The beautiful and the trocharde

At the time, Nancy Kerrigan was the long-time favorite for the Olympic title, to be played a few weeks later in Lillehammer, Norway. The 25-year-old had to settle for bronze in Albertville (Savoie) two years earlier, but 1994 must be her year. Brown hair wisely tied, a smile worthy of a pub for toothpaste, a haughty port, even aristocratic. "She's a lovely lady ," said an Olympic judge at the Washington Post at the time, " she was raised in those values, it shows." "Nancy seems to be rich" , agrees a reporter from the Boston Globe John Powers in the documentary The Price of Gold ,

All false. The Kerrigan pile up in a small green house in the suburbs of Boston. The father is a welder, the mother stays at home. Nancy, an unofficial holder of the title of little fiancee of America, lived very late at home with her parents. As he approaches his scheduled triumph at the Games, his agent discusses the number of zeros on the contracts with the jostling sponsors.

Nancy on the flank, who benefits from the crime? A few days later, rival Tonya Harding shines on the ice of Detroit, where are scheduled the championships of the United States, qualifiers for the Games. A boon to the one who was one of the first skaters to succeed a triple axel in competition but had a little disappeared radar since the advent of his rival .

Where Nancy slips gracefully, Tonya uses her power. The first patina on patriotic themes, such as the soundtrack of the film Born on July 4th , the second dares to propose rap to the chaste ears of the judges. One is offered her costumes by seamstress Vera Wang, the other has to tinker with bits of string and mock the judges. Tonya Harding will remain marked by one of their humiliations: "One of the judges came to see me after and said to me: 'If you put a thing like this for an American championship, you will never participate again.'" "She did not go into the mold, with its look, costumes, music" ,

A pathetic planted with stick

The days go by and the FBI investigation tightens around Tonya's bodyguard. Cracked by a raven, enlightened by the confessions of the protagonists, the agents discover the details of a pathetic plot, hatched on a kitchen table by the ex-husband (but still a companion) and agent Tonya Harding, Jeff Gillooly, and that the bodyguard of the champion, a good quintal on the scales, Shawn Eckhardt.

With the latter, who runs the company pompously baptized "World's Bodyguard" from the small room he occupies in his parents' house, he tries to find a good way to put Nancy Kerrigan offside . "Why not use a sniper?", We hear in the bands that discreetly records the bodyguard, quoted by The Believer magazine (article in English). Why not cut him the Achilles tendon with a knife? " Gillooly, who has dropped her job to care for her full-time protégé, does not have the funds to hire a professional. It collects barely $ 2,000 (about 1,600 euros), not one more ticket. For that price, they have little choice. Go for Shane Stant, a small delinquent but a real broken arm, who embarks for Boston with a telescopic baton in his luggage and a target named Nancy.

From pathetic, one sinks into ridicule. Stant forgets his bank card in Portland, misses Kerrigan in Boston several times, has to board a Greyhound bus, travel 20 hours to join her in Detroit and attack him in a corridor of the rink. Then Stant gets down in his hotel. The FBI has no problem picking it.

"How stupid can you be to believe that the attacker wanted to be caught."
Mark Lund

Gilooly, Eckhardt and Stant behind bars on January 20th, the vice tightens on Tonya Harding, who has meanwhile won his qualification on the rink. With her lawyer, she develops a strategy based on blackmail: if the American federation prevents her from defending her chances in Norway, she will ask 20 million dollars (more than 17 million euros) before the courts, the equivalent of the estimated damage from the fallout of a possible medal. The champion thinks a lot about gold, but not about the one on her charm. As she said cash after her national title, a few days before the FBI unveiled the pot of roses: "All I think, honestly, these are the greenbacks."

Sex, lie and videos

Venal, Tonya? It does not take more so that the newspapers, which put forward the champion of nothing during its coronation of 1991, embark on a great unpacking. If it was common knowledge that her violent mother was preventing her from going to the bathroom in her youth while she was training on the ice, on the pretext that school time was too expensive to waste precious minutes, some media found witnesses who saw Tonya relieve themselves on the rink. Others dig up a sentence from his father in 1976 in The Enterprise Courier complaining that his daughter is costing him $ 225 a month: "We can not keep up."

Other revelations follow. She is only 15 years old when her brother, eleven years older, tries to rape her. His mother convinces her not to complain. Since she is famous, her only goal is to leave her house, no matter who. When she spotted a handsome brown man with a thin mustache behind the ice rink during a training session, she did not ask herself many questions: "I fell in love with the first boy who told me that I was pretty , recalls Tonya in the documentary Truth and Lies broadcast on ABC . I was 15, he had a job and a car. "

Each of Tonya Harding's training is followed by hundreds of journalists. "As soon as I made a jump, I heard the crackling flashes," sighs the champion. Off the rink, the ordeal continues and the media coverage of the case turns to anything. "Local journalists and those redeeming feature for the tabloids needed pictures every day. So they made him dross as puncture the tires of his car for photos of her" , remembers Michael Janofsky, who covered the case for the New York Times . The venerable newspaper, mocked with the Detroit Free Press and the San Jose Mercury News, hack the box of the champion.

A Japanese television crew even deliberately set off the fire alarm at the hotel where the federation's lodges were staying to get an interview from their spokesperson, in their pajamas, at midnight. It's up to the media to have Tonya Harding's Lynn Harris go for a ride in the Kerrigan Garden "to see if anything is happening" . Truthful.

"You're not going to get away with it like that"

"I feel really lucky," NBC coach Tonya Harding says, seemingly unperturbed, on the plane that takes her to Lillehammer. If Nancy Kerrigan, who managed to heal herself, avoided being in the same camera and refused Tonya's hug proposal to the Olympic Village, the two are forced to meet during training. All American athletes together, this is the rule since 1896 and Pierre de Coubertin, and the IOC does not see why it should make an exception. The two women avoid looking at each other ... But the journalists in the stands remember that Kerrigan pulled out the dress she was wearing the day of her assault. A white dress. Virginal. Kerrigan's agent, Jerry Solomon, slips:"It's a way for her to say, 'You're not going to get away with that.'"

The divine punishment is not long in coming. Disappointing 10th of the short program, Harding collapses during the free program (which accounts for two thirds of the note). Because of her very aggressive skating, she needs very long laces to close her skates. Laces ... she has forgotten in Portland when packing. Destabilized, she loses all concentration when her team struggles to find in the locker room.

The way is free for the triumph of Kerrigan? The miraculous Detroit performs a perfect performance, but lacks a bit of madness, and is made to the head to the surprise of the Ukrainian Oksana Baiul. And while the gold medalist is waiting on the podium, Kerrigan only silver, fulminates, imagining that this delay is due to a makeup session of the Ukrainian.

"But what's the use for her to make up?" She's going to ruin everything by yelling like a madeleine on the podium
Nancy Kerrigan