Assault Batters The Olympic Ideal

"Why me?" Nancy Kerrigan cried as she grabbed her bruised knee and her assailant escaped into the harsh snows of downtown Detroit.

Why Nancy Kerrigan?

We're beginning to discover that the answer might be pretty simple.

Nancy Kerrigan was a better figure skater than Tonya Harding. She had everything Harding didn't.

The admiration of the skating hierarchy. The favor of the judges. The inside track on an Olympic medal. The inside track to gold.

Kerrigan stood in Harding's way and, if the allegations are true, Harding's camp wasn't about to let that happen.

Two arrests were made yesterday and a search continued for at least one more man on charges they plotted to harm Kerrigan and keep her out of next month's Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

A frightening story

In the 1990s world of Bobbitts and Buttafuocos, Amy Fisher and Heidi Fleiss, you would think we would become numbed to the tawdry.

But this story is frightening. It is about competition gone haywire. It is the immorality of international politics finally coming to sports.

If people threaten your interests, have them removed. If you don't like somebody, take him or her out.

We've seen it Guatemala and El Salvador, and now we're seeing it in sports.

This is the perversion of the Olympic ideal: "Higher, farther, or break your competition's legs."

Team Tonya, which includes her ex-husband, her bodyguard and her strange fans, always has had a chip on its shoulder. That chip has been fed by a mean-spirited newsletter, The Skater, published by Harding's fan club.

`Poor Tonya' stories

In its December edition this paranoid little publication was full of "Poor Tonya," stories. Headlines included: "TONYA GYPPED IN JAPAN," "PRO-AM SNUBS TONYA," "TONYA `EASY TO BEAT' SAYS KERRIGAN."

There is almost no substance to any of these stories. Kerrigan, for instance, never said Harding was easy to beat. She merely declared at a press conference that she was the Olympic favorite. She never mentioned Harding's name.

Figure skaters already are under enough pressure. They don't need the extra jolt of paranoia.

Every competitive skater wants to be loved and respected and courted by the rich and famous. Each wants to be the next Peggy Fleming, the next Dorothy Hamill.

All skaters are victims of this pressure.

Rosalynn Sumners admitted her 1984 silver-medal Olympic experience was a nightmare of missed expectations. Debi Thomas choked so badly in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary the judges didn't know whether to grade her or give her the Heimlich maneuver.

Harding could have been different. She could have been a strong-willed fighter who didn't cave in to the months of tension.

She could have been a refreshing breeze in the skating's stuffy, uptight universe.

She could have been the pool-shooting, tranny-pulling, chain-smoking diva. A commoner in a world of debutantes. Tammy Wynette belting out arias.

She brought a hockey player's mentality to the sport. She was Horatio Alger on skates. A triple-jumping individualist for a sport that demands conformity.

The images of her mother sewing her costumes and searching the shoulders of highways looking for bottles to redeem for cash could have been inspirational.

But the dark side of Team Tonya may be too much to overcome. Her neurotic entourage. Her overbearing, jealous ex-husband. Her dysfunctional family.

Maybe she is another victim in this seamy soap opera, but instead of becoming Peggy Fleming, she became Shannen Doherty.

Something always seems to rock her world. Her skates break. Her costumes fall apart. A driver gets into her face, forcing her to pull a baseball bat out of her truck.

Now she is a tabloid-writer's dream.

Tonya Harding's glorious quest has run amok. Instead of becoming a hero, she has become an American sporting tragedy.