Early life

Harding was born in Portland, Oregon to LaVona Fay Golden (b. 1940) and her fifth husband, Al Harding (1933-2009). Her father had health problems that sometimes left him unable to work. She claims that her mother physically abused her, a claim her mother admitted to when asked for a response by the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009. She began skating at age three. She landed her first triple lutz at age 12. Her mother made many of her skating costumes.

Harding stopped attending David Douglas High School in Portland during her sophomore year and later earned a GED, as she was busy with skating competitions, having begun receiving invitations to them while she was still in junior high school.

Skating career

Harding began working her way up the competitive skating ladder in the mid-1980s, placing sixth at the 1986 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, fifth in 1987 and 1988, and third in 1989. She was considered a strong contender at the 1990 U.S. Figure Skating Championships after having won Skate America 1989, but she had a poor free skate as a result of suffering from the flu and asthma, and dropped from second place after the original program to finish seventh overall. While she was a powerful free skater, she typically had lower placements in the compulsory figures.

Harding's breakthrough year was in 1991, where she landed her first triple axel at the U.S. Championships, winning the title with the event's first 6.0 ever given to a single female skater for technical merit. At the 1991 World Championships, she again completed the triple axel jump (becoming the first American woman to perform it at an international event) but finished second to Kristi Yamaguchi.

In her career, Harding landed four triple axels in competition. All of them were in 1991, where she completed each one she tried: one at the U.S. Championships, another at the World Championships, and two at the Fall 1991 Skate America competition.

At the Fall 1991 Skate America, Harding recorded three more firsts:

1. The first woman to complete a triple axel in the short program;
2. The first woman to successfully execute two triple axels in a single competition;
3. The first ever to complete a triple axel combination with the double toe loop.

Despite these record-breaking performances, she was never able to successfully perform the triple axel in a competition after 1991, and her competitive results began to decline as a result. In 1992, she placed third in the U.S. Championships after twisting her ankle in practice. She finished fourth in the 1992 Winter Olympics, and in the 1992 World Championships, she placed sixth in a weak field. In the 1993 season, she skated poorly in the U.S. Championships and failed to qualify for the World Championship team.

Figure skating record

International
Event	1985-86	1986-87	1987-88	1988-89	1989-90	1990-91	1991-92	1992-93	1993-94
Winter Olympics							4th		8th
World Championships						2nd	6th
Skate America		2nd			1st		1st		3rd
Skate Canada International								4th
Nations Cup					1st
NHK Trophy			3rd			2nd			4th
U.S. Olympic Festival						2nd
Prize of Moscow News				1st
National
U.S. Championships	6th	5th	5th	3rd	7th	1st	3rd	4th	1st†

^† In June 1994, U.S. Figure Skating voted to strip Harding of her 1994 title. (See #January 1994 incident) However, the competition results were not changed and the title was left vacant rather than moving all the other competitors up one position.

January 1994 incident

On January 6, 1994, Harding's main team competitor Nancy Kerrigan was attacked. The widely publicized attack took place after a practice session at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit. Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt, hired Shane Stant to break Kerrigan's right leg so that she would be unable to compete at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. After failing to find Kerrigan at her training rink in Massachusetts, Stant followed her to Detroit. When she stepped off the ice after practice at Cobo Arena and walked behind a nearby curtain into a corridor, Stant struck her on the thigh a few inches above the knee with an ASP telescopic baton. Her leg was only bruised, not broken, but the injury forced her to withdraw from the national championship. Harding won that event, and she and Kerrigan were both selected for the 1994 Olympic team. Harding finished eighth in Lillehammer, while Kerrigan, by then fully recovered from the injury, won the silver medal behind Oksana Baiul from Ukraine.

The attack on Kerrigan and the news of Harding's alleged involvement led to a media frenzy of saturation news coverage. Kerrigan appeared on the cover of both TIME and Newsweek magazines in January 1994. Reporters and TV news crews attended Harding's practices in Portland and camped out in front of Kerrigan's home. CBS assigned Connie Chung to follow her every move in Lillehammer. Four hundred members of the press jammed into the practice rink in Norway. Scott Hamilton complained that "the world press was turning the Olympics into just another sensational tabloid event." The tape-delayed broadcast of the short program at the Olympics remains one of the most watched telecasts in American history.

On February 1, 1994, Gillooly accepted a plea bargain in exchange for his testimony against Harding. Gillooly, Stant, Eckhardt, and getaway car driver Derrick Smith all served time in prison for the attack. Eckhardt was sentenced to 18 months in prison for racketeering but was released four months early in September 1995.

Harding avoided further prosecution and a possible jail sentence by pleading guilty on March 16 to conspiring to hinder prosecution of the attackers. She received three years probation, 500 hours of community service, and a $160,000 fine. As part of the plea bargain, she was also forced to withdraw from the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships and resign from the USFSA. On June 30, 1994, after conducting its own investigation of the attack, the USFSA stripped her of her 1994 U.S. Championships title and banned her for life from participating in USFSA-run events as either a skater or a coach. The USFSA concluded that she knew about the attack before it happened and displayed "a clear disregard for fairness, good sportsmanship and ethical behavior". Although the USFSA has no control over non-competitive professional skating events, she was also persona non grata on the pro circuit because few skaters and promoters would work with her. Consequently, she failed to benefit from the pro skating boom that ensued in the aftermath of the scandal.

In her 2008 autobiography, The Tonya Tapes, Harding said that she wanted to call the FBI to reveal what she knew, but refused when Gillooly allegedly threatened her with death following a gunpoint gang rape by him and two other men she did not know. He subsequently changed his name to Jeff Stone and called the allegations "utterly ridiculous." Eckhardt, who legally changed his name to Brian Sean Griffith following his release from jail, died of natural causes at age 40 on December 12, 2007.

Later celebrity

Harding had a celebrity sex tape: an explicit "Wedding Video" showed her having sex with her then-husband, Jeff Gillooly. They had sold it together to Penthouse, for an advance of $200,000 each plus royalties. Penthouse published stills from the tape in September 1994 and the tape itself was released at about the same time.

Harding appeared on an AAA professional wrestling show on June 22, 1994, in Portland, Oregon, as the manager for wrestling stable Los Gringos Locos, which that night included Art Barr, Eddie Guerrero, and Brian Cox.

A one-off promotional musical event was unsuccessful when Harding and her band, the Golden Blades, were booed off the stage in their only performance, in 1995 in Portland, Oregon. She had a part in a 1996 crime-film titled Breakaway, playing the girlfriend of a criminal.

In late 1996, she used mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to help revive an 81-year-old woman, Alice Olson, who collapsed at a bar in Portland, Oregon, while playing video poker.

In March 2008, she became a regular commentator for TruTV's The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest..., later retitled TruTV Presents: World's Dumbest... after TheSmokingGun.com ended its partnership with TruTV in the production. She is no longer on the show as of 2013.

Boxing career

In 2002, she boxed on the Fox TV network Celebrity Boxing event against Paula Jones, winning the fight. On February 22, 2003, she made her official women's professional boxing debut, losing a four-round decision in the undercard of the Mike Tyson-Clifford Etienne bout, amid rumors that she was having financial difficulties and needed to box to earn money. She did another celebrity boxing match, on The Man Show, and won against co-host Doug Stanhope.

She won her third pro bout against Alejandra Lopez at the Creek Nations Gaming Center.

On March 23, 2004, it was reported that she canceled a planned boxing match against Tracy Carlton in Oakland, California, because of an alleged death threat against her.

On June 24, 2004, after reportedly not having boxed for over a year, she was beaten in a match in Edmonton, Alberta, by boxer Amy Johnson. Fans reportedly booed her as she entered the ring and cheered wildly for Johnson as she won in the third round. Harding later protested the outcome.

Her boxing career was quite short, a brevity she attributes to asthma. Her overall record was 4-3-0.

Boxing record

4 Wins (3 decisions, 1 TKO), 3 Losses (2 knockouts, 1 decision), 0 Draws
Date	Opponent	Result	Type	Round, Time	Location
2003-02-22	Samantha Browning	Loss	Decision (split)	4	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
2003-03-15	Shannon Birmingham	Win	Decision (unanimous)	4	Gulfport, Mississippi, U.S.
2003-03-28	Alejandra Lopez	Win	Decision (unanimous)	4	Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.
2003-06-13	Emily Gosa	Win	Decision (unanimous)	4	Lincoln City, Oregon, U.S.
2003-08-02	Melissa Yanas	Loss	TKO	1, 1:13	Dallas, Texas, U.S.
2004-06-14	Doug Stanhope	Win	KO	1	The Man Show, U.S.
2004-06-25	Amy Johnson	Loss	TKO	3, 1:04	Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Automobile racing land speed record

On August 12, 2009, Harding set a new land speed record for a vintage gas coupe with a speed of 97.177 mph driving a 1931 Ford Model A, named Lickity-Split, on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Personal life

Harding was born to mother LaVona Fay Golden and father Al Harding and grew up in Portland with brother Karl. She married Jeff Gillooly in early 1990, when she was 19 years old. Their tumultuous marriage ended in divorce in 1994. She divorced her second husband, Michael Smith, in 1995 and married 42-year-old Joseph Jens Price on June 23, 2010. On February 11, 2011, it was announced that she was pregnant with her first child. She gave birth to a son on February 19, 2011.

In culture

Harding and her role in the Kerrigan attack have been widely referenced in sitcom episodes, music videos, and even a primary campaign speech by Barack Obama.

In 2014, ESPN aired a 30 for 30 documentary on the Kerrigan attack called The Price of Gold.

On February 23, 2014, NBC aired a documentary on the incident called Nancy & Tonya.

In 2014, Matt Harkins and Viviana Olen created the The Nancy Kerrigan And Tonya Harding Museum in their Brooklyn, NY apartment. This installation was covered by several national press outlets.

On March 21, 2016, it was announced that Australian actress Margot Robbie would portray Harding in the upcoming biographical film, I, Tonya.

Music and opera

• Elizabeth Searle collaborated with composer Abigail Al-Doory to create Tonya and Nancy: The Opera, a chamber opera produced in May 2006 by Tufts University and directed by Meron Langsner.
• Searle and composer Michael Teoli later created Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera, which was presented at the American Repertory Theatre's Oberon space twice. Singer/actress Kristen Lee Sargeant played Tonya in the opera and Nancy in the rock opera.
• The song "Tonya Harding" by the Atlanta band The Coathangers is about Harding and her role in the attack on Kerrigan.
• She was the subject of "Tonya's Twirls," a song by Loudon Wainwright III, a US folk musician. The song was recorded and issued on Social Studies (1999), with a live recording also issued on So Damn Happy (2003).
• The 1994 "Weird Al" Yankovic parody song "Headline News" contains lyrics about Harding and her role in the attack on Kerrigan.
• Australian rock band 'Jonny Don't Play' referenced Harding at the end of their song 'I like football' during live performances in 1999 and 2000.

Print

• The book Women on Ice: Feminist Essays on the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle (1995) included a number of essays analyzing her public image in the context of the sport of figure skating.
• Elizabeth Searle's novella, Celebrities In Disgrace, centers on the Harding-Kerrigan affair.

Television

• Spunk: The Tonya Harding Story was a satirical short which aired on Comedy Central during the 1994 Olympic Games.
• In an episode of the television program Seinfeld called "The Understudy," when Seinfeld's date, a performer, takes the stage, she has a problem with the laces on her boot and, in an act reminiscent of Harding's bootlace incident, tearfully asks that she be allowed to start over.
• A 1999 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured the movie Soultaker. The star/writer of the movie, Vivian Schilling, was the target of numerous Tonya Harding references in the MST3k episode due to their passing physical resemblance.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]