| For fans of figure skating, 1994 got off to a complicated start. At the beginning of January, the skater Tonya Harding won her second national title, confirming her status as a gold-medal favorite at the next month’s Olympics. But there was a major asterisk. On January 6th—thirty years ago this weekend—Harding’s chief American rival, Nancy Kerrigan, had been bashed in the knee with a police baton, an attack that was quickly traced to Harding’s ex-husband and two other men. The case instantly became a global sensation. Weeks before Harding stepped onto the Olympic ice, the New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean travelled to Clackamas County, Oregon, the site of the skater’s hardscrabble childhood—and of the shopping mall that served as her unlikely training facility. In addition to observing Harding at her home rink, Orlean attended a meeting of her fan club, reporting that the group had “received hundreds of requests for membership information” after the assault on Kerrigan. Harding’s supporters remarked on the class snobbery that rippled through media coverage of the skater, an issue that would be revisited later in works such as “I, Tonya,” the 2017 movie in which Harding was portrayed, pre-“Barbie,” by Margot Robbie. The president of Harding’s fan club explained that local residents identified with the skater because of their own difficult backgrounds. “They’d see that little gal [succeed] and feel really good about themselves,” she told Orlean. “So it’s funny that people would think of her as trash.” | 
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