was doing this sort of like sexy goblin king look. Male figure skaters compete wearing outfits with belts at times. They wear watches. There's all of this weird pressure still

to perform straightness. Yeah. Or I guess to apply the same thing to Tanya and Nancy, it's like to perform heteronormativity. The expectation of men is that they're supposed to be masculine and burly or whatever and then of women it's to be dainty and graceful and pretty and you have to smile for your whole routine. That's always stuck out to me. Oh my god, yes. That always seemed to me like one of the hardest parts. You have to do these jumps. You have to do these spins. You have to have these specific athletic abilities and that's half your score and half your score is did you do the jumps that you have to do for this program? Did you do these things at this time? Did you do all of these technical elements of the routine?

And then half of it is artistic and some of that is that you're being graded on costume and carriage and how do you use the rink and just how do you make the judges feel like that's part of the score. And that's what makes it in some ways more like ballet than gymnastics, right? Is that if you're a female figure skater, appearance is part of the game and of course the stories of eating disorders in the figure skating world are legion. There are stories about Debbie Thomas's coach watching her do a jump after she came back to training from Thanksgiving and saying you've gained five pounds. I can tell you're lower. Oh, fuck. I mean it's like to judge someone on athleticism but then also judge what their body looks like to achieve that athleticism seems

unfair. Right. And it's like Tanya's doing the jumps. That's the question, right? Can she do the jumps or can't she? And so especially during the scandal, there is so much obsessive attention in like the size of her thighs and that she has these huge thighs and she's fat. She's so fat and it's just like, you know, not that it matters. Like her thighs can be whatever size they need to be to do what she needs to do but they're not. Yeah, objectively. There's this idea in the narrative that like she's this big hulking scary and also that she's like uncomfortably booked, you know, because she like grew up fishing and hunting and knows how to fix cars and she always has like a big truck and a big dog which of course in the tiny tape she talks about the interviewer at

one point says, well, how does someone who grew up abused as a child and then abused in young adulthood learn to feel safe and she says have a big truck and a big dog. There was just the sense at the time that she first became famous in 1991 that like, yes, she could do this amazing thing athletically and that was wonderful but this was not the poster girl that American figure skating wanted to have. They wanted Nancy and they wanted Christie Yamaguchi. So Tanya Harding has been competing since she was four, has been competing internationally since she was 11 or 12 and has been sort of like slowly climbing up the ladder of competitive figure skating for her entire life. I mean, she started skating when she was three. Her first memory is of the first time she ever

skated and when she was a kid, her mom would drive her to the rink at 4.30 in the morning and then she would skate for about three hours. Jesus. And then she would go to school and then she would skate again and when she was older, she would go to the rink and skate and then go to school and leave earlier and go to one of her part-time jobs and then skate again. Oh, so she was working during this too? Oh yeah, because she had no money when she was growing up. I mean, one of the things that people really can't debate and have never even really tried to debate because it was always so obvious is that Tanya Harding had a hellish upbringing. Her mom was a mean piece of work and she was very much in the media at the time of the scandal,

so no one could deny it. No one could look at Lovanna Harding appearing on Montell and be like, no, she, I would be fine with her being my mom. It was like, oh yeah, that's, Tanya Harding grows up in Clackamas County, Oregon, which is kind of in Outer Portland. Now it's kind of a suburb exer, but at the time it was kind of in the boonies. Her dad is her mother's fifth husband and she has three older brothers and an older sister. One of Tanya's brothers died of crib death when he was an infant and one of them molested her throughout her childhood. So her mother and father got divorced when she was a teenager and when she said about her dad is that she loved him, but she didn't respect him. Like he was never able to protect her

or never tried when she wanted him to. And so her mom was physically abusive to her when she was growing up. Like what kind of physically abusive? Because we don't associate moms with physical abuse. It's really interesting. It is interesting. It's interesting what happens when you don't look somewhere. Yeah. The interviewer, Linda Prouse, says to Tanya, didn't anyone tell you that you were beautiful when you were a little girl? And Tanya says, no, I was always called fat and ugly. Oh my God. By whom? My mother. I can eat this. I can't eat that. You're not going to amount to a hill of beans. My mother was an alcoholic, a very bad alcoholic. Filling up a thermos, three quarters are half full with brandy and the rest was coffee at 4.30 in the morning to take me to the rink.

She would drink all that and then once we got home or after she got home, because there were a lot of times I didn't go to school, she would be drinking again as soon as she got home and it made life very hard. You never knew if you were going to get backhanded or whatever. There were so many times when my mother would be upset with me because I didn't skate good and drag me off the ice by my hair, take me to the bathroom and beat my butt until it was black and blue and taking a brush to me, hitting me with a brush. She did that in front of people all the time, slapping me. I mean, it was bad. It was bad. That's heartbreaking. My dad was always supportive of me and my skating and he loved me as best that he could and he worked hard. The interviewer says, what did your dad do?

Antonia says, when I was little he worked for a rubber factory and then after that he heard his back, but after that he ended up working for, let's see, a cement company and he worked for a sporting goods store in the gun department and fishing department. Then he worked for a cop shop where the police officers can go and buy their equipment. Then he worked for a company that manufactured truck beds. When my parents got divorced, I stayed with my father. When my father lost his job, he tried to get other jobs but nobody wanted to hire him because he was too old and he didn't have a college education and he ended up moving and leaving me with my mother when I was 17 and went and moved to Idaho. Can I ask on the mom, why figure skating?

Why not gymnastics or dance or whatever else? Her mom had a thwarted dream of being an ice dancer and she had skated when she was young, but also, Antonia immediately took to it and had also an immediate natural attitude for it. Part of it was abuse, but part of it was also she took real joy in it. Yeah, it was something that, Antonia was never forced to skate. That's also something she's very clear on. It was her idea to do it. She loved it and it was something that her mother was controlling about but also functionally supported her doing, I think, partly because she had this thwarted dream of her own. There was a time when the networks were trying to come up with the good working class narrative for her. The little narrow margin we have of

tolerance for working class people if they behave really well and are always scrimping in a savin. So there are network profiles of her about just this hard working girl whose mom makes her costumes and it's always presented as this sweet, hard scrabble detail and it's like that was a way that Tanya's mom controlled her when she was growing up. She would make her these gross costumes that she had to wear that were just old fashioned 60s, 70s carpenters on the Ed Sullivan show looking and that Tanya, who was a total tomboy, really hated and just made her freely outfits for her to wear to school and it was just the way she tells it part of the controllingness of the relationship. It's like this weird aesthetic control. Yeah, and molding her into her idea

of who she wanted her to be, which was always very kind of frilly and old school femininity. So you can see that she would rebel against that by being a little tomboy and also that it was what came naturally to her. And then when did the figures getting association get involved? When did like gross old dudes in suits start controlling Tanya as well? Oh, I mean from the beginning. So she starts competing at a senior level when she's in her early teens. There's a documentary that a at the time Yale film student made about her called Sharp Edges that comes out in 1986 and it shows her going to Skate America and placing, I believe, six. And that was when she was 15 and Skate America is one of the major national figure skating competitions in the United States.

So she was skating very competitively. Wow. It's a lot of pressure for a 15 year old girl. Yeah. In that documentary, there's footage of her calling her mom and hanging up and saying that her mom was like, yeah, I saw how you place, you sucked. And just like her mom's attitude is like, you are going to be number one or like it doesn't matter. You are the best or you are nothing. And so in 1986, in the mid eighties, when she becomes competitive at the senior level, the US figure skating world is very different from the world that we're in today. This is at a time when you can be competitive at an international level as a female figure skater without any triple jumps in your program, which would be absolutely unheard of today. Triple jumps,

which is just a jump with three rotations in it. But what happens is that skating advances and women start doing triple jumps and then more and more of them start doing triples. And so in the mid eighties, there's this interesting thing happening where triple jumps and the kind of athleticism and just profound strength that Tanya has are being valued more than they ever have before because Tanya is a really great high jumper and she's also a great spinner. And then the area where she tends to not score as highly is in artistic merit, which is partly because she doesn't have the look that people want. I think she had a bad perm when she was young. And so she ended up with like this kind of Billy Idol haircut when she was at Skate America in 86. And she just

like doesn't know how to put on makeup and like the way that the judges want, you know, so she wears like heavy eye makeup and stuff like that. I mean, the funny thing is it's like none of it is wrong. It's like she has like lipstick and long nails. And it's like, yeah, that's how you perform femininity. But it's like the judges in figure skating are so fucking specific. You know, it's like it reminds me of like footage of the drag balls in Paris is Burning where you have to do like a look from Dynasty. And it's like those bugle beads are all wrong for Joan Collins's character. Like you are not, you're doing that wrong. You know, it's like, it's that degree of precision, but no one will admit to what they're doing. So it's like they don't want this very

specific version of the feminine, but they won't admit that that's what they're looking for and grading on. And they won't tell you how to do it. You have to just know how to do it. Well, they want you to look affluent, right? I mean, there's a class element of this of like whatever the upper classes are into, they always think that like, Oh, well, this is nice. Like we want you to look nice, but they won't necessarily admit that like, no, we want you to suit a upper middle class white aesthetic. That's what they're actually wanting. But to admit that would take the mask off of what they're actually doing. Right. And then it would, it would mean admitting, yes, it's a sport and rejecting you as an athlete, but you're also, we're also judging you for your

very specific presentation of socially ordained femininity. And of course, when we put it that way, it's weird that we're doing this at the Olympics, but like it's just the way that gender occupies the world of sports is just so fascinating because it's of course so much about the body of the athlete. And at a certain point that inevitably makes it about the gender of the athlete. Totally. So basically, this whole narrative of Tanya as not feminine enough that the country will become familiar with in a couple of years was sort of already the narrative about her within figure skating. Oh yeah. This is, this is her whole life. Something about her is just wrong and they won't tell her what it is or what to do to make them

happy. Right. It's also interesting because we always socially construct sports as like the great equalizer, right? That like, it's a way for kids to get out of poverty. It's a way for people to judge on their skill alone. It's sort of like the last real meritocracy. But then these sorts of things reveal that all this class stuff and race stuff and gender stuff, it's all still there, right? But it's under this mask of like, oh no, all we care about is your skills, unless we think you're trailer trash, basically. Yeah. It also, you know, this comes in with the Tanya Nancy dichotomy because at the same time that Tanya starts competing at the senior levels, Nancy, you know, is getting her start as well. And you can see Nancy grow up too in the footage

of her performing in the 80s. She in about, you know, 87, 88, she had this little Dorothy Hamill haircut. Nancy and Tanya both interestingly had the same problem, which was tiny teeth. Yeah. That's such a weird problem. It's weirdly specific, right? Yeah. And yet teeth are like, so connected to class. Yes. And you have to smile as part of your job. So like, you have to have the right teeth, which means the right dental work, which means the right dental work. It was like, they both had teeth when they were younger that like, there were there were a lot of spaces between each tooth. Okay. And they both had dental work done in their late teens or early 20s. So Nancy got her teeth bonded. And that was one of the reasons that she started to make section

impression on judges. After that was that her look really came together, right? Because it's like, it's skating. So obviously your teeth are very important. You use your teeth to skate. No one says this about like Derek Jeter, like, oh, he got a nose job. And that's when his baseball career took off. Right. And then Tanya Harding, a guy who saw her land her triple axle at Nationals, decided to donate $6,000 worth of dental work to her and also kind of fixed her teeth so that she didn't have like the gaps between them and stuff. I mean, is that nice or is that kind of shitty? How do we feel about that? It's, it's pragmatic because she was being judged on it. You know, like her teeth were holding her down in terms of her presentation scores. And that's

just the truth. I mean, it reminds me of those emails that we get that are like, if you didn't do so much upspeak, people would take you more seriously. Yes. Maybe someone who works in the upspeak clinic will donate, you know, thousands of dollars worth of heteronormative speaking therapy to us. Tanya and Nancy know each other. I mean, they must have been aware of each other. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's a tiny community. They knew each other for years. They were in the same elite circle of maybe like 10 other skaters for years and years. They would be roommates with each other at competitions. They had known each other. They had grown up with each other. Yeah. They both had tiny teeth.

Did they get along? They got along fine. I think that the main thing is that neither of them really had many friends when they were growing up. And I think Nancy was even more socially isolated than Tanya was. Tanya had a couple of friends. This is the kind of community that Tanya was living in at its best. She trained at Clackamas Town Center. And there was a guy who owned a food court restaurant called Spud City, which was a potato themed restaurant, which is a very ballsy theme for a restaurant in a mall, I must say. Yeah, I was just gonna say, we don't, that's like not an extant theme in American life anymore, potatoes. But that was what the 90s were. We all just went to the mall and ate our mall potatoes

and bought huge pants and, you know, worried about the deficit. So this guy ran this restaurant called Spud City and he would, you know, talk to all the mall walkers and kind of knew the mall, the Clackamas Town Center community, basically. And the mall walkers every morning would all watch Tanya skate because here's this world-class figure skater who's training in the mall at five in the morning. So it's just this little community of people, all the mall walkers watch Tanya. Tanya meets Chef Galooly, her first and at the time only boyfriend and then her husband when he's like standing there watching her skate. This is like how everything comes into her life. And so the guy who runs Spud City has a daughter who Tanya also becomes friends with because they're

about the same age and he eventually is like, why don't I give you a part-time job at Spud City to coordinate with your skating and you can come in for like two hours first thing in the morning and open up shop and get all the coffee ready. And then after two hours you can hand Spud City off to the next person and you can go do your skating. So this is Tanya's world. It's a lot of work. She's always working. And here on a related note is something Tanya says right before she describes her first date with Chef. At the grand opening of the ice rink, Clackamas Town Center, Dorothy Hamill opened it and I was her guest skater. I was wearing a white dress and I fell once in the program and all of a sudden my dress had blood all over it. I got off the rink to see

where I was cut but I wasn't cut. I was starting my period. Who else had that experience of their first period? Wow. Kerry. Oh. I thought you were asking that as a rhetorical question. No. There was an answer to that one. Go on. It's fascinating how all of the milestones of her life are around skating. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's like every spare minute it's where all the money goes to and you know later on after everything that happens Tanya is banned from skating and she's also essentially blackballed from professional skating which is where you know like Stars on Ice where you skate for money. You know she describes this and I don't think this is hyperbolic at all. She describes this as her life being taken away from her. Yeah. And it was. Yeah. Like not only was it

her vocation, not only was it where she spent all of her time and dedicated all of her effort but it was like this was what she was great at and she's someone who grew up believing and who was told by everyone who she trusted that she was nothing and this was something where no one could argue with the fact that she was worth something and that she could do what no one else could do. Yeah. I'm losing that. Yeah. Imagine if someone told you that you could never correct people about city infrastructure ever again. What if you lost the thing you were great at and the thing you were called to? You have many other areas of course so it's not the same thing. When does she and Jeff get together? How old is she and how old is he?

They go on their first date when she's 15. Oh fuck. And let me actually read to you from the tiny tapes the story of their first date. So Tanya is talking about her older half-brother who molested her for the first time when she was five. How old was he? He was in his teens at the time. Oh fuck. And then when she was nine and then she says then when he tried it when I was 15 years old I was getting ready to go out on my first date with Jeff. I was doing my hair and makeup in a lighted-up mirror that you can stand up while I was watching TV in the front room and he showed up at our house. My mom had gone to work and my dad was at work. The grown-ups are just always at work, right? He shows up drunk as a skunk comes in, asks where my mom and dad

are. I said they're both at work and he needed to leave because nobody is supposed to be here, even you and mom and dad aren't here. He was like they wouldn't care if I sit and wait for them and I said well they will because I'm leaving and I remember he said doesn't your brother get a hug? I'm like okay fine give me a hug but I'm getting ready. So he gave me a hug and he tried to kiss me on my cheek. I was like whatever go away, go away. Because I knew he was just drunk, totally drunk, staggering. I told him to go and sit down and then he could stay until I have to leave but then he would have to go. He stole money from my parents a lot and all kinds of things and in another place she talks about they would put her skating trophies on the mantle and just store

like change and then like her mom would put all her quarters from tips in Tanya's trophies. Oh man. Which seems kind of disrespectful and then her brother would come over and like take a bunch of the tip money out of her trophies and then Tanya would get blamed for it and send to her room along like once a week. Oh my god. Anyway back to the brother. I was sitting doing my hair and he comes over and sits down on the arm of the chair next to me and pushes me back and the chair and tries to kiss me. I said get the hell away from me, leave me alone, you're drunk, go home, get out of here. And he came back and tried to do it again so I burned him with my curling iron and ran upstairs. He followed me upstairs. I locked myself in the bathroom and he breaks the door to

get into me. I grab my stuff again and go downstairs to the other bathroom. He breaks that door handling comes in so finally I go back and say just leave me alone. I ran over and grabbed the telephone and called 911. He came over to me, put his finger in my face and said if you say anything to them you'll die. And then the operator says what's wrong. She says nothing and then they call back and the person who calls back says this is the police. Is everything there okay? If it is not okay say yes. I said yes. She said okay we're sending out an officer right now. God. The police come and she says so I opened the door and five minutes later I was talking to the police and Jeff shows up. My date. Oh my god. They said who is this and I said this is my date.

Jesus. And here I had just gone through this whole thing. My father comes home, they call my mother, she comes home and they ended up arresting him for child molestation for driving under the influence of stolen vehicle and resisting arrest and something else. I'm not really sure what it was. And my father and mother come home and said I was full of shit basically. My mother told me they were going to put him away for life if I testified against him and all this stuff making me feel horrible and guilty and all this shit. I had no rights. I was a kid. They said she's not going to testify against him and so she didn't and he walked. Jesus Christ. Just like the moral complexity, the financial strain, the sexual strain, the emotional strain, being between your parents

and your skeezy stepbrother. I mean Jesus Christ. Having your first date with Jeff, it's just like deer diary. Why couldn't she just have a nice first date? Yeah. Please look up a picture of Jeff Galooly. G-I-L-L-O-O-L-Y. Oh, I mean he looks a lot older than her. He's got a cop mustache. He does have a, he looks like he's on the show cops. He's wearing one of those paisley, knit, woolen sweaters that they wore in the 90s. Sort of like the pattern that they had on like MC Hammer pants but like on a sweater. He just looks very pleased to be dating a girl that's way out of his league.

Yeah, I think he kind of knew what he had. Man, she was radiant though. I found a picture of the two of them together. She's got beautiful blue eyes. Her hair is wavy and kind of reddish. She's just super pretty and she looks really happy in whatever photo this is. I know and she was always so pretty and I find that also very frustrating that in the discourse around this where we're policing her femininity all the time, it's like in Tonya Justina she, no one ever says she's pretty and there's often the implication that she's sort of like trashy and ugly and it's like she was a beautiful, scrappy little princess. Yeah. So Jeff was three years older than her. So he was 18 when she was 15.

So okay, so they get together, I assume the first date goes okay because they get together. She wants to move out from her folks so she moves in with him relatively quickly? I think she moves in with him when she's 18. They get married when she's 19. So they were together for a long time. When does the abuse start? Okay, so first of all Tonya says of Jeff, obviously I thought he was a great guy because he was interested in me. Other than that, I really don't know. Oh, that sucks. This is another one of our stories about a woman who married the first guy who ever showed any interest in her. Which is also completely nuts because she's like super

pretty. She's the sixth best person in the world at something. Yeah. She's like, I'm good enough to date Jeff. Yeah, it's amazing how people can wall themselves off from that. Yeah, and I think that really shows how you can have no self-esteem even if you are literally one of the best people in the world at something. I was thinking of this when people talk about depression in this really one-dimensional way where they're like, how can you be depressed? You have a well-paying job and you have a happy family and blah, blah, blah, blah. You have one of those really deep sinks. Yeah. And it's like, this is how it works, right? It doesn't get in. Yeah. You define success

to mean whatever you don't have, and you define what you have as meaningless. Yeah, and whatever you can do is not a value because if you can do something, then obviously it's not a valuable thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to refer to the Tania tapes, Linda Proust, the interviewer says, so you really loved him, you were head over heels, and this is after they get engaged. And Tania says, well, I thought so then, but when I look back now, I was stupid. He used to beat me all the time. He would get pissed off and he'd beat me. He would go out with the guys and I would stay home. He wouldn't take me out. And Linda says, this was after you were married. And she says, yes, but even before, what was I thinking then? Being stupid

and young and naive, my mom hit me and she loved me. He hits, he loves me. It's just the way life goes. He's a man. That's how it goes. Jesus. From the way she describes it here, it feels like she doesn't see it as like anything worth complaining about really. Yeah. This is what love is. This is what men are. Yeah. And then later she says, once we moved in together, he became very abusive. He would be mad or would punch me, hit me or kick me, whatever. And I would take it because I thought I deserved it for being bad. Oh, sorry, I didn't clean the house good enough or I didn't clean the house because I didn't get to it. How is she cleaning the house? Good point, Michael. I'd be like, Jeff should be cleaning the fucking house. Your wife is the best at something in the

world. She should not be cleaning the house, Jeff. I guess wish you had been able to marry her. She should have married some 12 year old boy from the greater Seattle area. I don't know. What is her money situation? Is she getting rich off of? Oh my God. Clearly not. But like, where's the figure skating money going? Is there figure skating money? So one of the things about figure skating, I think in the 90s you could spend $30,000 a year on your skating if you were an elite skater. And if you're an amateur figure skater, which is what you have to be to be competitive at elite levels, then you cannot be paid for skating, right? You can't skate in ice shows. Tanya talks elsewhere in this book about she was saving up bottle deposit money because she would go like

collect cans and bottles and was getting money that way. She was saving up to get a bike. You're kidding. And her dad before one of her skating competitions was like, if you win this competition, we'll go get that bike. And so she wins the competition and then one of the judges comes and is like, we heard that your dad was bribing you with a bike for winning the competition. So we have to strip you of that title. What? Which like, I haven't independently confirmed. So like, who knows how different the, you know, the details of that could potentially be. But even if that particular story didn't happen exactly the way she's described it here, it's like, you can tell that that degree of surveillance is going on from, you know,

everything else that you hear about the way that you're judged in the sport starting in childhood and that it's a tiny community. Everyone's spying on each other. People are known to sabotage each other's equipment, you know, skate blades and stuff. It's like, we want to believe that people are playing sports because it's fun. But then once the myth no longer has any purchase in reality, it's like, no, no, we have to enforce the myth. We have to make sure nobody's making money because then they'll only be doing it for fun. But that doesn't mean that people will be doing it for fun. That just means that they'll be exploited. It's like, what value are we really upholding here by making it impossible for somebody to make money? It just seems completely nuts.

Here's the loophole though. And here's where it gets so gross is that you cannot be paid to skate, but you can be paid in endorsements and that is where the money is. And so kind of the same way actually that today, you know, if you're a millennial, like there are a lot of industries where you cannot find any kind of work unless you consent to be abused. But you can sell your own image and get a bunch of Instagram followers and then get people to watch you eat smoothie bowls and buy your bathwater. It's the same thing. You have to sell yourself. So one of the things that starts happening that is like a very marked difference between Tiny Harding and Nancy Kerrigan in the early 90s is that Nancy starts getting a ton of endorsement deals. She does ads for Reebok.

She does an airline commercial and also has an endorsement deal with Disney World at the time of the scandal. Very important. Oh, she did a Cheerios commercial. Okay. I can tell your tiring of this list. The point is she did a lot of ads for a lot of companies and she made a lot of money that way. And Tanya did one commercial, which I will show to you. Oh, it's for Texaco. The energy to go as far as we can and then go even further. And it's got slow motion footage of Tanya spinning around. Yeah. And that's her one ad. Wow. And I think she did a local ad for a dairy when she was a kid. So that's her only source of income, basically? Well, and then it's like you get sponsors and you get, you know, you fundraise and you work and I suppose, you know, there's,

I don't know if she was taking out loans or anything if that was part of it for her, but she had a fan club that was like small but tenacious and local. And they would fundraise for her. Like they had a little newsletter that would go around and they would be like, this week we're fundraising for Tanya's manicures. So please give so that Tanya can get her nails done. In 1994, she was being sponsored by George Steinbrenner. The guy that owned baseball things? The guy that owned baseball things. It's this very weird thing where, you know, you make money by being ad-friendly and by having a marketable personality. Right. And not necessarily, you're not selling your skill, you're selling yourself. Yeah. And it's like, it's such a fousty and deal, right? It's like,

you give your life and your youth and your energy and your health and you become the greatest at something. And then if you become the best, then your sport will reward you and it will pay you to be in gum commercials and to judge the young women who have taken your place. It's also like the number of people that get taken care of by the sport is vanishingly small, right? There's a lot of people that gave their life to the sport and then got a knee injury when they were 22 and couldn't really skate again and just got nothing. It's very similar to how Tanya in academia works. It's totally, yeah. You have to give everything and then maybe you will get something. Right. You're climbing up this pyramid, but there's only room at the top for like three people.

Yeah. And so this interesting thing happens kind of in the years that both Tanya and Nancy ascend. So 91 is Tanya's breakthrough year. The interesting thing about that Nationals is that Christie Yamaguchi has been ascending as well. She started out as a pair skater skating with Rudy Galindo and then ended up focusing on single skating. Basically everyone kind of figured that she would win. And then Tanya Harding skates and she pulls out the triple axle and lands it for the first time in competition. And so she wins. And so Tanya finishes with the gold, Christie gets the silver and Nancy Kerrigan finishes on the podium and gets the bronze. So that's it. Like that's the trifecta that we're used to. That's the trifecta and it's a major upset because Christie was

supposed to get it. And there's the way that the sport works is that the judges who are judging you at a competition do not come out of nowhere. Like they have been watching you throughout the season. They potentially have judged you in other competitions. They will also be watching you at practice. Your score when you compete at least at the time that Tanya and Nancy were competing was going to be based on not just how you skated that night but how they had seen you skating in practice sessions as well. Got it. The system like perfectly set up for class-based invisible shittiness, isn't it? Yeah. Because they're not really judging you on your performance. They're kind of judging you on like the person that you are and knowing you throughout the year of like,

oh, I said hi to her and she didn't say hi back two months ago and so I'm going to give her a bad rating today. Yeah. Figure skating, judging is much like our legal system and that it leaves all this space for like how the judges feel about you. And like maybe it shouldn't or maybe it should do a lesser degree. Like maybe we shouldn't leave so much to the discretion of random older white men. And so this is the big upset year and then they all go to worlds and this is also a very exciting thing because Christy Yamaguchi is already a star in the figure skating world. She has a very bankable image. She gets a lot of endorsements too although some argue at the time that she gets fewer than she would if she weren't Japanese American. But she's also a big breakthrough

athlete in that way too where she's representing a community that doesn't see itself represented in American pop culture at all, let alone sports. She's having this breakthrough season as well. And what ends up happening is that the American women sweep the podium at Worlds in 1991. But Christy and Tanya switch places. Tanya lands the triple axel again but she wins silver. Christy wins gold and Nancy wins bronze again. Wow. So it's this really exciting time for American figure skating on top of everything else. Right. So the attention on women's figure skating is already at a fever pitch by the time this scandal happens. Yeah. And then all three women, you know, they're the American team for women's figure skating at the Olympics in 1992. Oh yeah,

because I keep forgetting they did the years the same years back then. Right. So summer and winter in the same year and then the next Olympics would have been 94 in Norway and that's when the shit goes down. Yes. And this is the weird fluke thing that happens where normally the winter Olympics are four years apart. Yeah. But they're reshuffling things and moving them to alternate years from the summer Olympics. And so the next Olympics is going to be in two years. Right. And another thing that has happened also in skating between the 88 and the 92 Olympics, oh my God, I just like I'm so happy to be talking about this. I'm sorry. I get to talk about the differences in figure skating in the early 90s. It's just like,

yes, my dream. One of the aspects of figure skating that Tanya has always struggled with for her entire life is compulsory figures. Do you know what those are? I know what those words mean separately. But do you know why it is called figure skating? Oh, I actually don't. Right. No one knows. We never think about it. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to blow your mind a little right now. The reason it is called figure skating is because originally the first year that figure skating was in the Olympics, there were two events. Each was worth 50 percent of your score. And one was compulsory figures, which is where you skate basically in different shapes, and you skate over the shapes multiple times, and then you were judged on the precision

of your skating. Like, does it all like one deep line as opposed to multiple close together lines? What? And like, seriously, look up videos of judges in the compulsory figures portion of figure skating competitions through the end of the 80s, because it's the most hilarious thing you can see, because it's all these very serious experts in like nice outfits, getting down on their hands and knees on the ice and like peering with their faces, you know, centimeters away from the surface of the skating rink, peering at like the shape of just like a groove or like the curve of a groove. And it's judged down to like, were you using the correct edge of your skate blade? Fascinating. Like an unbelievable degree

of precision, like dollhouse making level. My favorite thing about this is that whenever you hear about old or exotic sports, they always sound so stupid. But then when you think about like real sports, like they're also stupid, like we have to put the ball through this hoop that we've designed and put 10 feet off the ground. Like every sport is equally arbitrary, but they only seem arbitrary when you're not used to them. Yeah, it's just some of them we watch enough to not realize how strange they are. What shapes did they skate? What a good question. I'm just imagining you doing a pentagram. That's what I assume you would start with for your program. That would be hard to do because it's a lot of acute angles. You need something with rounded

edges. Yeah. Okay, so I sent you the page and then if you scroll like halfway down, there's pictures of the figures that you have to do. Oh my god, fascinating. One of them looks like a butt. It's like a circle with like a butt crack in it. And so you have to skate over that multiple times. That's actually really hard. I mean, that's just as hard as any other sport. It is a ridiculous amount of muscular control. But then by the 90s, is this still around? Are there remnants of this still? Well, here's what happens. It starts getting chipped away at. The other thing about compulsory figures is that they're not a spectator thing. What? Well, compulsory figures, right? It's like someone tracing patterns on the ice over and over again, and then people kneeling

to judge them. So the thing that's being judged is like, you can't really see it as a viewer. Oh, right. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that you have to have an expert degree of knowledge to even notice the difference in. So it's not satisfying as a viewer, right? And the great thing about the Olympics is that we all become experts in sports that we hadn't heard of two weeks ago. And we all become momentarily really passionate about like, you know, the one with canoes or whatever. I become extremely passionate about male diving for obvious reasons once every four years. And then I always get like really good at it. I'm like, oh, his rotation was a little bit slow, completely ridiculous. Or do you ever watch the synchronized

diving? Are you kidding me, Sarah? Have you seen my YouTube history, Sarah? So, you know, you can like intellectually understand the compulsory figures, but like there's no enjoying them as a spectator. So they invent the short program, which is something that gives you more points. So if you're like a great performer and a not so great compulsory figure skater, then you can get more of a lead in the original program. And then that takes points away from compulsory figures. So it's no longer worth like half your score. Yeah. And so compulsory figures are getting whittled away and whittled away and kind of every few years, they're worth a little bit less of your score. And then the last year that they are skated in international and national

competitions is 1990. Wow. And what that means is that Tanya Harding suddenly has this thing that has been blocking her and keeping her down taken out of the sport because she has always been a not so great compulsory figure skater. Like her strength has always been in athleticism and jumps and spins. Kristi Yamaguchi, you know, she wins Worlds in 1992. She's kind of the golden girl heading into the Olympics and she wins gold. And Nancy Kerrigan wins bronze and Tanya falls on her axle attempts and finishes in fourth place. And I'm still bitter about it. And then Tanya is experiencing that thing where like she is the person who the rules were written to apply to and everyone can break the rules but she can't because Nancy didn't skate a clean program

at the 92 Olympics. Like her program had mistakes in it. And one of the problems that she has at this time is that she's not a very consistent competitor. She tends to get into her own way. She tends to get nerves. You know, she's just not one of those skaters who can like consistently pull it out and like get in the zone and perform. And yet it doesn't matter. Like she can still be championed as being the kind of athlete who is everything that's great about her sport because she has the look that people want from the sport. Like so much of it is her look. And she doesn't have to save up for a fucking bike. Like she has it easier. And well, here's the other thing is that, you know, Nancy Kerrigan also,

this is the period when people start seeing her the way that she's portrayed in her ads and in her in the media hype that starts appearing around her is like New England, Grace Kelly, elegant, ballerina, refined, you know, this kind of sparkling creature. And she's not. She's from working class Massachusetts. Like, Oh, is she as well? Yeah. She's also working class. She's a working class girl. Oh, see, I didn't even know this in my head. She was like this silver spoon. She's like from the family and wedding crashers. No, yeah. Well, and that's the image that was created of her. And then and it's like she looks the part, right? Like she and it's that Cinderella quality where like you can pass. She passed.

And, you know, she talks about like they saved up quarters for her ice time and for her lessons. I mean, this is like two girls for whom quarters are like a very central part of their childhood. I always get sad when people who sort of like should have been friends and allies ended up rivals that always bums me out. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is that like, I don't think they saw each other as rivals. Yeah. You know, even as Nancy's career was taking off where Tanya's wasn't, they both recognized that their biggest enemy was themselves. And that was what they were both struggling with and focusing on. And we made it about a rivalry between them and Tanya's ex-husband made it about a rivalry between them, I think more than anything.

Right. But yeah, so Nancy, she grows up in a working class home. Her dad starts driving the Zamboni around the rank to get her ice time in exchange. Wow. She also like her whole world is skating. Yeah. Her mom is legally blind. And so this also is something that really endears the media to Nancy at the 92 Olympics, because if you're producing fluff pieces, you know, for NBC, you're like, okay, we need a heartwarming thing. So, oh, there's a skater with the blind mom. Let's do that. Because Tanya's mom is like a mean waitress who smokes all day. And I think no one wants to watch a four minute NBC piece about that. You could just see the NBC producers like casting around in Tanya's life for something

that's going to humanize her and like, no, her husband's kind of weird. Her mom's sort of soft. Like her brother like might have gone to jail. Like, what do we have here? This is the thing. Like Nancy has like exactly the right kind of misfortune for like TV to understand. I mean, the whole thing is like there's certain kinds of hardship that we're willing to recognize and certain kinds of hardship that we're not. And one of the other things Tanya talks about a lot in the Tanya tapes is like a long time friend of hers who raped her. And she was like, and I didn't tell the police. And the interviewer was like, why? And she's like, well, I was a national champion at the time. Like I couldn't tell anyone it would be shameful.

I mean, to some extent, she's right. Yeah, that's the thing. She is right. She is right about how the world would respond to that. That's the terrible. They would use that as evidence of her being trashy somehow that she was a victim of rape. I mean, because she alleged terrible domestic abuse against Jeff, she said he did awful things to her. And that was available to anyone who was interested in listening at the time, at the time that everyone was writing these articles about the mystery of what happened. And the only time people mentioned it, for example, in a Rolling Stone article in 1984 is like, what a trashy national champion. She had this hair and this eye makeup and she filed a restraining order against her husband. Like what a trashy thing to

do. And it's like, this is how we talked about people in America. Like what a trashy thing to do to like have an abusive husband. Like what the fuck is that? And you can also imagine a narrative in which we place a rape into that frame. Absolutely. And we can recall, if we look back at our previous work, that like Jessica Hahn alleges this terrible rape and the headlines are all like, Jim Baker embroiled in a sex scandal, sex, sexy sex. And it's like, no, this is, this is about rape. Right. Like we were so confused about that. Yeah. So Tony of the land's a triple axel in 91. Once the national championship finishes silver at Worlds and then the following year finishes just off the podium at the Olympics and starts to decline from there.

And what we know from what she said later is that her marriage to Jeff is in a really bad place too and he's being extremely abusive. You know, there are periods where she would train at night because Jeff had beaten her up. And so she couldn't train in public during the day when people could see the bruises on her. Oh, Jesus. And she stops being able to land the axel and she stops training as hard and kind of gets in bad shape. And what emerges during this period is that judges will prop up a weak performance by Nancy, but they won't prop up a weak performance by Tonya. And so we're starting to see also this narrative at the time of like, Nancy's the contender. Nancy's the great hope for the Olympics. Tonya is just like white trash and inconsistent and she's lost her

axel, which was the only thing that made her worthy as a competitor anyway. And Tonya's like, I'm working on my artistry and I have a really good triple lutz and which is considered really athletic for any other woman. And they're like, fuck you, Tonya. Because they have almost, it feels like a morals clause where they feel like she's not behaving according to their aesthetic. She gets a divorce from Jeff in 1993. And this is like unheard of for a female figure skater. Like it was weird enough to have a married one and now she's divorced. And they kind of have this feeling of like, okay, well, like Nancy is the only one who we really like want representing us because she's the one who's doing femininity right. So at the same time that Tonya is faltering,

Nancy is subject to like, yes, the privilege and the money, but also it's like overwhelming attention. Nancy starts feeling essentially like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders and she has to win for everyone because they expect her to win. And she's a golden girl now that Christie has retired. And she starts to really get in her own way and get in her head when she competes. And she's also living apart from her parents for the first time in her life. She's like 23 or 24 and she lives away from her parents for the first time. And that's a really big deal. God, these kids are so young. Yes. And so inexperienced. They're so unworldly. They're like these little Amish kids on Rumspring. It feels to me a story about how her entire life

is about her sport and how her sport has not treated her in the best of ways leading up to this time. And maybe the scariest thing in her life is not another woman, but this world where she has to like sell herself in order to be financially able to do the thing that she loves. So that's where we are in when the attack happens. Well, let me tell you another thing, because we've talked about kind of where Nancy is going into the attack. And then we have the story of Tanya Harding, who married Jeff when she was 19. They separated a couple of times. She had restraining, at least one restraining order against him. And what she says in the Tanya tapes is that she and Jeff were divorced. And then in 1993, the USFSA told her that if she

wanted to go to the Olympics, she and Jeff needed to reunite because they felt that he was like an adult influence on her and that she was more stable when she was with him. No fucking way. And that they would feel more comfortable about her lifestyle as she was married. This is something I have not confirmed anywhere else. We are only taking her word on this, but it doesn't seem at all implausible to me that that happened based on the degree of control that figure skating's governing body is exert on skaters' lives and other ways that we know about. God, what is the purpose of this? We have to present this beautiful face and this perfect family to the world, but why is that so important and more important than somebody's safety?

Who are we protecting with this weird thing? Shareholders. That's too easy, Sarah. For Campbell's and so forth. I mean, I don't know. That's the only answer if there is one, right? Because it's like, yes, here's Tanya. Here's this woman who needs help, needs someone to take care of her without trying to profit off of her in some way. And all she gets is people using her for their own purposes. And so what she says is that the USFSA says get back together with Jeff and we will feel more comfortable with you as a competitor and we'll send you to the Olympics. And she does. Oh, really? Yeah. Let's go back together. So we've heard about Nancy's

lowest moment. Now let's hear about one of Tanya's lowest moments as she describes it in the Tanya tapes. I remember in 93 before I left, I ended up staying with another friend. Her name was Angela. Well, one night I got out with my friend Wendy. We weren't shopping at the mall. I told Jeff I was going to be back at a certain time and I was running late and I called him. I was about half an hour late because we wanted to get something to eat. So I called him up and told him I was on my way home in just a few minutes and then we were finishing up our dinner. He told me to get my ass home. I was like, I will be there when I get there. So they get home and Wendy says to come out if she has a problem with Jeff and then she goes in and she tells Jeff that she's

getting her stuff and starts packing. He came in, threw my bag down, punched me. Jeff pushes her through a glass window into a bathtub so she gets cuts on her. He grabs her and throws her on the floor. She runs into the other room. She says he grabs her by the leg and twisted her leg and ankle. So she thought he was going to break it. And then she runs out. She tries to start a truck and then she says he grabs the coil wire out from the engine and rips it out, which means that she can't start the car, which is like this absolutely horror movie scene that she's describing. And then she just takes off running. She says, grab my stuff, picked it up and started running. There was a drug store at that time about one mile up the road.

I start running carrying my skate bag, my purse, my clothes bag, and my coat in Ted's tennis shoes, running down the street and he comes running after me. I kept running. I just ran as fast as I could. I had pretty good endurance back then, but I was carrying all this stuff. My adrenaline was so high that I kept running. Finally he stopped. He's yelling and screaming, I'm going to get you, bitch. Finally he stopped. So like Jeff's endurance gives out, basically. I just kept running. It was finally about eight blocks from the stores where I knew there was a telephone. So I started walking because I was getting so tired. All of a sudden I could hear the truck coming. He jumped back into the truck, had put the coil wire back on and fixed it and

was coming. So I started running again. Finally I make it out to the main road and I could hear him coming. So I started running again and there's a new housing development there behind the store. I heard him and saw him turn on to the main road. So I ran into the new housing development. I ran and hid in some trees and saw him drive by and park on the other side. Then I saw him coming running down. So I'm running through these trees. Couldn't see a damn thing, tripped a couple times. Finally he saw me, ran around the other side and jumped back in the truck. Then she ends up in a parking lot and hides behind a pillar while he looks for her and then finally gets to her friend's house and they call the police. She says they go and talk to Jeff at work the next day and he

sweet talks them out of doing anything. Of course. It bears repeating. She's one of the best people in the world at what she does and she's in an abusive marriage. This is something that the governing body of her sport that is controlling her life in all these other ways has the ability to know about and they don't see it as in their best interests to try and protect her. It's like when we talked about homelessness, it's like how much of a difference would a couple thousand bucks in a hotel room in a different part of town have made? They easily could have stepped in with all the authority that they represent and said, we're going to help you get away from this guy and we're going to make sure this guy doesn't come within a mile of you.

They could have moved her to whatever San Diego to turn there. There's all kinds of things they could have done. They had the resources for that and she didn't. There's just no uncomplicated source of love in her life because the skating world can love her and can give her resources, but only if she's walking a tightrope the entire goddamn time. It's not good enough that she's a world-class skater and that she's succeeding athletically even without the triple axel in ways that are almost unheard of for a woman. She needs the axel. That pressure that both these women are facing is just unbelievable. I should also say that this description in her book about Jeff, these are her allegations. I don't have any other source of information that

says this happened. I personally believe her. One of the problems that I had with the movie Eitania, which when people ask me what I think of it, I say, it's fine. One of the things I find frustrating about it is that it does this kind of he said, she said with her abuse allegations where it's like Jeff says he didn't abuse Tanya at all and we're going to show you know, it does this thing like clue. And so they do Jeff's version where he never laid a hand on her, you know, Jeff Galooly couldn't hurt a fly. And then they do Tanya's version where it's like, he abused me, but it's like they show her getting hit a couple times. They show her like Jeff like, you know, backhanding her in the face, I think, which is awful and which no one should do. But

if you're going to do, you know, his allegations, her allegations, I see no reason to not show what she really alleges, which is that he was chasing her down a dark road in a truck, what she was running away from him, you know, and then she like running through the forest in Keds, you know, what she's claiming is that he was a terrifying force in her life. And like, if we're doing, he said, she said, then like, let's do the she said, right, right. This reminds me of the article that you read a few months ago called White Trash Nation, which had our angel Anna Nicole Smith on the cover and which talked about Tanya quite a bit. That's one of the worst articles I've ever read. That's like when long form goes bad. That was

so terrible. It's really like on another level. It was published in 1994 in New York Magazine. And like, what is it? I mean, what's its thesis? Just that like the aesthetics and morality of quote unquote White Trash have taken over the country. It's the same bullshit moral decay thing that you can find in the letters to the editor of any local newspaper of like people don't hold open doors anymore and like kids are always on their phones. It's basically the same thing, but it's blaming Anna Nicole Smith, Tanya Harding, Paula Jones, Paula Jones, of course. It's basically just like an excuse to like shame these women for like their clothes and their hair and their makeup and how they look and

how they talk especially. Because this is one of the things that makes me feel like there's something that other people see that I can't see where like, you know, this idea that like there's something that White Trash is and it's bad and it's like, what are we saying when we say that? Like, what does that mean literally? I mean, the way that we usually frame these things, especially when women make claims of abuse and claims of sexual assault and other things, is that like there's just like an air of chaos around people. And so this is sort of the way I think that women get blamed for their own abuse because it's like she's in a tumultuous home and like what makes somebody White Trash is kind of this like instability that like they're always

fighting, they're always shouting. Right. Or like, Jeff and Tanya, we're having altercations. Exactly. And it's like, yeah, an altercation is what happens when your husband is abusive and you fight back maybe sometimes or whatever. Right. It's exactly like how actresses and directors get called difficult. Right. It's the same thing that they just get put into this bucket of like chaotic and unstable without any like more than one dimensional analysis of what that chaos actually is and who's responsible for it. Right. So all of this is lead up to the attack. All of this is lead up. And so yeah, going into nationals in 1994, which is where the attack takes place. Tanya has embarked on a new training regimen. She's working her little hinder off and

getting ready to compete. She has also taken up residence with Jeff again. And Nancy is feeling the need to get back her status as America's hope for the games. Yeah. You know, in the 1993 world, she came in as the favorite and she had one minor error in her first jump where she put a hand down on the ice to stabilize a wobbly landing. And then after that, you can see her getting in her own head. You can see her starting to overthink each jump and turning a bunch of triple jumps into singles. And then when she comes off the ice, you can see her feeling like she's disappointed everyone. She's coming into the championships in 94 ready to like show the world that she has rebuilt herself as a skater. And so two women coming in with a lot to prove. And also,

there are some men around. Let's leave it there. Let's do a little cliffhanger to be continued. Are we doing a cliffhanger? Is this Sweep Sweep? Okay. Next week, we're gonna get married, kill someone, have a baby and learn about the assault on Nancy Kerrigan and the ensuing aftermath. Yes. I guess all aftermath is ensuing, really. So it's kind of redundant. We're gonna learn about the assault on Nancy Kerrigan and the regular aftermath.