This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of the biggest scandals in sports history.
Just weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, figure-skating darling Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the knee by an unknown assailant wielding a club — an attack later revealed to have been plotted by the husband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding.
The tabloid-ready story had all the hallmarks of a soap opera: A classically beautiful brunette from the Northeast vs. the scrappy blonde tomboy from the wrong side of the tracks. A back-stabbing plot to literally eliminate the competition. And six weeks for Kerrigan to come back from her injury and go for Olympic gold against Harding.
Two decades later, “Price of Gold,” a documentary premiering 9 p.m. Thursday on ESPN, is taking a new look at the scandal so bizarre that nothing in sports has topped it since.
“Occasionally athletes try to injure a competitor on the field, but it certainly never happens off the field,” says “Price of Gold” director Nannette Burstein. “For it to have occurred in a sport that’s all about grace and poise and beauty seemed particularly shocking.”
“Price of Gold” features new interviews with Harding — now 43 and remarried with a son — as well as journalists who covered the story at the time, including Connie Chung and Tony Kornheiser, coaches for both Kerrigan and Harding and Kerrigan’s husband/manager, Jerry Solomon.
Burstein edited the film to focus on Harding — her abusive mother, her outcast status in the sport — even while thinking she might get a sit-down with Kerrigan, which didn’t fall through until the last minute.
(Kerrigan will break her 20-year silence on the topic in an NBC documentary airing during the network’s coverage of the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gilloolly — who changed his surname to Stone in 1995 — declined to be interviewed.)
“I had always intended for it to be much more focused on Tonya because I think her story was far more complicated,” she says. “Nancy has an admirable story — she was injured and had six weeks to come back from that injury with a media maelstrom and actually win the silver medal. But beyond that narrative, there’s not a lot more to say.”
Burstein interviewed Harding twice, first for eight hours then a follow-up that lasted nearly five hours and found her to be forthcoming — as far as her version of events preceding the attack on Kerrigan.
“She was very comfortable talking about her childhood, even the darker sides of her childhood,” Burstein says. “She was very uncomfortable and would become very emotional and anxious and angry once you entered the year 1994.”
The Olympic figure-skating final that year featuring Kerrigan and Harding is still the highest-rated Olympic program in history, earning a 48.5 household rating.
(Neither skater ultimately won gold — that medal went to 16-year-old Ukrainian Oksana Baiul.)
The documentary also highlights the media spectacle that elevated the popularity of the sport for years to come, allowing many skaters to make a lot of money through televised ice show specials — except Harding, who was banned from the sport for life after pleading guilty to knowing about the attack after the fact and not going to police. “There was a certain tragic irony to that,” Burstein says.
Though definitive evidence of her guilt or innocence will likely never be known, Burstein says she did develop some empathy for Harding while researching the documentary.
“But then at the same time there’s this whole gray area of how much are you revealing, are you telling the truth, are you a reliable narrator, did you know, did you not know?” she says. “And of course there’s no motivation for her to ever admit if she was involved in the planning. There were definitely things that she said that I had a hard time believing.”