Early January 1994—25 years ago this week—brought big, big news in figure skating. Nancy Kerrigan, widely considered a gold-medal candidate for that winter’s Olympic Games, was physically assaulted the day before she was to compete during the U.S. National Championships, which were serving as the Olympic trials, in Detroit.
It turned out, as anyone paying any attention has known for the last quarter century, that associates of Tonya Harding, Kerrigan’s skating rival, were responsible for the attack. The fiendish episode, and its shadow over the ’94 Lillehammer Olympics, was so bizarre that it refuses to grow smaller in the rearview mirror.
And now that the skating nationals are returning to the Motor City for the first time since ’94, veteran Olympic reporter Phil Hersh has marked the Nancy-Tonya anniversary with a terrific in-depth retrospective for nbcsports.com.
That same week in Detroit, by the way, another highly unusual skating event transpired: The first—and, as far as I know, last—National Media Figure Skating Championships. Not so memorable that Hersh should have mentioned it. But, still.
It was organized by Michelle Kaufman, the Olympic beat writer for the Detroit Free Press at the time. She arranged for use of a skating rink, for rental skates, even for music to accompany our…ahem…routines. (We were on our own for skating outfits, which I recall ran toward sweatshirts and jeans.)
Kaufman invited a handful of figure skating officials to the morning gathering, and that informal mingling with the likes of U.S. Figure Skating Association president Claire Ferguson paid enormous dividends at the Olympics. Unlike the hordes of journalists who parachuted into the Games at the last minute, in anticipation of more Tonya-Nancy mayhem, those of us from the small knot of…er…competitors in the Media Figure Skating Championships were immediately recognizable to Ferguson.
About those championships, though. There were a couple of folks who actually knew what they were doing. I recall a woman who wrote for a skating magazine who was doing spins and jumps, some real dipsy-doodling. But, as Randy Harvey of the Los Angeles Times noted, “We can see that at a figure skating event anytime.” He preferred the Larry-Curley-Moe bits, such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Jay Weiner shuffling around as half of a pairs team—the other half being a chair. I suspect it was not so much a prop as a device to prop him up. And the New York Times’ Jere Longman finishing his slow-motion bit by pretending to drink from a champagne bottle.
My favorite—and I believe it resulted in the winning scores—was the vision of the Boston Globe’s John Powers, a bear of a man, building steam as he powered across the ice with what appeared to be dead aim at the judges’ table. I contend there was real fear in the arbiters’ faces, a dread that he may not be able to stop or turn in time.
Could it be that Powers was awarded good marks for having spared the judges injury?
As for my own performance: Having grown up in warm-weather locales, with scant experience on blades, I decided to play it safe. Since the judges were at one end of the rink, I chose to glide—shamble? totter? lumber?—to the opposite end, whereupon I did a few back-and-forth repeats before making a quiet exit.
Unlike Tonya Harding, I did not attempt a triple axel. Also unlike Harding, I did not fall. And I was abundantly rewarded. One of the appointed judges, Linda Leaver, who coached 1988 gold medalist Brian Boitano and therefore was eminently knowledgeable of all things figure skating, presented me with a perfect 6.0—the highest possible score in the sport at the time.
“I don’t know what you did,” she said. “You were too far away. I just figured it must have been okay.”
Anyway, then we all adjourned to cover the real skating. And actual crimes.