#america's sweetheart nancy kerrigan

[bookish-bogwitch]

Hello! Thank you for the tags, @blackberrysummerblog @mooncello @monbons @artsyunderstudy @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @thehoneyedhufflepuff @nausikaaaand and @alexalexinii. You are wonderful!

Today I'm sharing an anxious plea for reassurance + a snippet of chapter 9 of Basil Pitch's Diary, posting June 7. Below the cut for spoilers and anxiety.

<ANXIETY> I'm working on chapter 10 now and friends, it's slow going. I still love this fic with all my heart, but chapters 1-9 I had mapped out more or less scene by scene months before I started posting, and before writing most of them. Writing them was like novelizing a movie I'd watched in my head a countless times.

For the rest of the fic, though--Ch 10-13--I had only broad strokes figured out. I knew the very ending, and a handful of key emotional beats along the way, but the connective tissue was basically "Collect Underpants ... ? ... Profit."

I've now plotted the rest out in reasonable detail, with help from the extremely kind and insightful @facewithoutheart and @thewholelemon. But I am a plotter to the core and it feels much scarier to be writing a story I just made / am still making up than one that's been living in my head for years.

Also, you guys: Chapter 9 is really fucking good. I'm really proud of it and excited to share it. And also scared that the rest of the fic won't live up to the promise of all I've set up. This fic is my baby and I just really want to nail it.

Intellectually I know I'm just swinging on the creative-confidence pendulum, and that future me will be able to write as well as past me. These doubts are just intrusive thoughts, skittering around my head like the mice that live in my walls. Harmless, but such a nuisance. </ANXIETY>

Anyway! Here are some sentences of Chapter 9, which, did I mention, is really good. Baz is finally going dancing with DeNiall.

“So, cousin. What’s your strategy?” I just raised an eyebrow and gestured at myself. My shirt was a perfectly cut navy so sheer that it read as cobalt over my pale skin. Climbing my chest were embroidered red and pink roses, between which you could clearly see my nipples. I’d changed out of Oxford cloth at Fiona’s. (I didn’t tell her I’d stopped in Blackfriars to drop off my grandmother’s furs and my grandfather’s Dickens.) Through my sleeve you could also see my mother’s wand holster, which my father now insists I wear whenever I leave the house. He’s also looking for a second dog. Something more territorial than Rusty, whose lick is worse than his bite. After the numpties he spent a week teaching me defensive spells. His skill surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. Once, when I was small, someone tried to mug him as we were leaving a theatre. My father didn’t panic or capitulate, just calmly kneecapped the man with a vicious Why me, why now. 

Tagging @angelsfalling16 @brilla-brilla-estrellita @palimpsessed @cutestkilla 

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[ilovetonyaharding]

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, figure skating was considered to be an elitist show sport and considering young women and girls were primary viewers, Harding was not the role model wanted to be seen, Kerrigan was (Duggan, 2021). Let's face it. Nancy Kerrigan was G-O-R-G-E-O-U-S. A Time Magazine article back from 1994 recognized her as “blessed with long, slender limbs and a natural elegance” (Duggan, 2021). She made PEOPLE magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” and even got custom made costumes from Vera Wang (Duggan, 2021).  (This is ironic because the media made her out to seem high class but she came from a blue-collared socioeconomic background just like Harding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) However, the press illustrated the exact way Harding and Kerrigan were portrayed in sport to outside of sport in regards to “The Incident”. Nancy was the tragic victim, America’s sweetheart and it made you feel bad for her, all while Tonya is depicted as evil and the bad guy. It was bad enough that Harding was a menace to traditional femininity and classism in the world of figure skating, but she would always be known as the  “scrappy girl from the trailer parks” (Rothman, 2017, para 4).

[gossipnetwork-blog]

Margot Robbie's Tonya Harding Will Make You Rethink Everything You Thought You Knew

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Margot Robbie's Tonya Harding Will Make You Rethink Everything You Thought You Knew

The imagery is iconic: Nancy Kerrigan’s virginal white lace dress versus Tonya Harding’s vampy maroon getup. So are the sounds: Kerrigan’s wails of “Why?” as she clutches her knee, versus Harding’s sobs to the Olympic judges while clutching her broken lace skate. The year was 1994, and these two were vying to be America’s figure skating sweetheart. One was an assailant, the other a victim. The stage was set, the character tropes determined.

Twenty-three years ago, popular imagination had room enough for only one kind of ice queen: the good girl, the one with the lithe body and shiny hair, who followed the rules. Tonya Harding, with her homespun costumes, moussed-up bangs, and routines set to bass-heavy soundtracks, cut a starkly different figure. After the legendary dust-up at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, Kerrigan went on to host Saturday Night Live and wave (grudgingly) from the Disney Parade. Harding receded from the spotlight as little more than a punchline.

PHOTO: Mike Powell

Director Craig Gillespie’s new film I, Tonya resurrects Harding, but in 2017 she’s given the homecoming she never could have received in 1994. Instead, the movie celebrates Harding, played viciously by Margot Robbie in all her white-trash glory: her heavy metal skate routines, her foul mouth, her rural poverty. She decries a system rigged against her. After receiving low scores at one competition, despite out-skating her more demure challengers, she glides up to the judge’s box and asks, “How do I get a fair shot?” “We also judge on presentation,” the evaluator retorts, gazing down his nose at the 5’1″ scrapper before him.

It’s a moment that’s unequivocally sympathetic to Harding, who we’ve just seen slaving with needle and thread over the outfit the judges are scorning, but it wouldn’t always have had that effect. Her image is cast in the light of today’s progressive feminism. In a flat Oregon accent with frizzy blond hair, Robbie as Harding tells the camera: “Most people’s reaction to me is that I’m a real person, in a sport where the judges want you to be an old-timey version of what a woman is supposed to be.”

The sympathetic portrayal of Harding shows us how far feminism has come in just over two decades. What makes this Tonya different is that we get the whole of her—especially parts that were edited out in the 1994 media coverage. For the first time, we get a clear picture of her lifelong victimization: first at the hands of her maniacal stage mother, played by Allison Janney—whose hilariously diabolical portrayal is worth the price of admission—and later at the fists of her abusive husband Jeff Gillooly. Margot Robbie serves an Oscar-worthy performance, reveling in Harding’s contradictions: her raw talent and self-sabotage, the unfair aspersions cast upon her, and her unwillingness to admit responsibility.

She was ahead of her time; today, pop culture has anointed realness and authenticity as queen. Squeaky-clean Taylor Swift is on the wane, while the regular degular schmegular girl from the Bronx, Cardi B, reigns supreme. Lifestyle doyennes like Gwyneth Paltrow and her pristine white jeans (genes?) seem retro compared to down-to-earth and self-deprecating Chrissy Teigen. The Kardashians handily shoved the Hiltons off their pedestal, swapping the pedigree of a hotel empire for the fame of a sex tape. The bulk of Keeping Up With the Kardashians depicts them standing around kitchen islands and lounging under blankets. Somehow, our heroines shape-shifted from the unattainable perfection to aspirational normality.

PHOTO: NEON

We are now far more sensitive to the influence of powerful men over women. When women come forward, as they have been in droves across all industries decrying sexual harassment, or as victims of sexual violence, the culture is much more willing to hear out these accusers. We are even more willing to consider the person’s context. We now have a word for people who question a woman’s background and use it against her: slut shaming. But in the nineties it was considered perfectly acceptable.

In 1991 the same year Harding skated her history-making triple axel, Anita Hill was delivering testimony to Congress about how Clarence Thomas routinely sexually harassed her at work from 1981 to 1983. Instead of hearing out the routine abuse and humiliation she endured, she had her character and personal life assassinated, with Missouri Senator John Danforth suggesting she might suffer from “erotomania,” the delusion that a powerful superior is in love with her. Many asked why she waited nine years to bring these allegations to light, a classic move to undermine women as played out in the case of Cosby’s victims. Conservative pundit David Brock painted her, in his words, as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”

This knee-jerk designation stuck throughout the nineties. Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old intern, was excoriated not only by conservatives licking their chops to send Bill Clinton down but by feminists on the left as well. Gloria Steinem wrote a defense of Clinton in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, arguing: “The power imbalance between them increased the index of suspicion, but there is no evidence to suggest that Ms. Lewinsky’s will was violated, quite the contrary.” In the wake of the Shitty Media Men list and more nuanced understandings of the dynamics of power, coercion, and consent, this sentence reads like it hails from the Stone Age. In 1999 New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd characterized Lewinsky as a “sexual climber” who “…connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status.” That a self-described feminist lobbed this assertion makes the 2017 head explode. Katie Roiphe recognized the irony in 1998, saying, “What’s interesting is that women overwhelmingly, even more than men…still strongly support Clinton. Even mainstream feminists, who you’d think would come out and say, ‘You know, here’s this poor young woman being exploited; let’s take her side,’ they’re not taking her side.”

Though Harding’s black mark was for violence and class animosity rather than sexual victimization, the nineties media still relished in the schadenfreude of her fall from whatever grace she momentarily held. But I, Tonya is fully steeped in today’s ethos. The film excavates facts of Harding’s biography that, if not unknown, were underreported at the time. Her mother abused her throughout her childhood, even beating her with a hairbrush before a competition. “She skates better when she’s mad,” she declares. Later she even pays off a heckler to lob insults like, “Where’d you park your double wide?” as Harding toddles out onto the ice. Harding dropped out of high school at 15 years old to pursue skating—the same age she had her leering stepbrother, who she called “Creepy Chris,” arrested for attempting to molest her. This happened to be the same day she met Jeff Gillooly, the man who would ultimately destroy her career. Following the pattern of abuse she grew up with, Gillooly, too, beat her horribly. In a moment of black-as-night comedy, Robbie deadpans: “Nancy gets hit one time and the world shits. I got hit all the time!”

In one poignant and revealing scene, Gillooly gets pulled over for speeding. The reason for his haste is that he’s ferrying his bride to the hospital, after he shot her in the eye. The cop sees her in distress, yet does nothing. “And that’s why I don’t trust the authorities,” she tells us. One can see why.

Even the knee-capping scheme in light of today’s news doesn’t seem all that crazy. If in 1994 an emissary from the future could have swooped down and told us that in 2016 the Russians would hack our election and a quasi-illiterate, hate-mongering reality star would be president, a casual knee-capping sabotage doesn’t seem that far out.

Harding claims to have no knowledge of the planned attack, which was carried out by her bodyguard Sean Eckhardt and her then husband Gillooly. Today, had the reality of the domestic violence she endured been public record, a far more sympathetic embrace of Harding would be expected. Instead, Harding became a laughingstock and was robbed of her passion. When the judge barred Harding from figure skating after she pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution, she told him she’d rather do jail time. Skating was all she’d ever known—and loved. She was denied. So she used her body as her profit again, becoming a professional boxer. She now works as a landscaper and is “a good mom” (her words) to a 12-year-old son. This week she even joined Margot Robbie on the red carpet for I, Tonya‘s premiere. She’s living the American dream—after we snatched it from her.

PHOTO: Vivien Killilea

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[zeroviraluniverse-blog]

The POW Olympics of World War II

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The POW Olympics of World War II

Don’t let the ornate costumes and beautiful choreography fool you, figure skaters are no strangers to scandal. Here are nine notable ones.

1. TONYA AND NANCY.

In 1994, a little club-and-run thrust the sport of figure skating into the spotlight. The assault on reigning national champion Nancy Kerrigan (and her subsequent anguished cries) at the 1994 U.S. National Figure Skating Championships in Detroit was heard round the world, as were the allegations that her main rival, Tonya Harding, may have been behind it all.

The story goes a little something like this: As America’s sweetheart (Kerrigan) is preparing to compete for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team bound for Lillehammer, Norway, she gets clubbed in the knee outside the locker room after practice. Kerrigan is forced to withdraw from competition and Harding gets the gold. Details soon emerge that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, was behind the attack (he hired a hitman). Harding denies any knowledge or involvement, but tanks at the Olympics the following month. She then pleads guilty to hindering prosecution of Gillooly and his co-conspirators, bodyguard Shawn Eckhart and hitman Shane Stant. And then she’s banned from figure skating for life.

Questions about Harding’s guilt remain two decades later, and the event is still a topic of conversation today. Recently, both an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary and the Oscar-nominated film I, Tonya revisited the saga, proving we can’t get enough of a little figure skating scandal.

2. HAND-PICKED FOR GOLD.

Usually it’s the top three medalists at the U.S. Nationals that compete for America at the Winter Olympics every four years. But in 2014, gold medalist Gracie Gold (no pun intended), silver medalist Polina Edmunds, and … “pewter” medalist Ashley Wagner were destined for Sochi.

What about the bronze medalist, you ask? Mirai Nagasu, despite out-skating Wagner by a landslide in Boston and despite being the only skater with prior Olympic experience (she placed fourth at Vancouver in 2010) had to watch it all on television. The decision by the country’s governing body of figure skating (United States Figure Skating Association, or USFS) deeply divided the skating community as to whether it was the right choice to pass over Nagasu in favor of Wagner, who hadn’t skated so great, and it put a global spotlight on the selection process.

In reality, the athletes that we send to the Olympics are not chosen solely on their performance at Nationals—it’s one of many criteria taken into consideration, including performance in international competition over the previous year, difficulty of each skater’s technical elements, and, to some degree, their marketability to a world audience. This has happened before to other skaters—most notably Michelle Kwan was relegated to being an alternate in 1994 after Nancy Kerrigan was granted a medical bye after the leg-clubbing heard round the world. Nagasu had the right to appeal the decision, and was encouraged to do so by mobs of angry skating fans, but she elected not to.

3. SALT LAKE CITY, 2002.

Objectively, this scandal rocked the skating world the hardest, because the end result was a shattering of the competitive sport’s very structure. When Canadian pairs team Jamie Sale and David Pelletier found themselves in second place after a flawless freeskate at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, something wasn’t right. The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze placed first, despite a technically flawed performance.

An investigation into the result revealed that judges had conspired to fix the results of the pairs and dance events—a French judge admitted to being pressured to vote for the Russian pair in exchange for a boost for the French dance team (who won that event). In the end, both pairs teams were awarded a gold medal, and the entire system of judging figure skating competition was thrown out and rebuilt.

4. AGENT OF STYLE.

Jackson Haines was an American figure skater in the mid-1800s who had some crazy ideas about the sport. He had this absolutely ludicrous notion of skating to music (music!), waltzing on ice, as well as incorporating balletic movements, athletic jumps, and spins into competition. His brand new style of skating was in complete contrast to the rigid, traditional, and formal (read: awkward) standard of tracing figure-eights into the ice. Needless to say, it was not well received by the skating world in America, so he was forced to take his talents to the Old World.

His new “international style” did eventually catch on around the globe, and Haines is now hailed as the father of modern figure skating. He also invented the sit spin, a technical element now required in almost every level and discipline of the sport.

5. LADIES LAST.

In 1902, competitive figure skating was a gentlemen’s pursuit. Ladies simply didn’t compete by themselves on the world stage (though they did compete in pairs events). But a British skater named Madge Syers flouted that standard, entering the World Figure Skating Championships in 1902. She ruffled a lot of feathers, but was ultimately allowed to compete and beat the pants off every man save one, earning the silver medal.

Her actions sparked a controversy that spurred the International Skating Union to create a separate competitive world event for women in 1906. Madge went on to win that twice, and became Olympic champion at the 1908 summer games [PDF] in London—the first “winter” Olympics weren’t held until 1924 in France, several years after Madge died in 1917.

6. AGENT OF STYLE, PART 2.

Norwegian skater Sonja Henie was the darling of the figure skating world in the first half of the 20th century. The flirtatious blonde was a three-time Olympic champion, a movie star, and the role model of countless aspiring skaters. She brought sexy back to skating—or rather, introduced it. She was the first skater to wear scandalously short skirts and white skates. Prior to her bold fashion choices, ladies wore black skates and long, conservative skirts. During WWII, a fabric shortage hiked up the skirts even further than Henie’s typical length, and the ladies of figure skating have never looked back.

7. TOO SEXY FOR HER SKATES.

A buxom young beauty from the former Democratic German Republic dominated ladies figure skating in the mid- to late 1980s. A two-time Olympic champion, and one of the most decorated female skaters in history, Katarina Witt was just too sexy for her shirt—she tended to wear scandalously revealing costumes (one of which resulted in a wardrobe malfunction during a show), and was criticized for attempting to flirt with the judges to earn higher scores.

The ISU put the kibosh on the controversial outfits soon afterward, inserting a rule that all competitive female skaters “must not give the effect of excessive nudity inappropriate for an athletic sport.” The outrage forced Witt to add some fabric to her competitive outfits in the late ’80s. But 10 years later she took it all off, posing naked for a 1998 issue of Playboy.

8. MORE COSTUME CONTROVERSY.

For the 2010 competitive year, the ISU’s annual theme for the original dance segment (since defunct and replaced by the “short dance”) was “country/folk.” That meant competitors had to create a routine that explored some aspect of it, in both music and costume as well as in maneuvers. The top Russian pair chose to emulate Aboriginal tribal dancing in their program, decked in full bodysuits adorned with their interpretation of Aboriginal body paint (and a loincloth).

Their debut performance at the European Championships drew heavy criticism from Aboriginal groups in both Australia and Canada, who were greatly offended by the inaccuracy of the costumes and the routine. The Russian pair, Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, were quick to dial down the costumes and dial up the accuracy in time for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, but the judges were not impressed. They ended up with the bronze, ending decades of Russian dominance in the discipline. (With the glaring exception of 2002, of course.)

9. IN MEMORIAM.

While not a scandal, this event bears mentioning because it has rocked the figure skating world arguably more than anything else. In February of 1961, the American figure skating team boarded a flight to Belgium from New York, en route to the World Championships in Prague. The plane went down mysteriously (cause still questioned today) as it tried to land in Brussels, killing all 72 passengers. America’s top skaters and coaches had been aboard, including nine-time U.S. Champion and Olympic bronze medalist-turned-coach Maribel Vinson-Owen and her daughter Laurence Owen, a 16-year-old who had been heavily favored to win the ladies event that year.

The ISU canceled the competition upon the news of the crash and the United States lost its long-held dominance in the sport for almost a decade. The United States Figure Skating Association (USFS) soon after established a memorial fund that helped support the skating careers of competitors in need of financial assistance, including future Olympic champions like Scott Hamilton and Peggy Fleming.