The Attack on Nancy Kerrigan: The Tonya Harding Olympic Scandal

The attack on Nancy Kerrigan on the 6th of January 1994 became one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the Olympic Games, and it involved one of the most famous rivalries in sport: Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. On that afternoon, at the United States Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, the reigning American champion Nancy Kerrigan finished a practice session and walked down a corridor toward her dressing room. A man stepped out from behind a television cameraman, swung a police baton at her right knee, and ran. The footage of Kerrigan sitting on the floor, clutching her leg and crying "Why? Why? Why me?", was broadcast around the world and has never been forgotten. Within days, the FBI had uncovered an extraordinary conspiracy. The attack had been planned and paid for by the ex-husband of Kerrigan's rival, the figure skater Tonya Harding, in an attempt to eliminate Kerrigan from the competition and clear Harding's path to the 1994 Winter Olympics. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Nancy Kerrigan attack and the Tonya Harding scandal: the four men who carried it out, the FBI investigation, the astonishing Olympic showdown at Lillehammer watched by 110 million Americans, the broken shoelace, the guilty pleas, the lifetime ban, and what became of both women in the decades since. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the whack heard round the world.

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