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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: February 25, 1994
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Lillehammer 1994 Winter Olympic Games Ladies Free Skate Program
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Even if you didn’t care about figure skating or the Winter Olympics — even if you actively hated those things — you were most likely riveted to the ladies’ figure skating events at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. That’s kind of what happens when one competitor and her husband hire goons to take out her chief rival, only to see that chief rival recover and return in time to go head-to-head in front of an international audience. As promos go, that’s not bad.
This particular moment in TV history came after the attack, after the weeks of press coverage and interviews and denials and Connie Chung. Now it was time for the ladies to skate. Tonya Harding had been so solidly cast as the villain that anything she did during her program would have been received with a bit of a sneer. But nobody was expecting the dramatics she delivered as she began her program, stopped it short, and then spent long minutes tearfully pleading her case to the judges for a do-over due to a broken skate lace.
The Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal was everything most sports feuds don’t have the guts to be: personal, campy, and bitchy. Like Drop Dead Gorgeous brought to life in vivid living color. I’d suggest that this would be the subject to Ryan Murphy’s next season of American Crime Story, but there’s already been a perfect depiction of the entire sordid tale with ESPN’s 30 for 30: The Price of Gold. Released in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, The Price of Gold was a candid, fascinating look at the scandal via some perspectives we didn’t really get at the time. This mostly focuses on Tonya Harding, whose low-income upbringing , abusive parents, and clashes with the figure-skating establishment add a lot to the bigger picture of the affair.
The present-day interviews with Harding herself are a riveting portrait of denial, blame-shifting, and also a kind of righteousness at how she was treated by the figure skating community, not just after the Kerrigan attack but before. It’s a fascinating window into a story that transcended sports and media and got to some of the most painfully American characters we’ve ever exported to Scandinavia.
