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Sporting News, The, March 7, 1994 by Michael Knisley

"What it is, is a waiting game," Bourne says. "You wait. That's how it's been. Hopefully, it'll change for us through the years."

For figure skaters, the Olympics isn't one moment in time. It's an entire career coming to fruition or failure, where everything you've done before counts at least as much as everything you do on the day you actually compete. The judges evaluate your practice as well as your performance; and if they see you do your jumps successfully in the training rink, they don't fully penalize you for jumps that aren't so adroitly executed in competition. They know you can do them, and that's what counts.

It's a sport where the pecking order, once established, doesn't change much, even off the competitive ice as a skater's involvement extends beyond his Olympic years. Brian Boitano botched a couple of jumps and finished sixth in the men's competition in Lillehammer, but it won't hurt his marketability or his sponsorship potential. He knows his 1988 Olympic gold medal will still sell tickets to his professional skating tour, which he will crank back up this fall.

"Once a figure skater has a profile that's pretty high, it usually stays that way," Boitano says. "I mean, unless maybe I did something non-respectable."

Because of all of those factors, figure skating, like life, is subject in the extreme to the same wretched, non-respectable excesses that make, say, a Texas wannabe cheerleader's mother try to snuff out another cheerleader's mother to gain a competitive edge for her daughter. To the lunatic fringe, sometimes it might seem like the only way to beat the system.

Figure skating had lots of problems in Lillehammer, partly because it functions so far afield from other sports and partly because some of those extreme pressures came to bear on this particular competition. The figure skating at the 1994 Winter Games seemed to have more trouble fitting in with the easy myths of the rest of the Games than at any other recent Olympiad, for several reasons.

First among them, of course, is the wretched excess that is Tonya Harding.

Harding was nakedly ambitious about the 1994 Games (as opposed to her famous Halloween video, in which she was ambitiously naked). Up front about the million-dollar payday prospects of an Olympic championship, Harding's attitude alone is an offense to figure skating's prim, proper hierarchy. But the ambition, now surely more-often chronicled than even Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon, transcended attitude when she and/or her entourage tried to remove her primary American competition, Kerrigan, with a January crackback attack on the knee.

She, and/or her entourage, did what she/they did in direct defiance of the figure-skating ethic. A rebel from way back, Harding had been making strange bedfellows with the sport's politics for a number of years. The system's waiting game hadn't brought her the success she craved, so she/they took matters into her/their own hands and directed them at Kerrigan's knee.

But the fear in figure skating wrought by the Harding phenomenon, at least in this country, isn't of more thwacks on kneecaps. Instead, it's what drove the attack in the first place.