Tonya & Nancy Show Still Knee-Deep in Controversy

NAGANO, Japan —  Four years and 10,000 miles separated from the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, the focus again is on Tonya and Nancy. If we’re lucky, it will remain there only for as long as it takes the Fox network’s James Brown to show they have nothing more to teach us.

Even if they did, we wouldn’t learn. We didn’t the last time.

The debate among some in the media here is whether Nancy Kerrigan, for $150,000 and the promise of a couple of television specials, should have agreed to the interview airing tonight on Fox, thus contributing to Tonya Harding’s efforts to resuscitate her own earning potential. She already has received $100,000 for this appearance.

It doesn’t matter to me. As long as Brown didn’t ask them to hug, I don’t care much about anything that happened during the much-hyped reunion. If it’s so significant, why is it tape delayed?

In other words, it’s not Begin and Sadat.

That doesn’t mean the episode should never be reexamined. In doing so, though, I think we’ll discover less about them than us.

It’s not likely to be flattering. Harding and Kerrigan gave all of us an opportunity to put some things in perspective--about sports, about journalism, about life. All most of us got out of it was a month or so of titillation.

Four years later, the International Olympic Committee is as arrogant as ever.

Officials sent out reminders Wednesday to the U.S. government that it had signed an Olympic truce last year, as if that would embarrass the Pentagon into postponing a war with Iraq until after the Winter Games end Feb. 22.

As good as their intentions might be, they have forgotten that, in 1994, they didn’t even have the power to keep Harding, a 110-pound figure skater, out of the Games.

Now the IOC is going to alter the course of world history?

Four years later, the media are as irrepressible as ever in our mandate to bring you all the sleaze that’s fit to print, even if it’s unfit.

I thought we had sunk to our lowest in Norway, when a couple of my colleagues broke into Harding’s e-mail.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they were bored. It’s certainly possible. When Harding arrived in Hamar, Norway, the site of the figure skating competition, she was met by hundreds of reporters from around the world. She got out of the car, waved and said a few words. The issue of the day was how many.

“Did she say, ‘Thank you for coming’ or ‘Thanks for coming?’ ” a Washington Post reporter asked.

It seemed important at the time.

Maybe my misguided colleagues were searching for the answer to that question in Harding’s e-mail. Or maybe they were searching for something more tantalizing. Whatever, their ethical breach gave Harding her only opportunity during the entire tawdry affair to claim the moral high ground.

Some of us in the media no doubt were chastened enough by the incident to pledge allegiance to a higher standard.

Others of us are seeking truth today in the pursuit of Monica Lewinsky’s diary.

Four years later, some athletes still subscribe to the principle that, if hard work doesn’t prevail, it’s all right to try a tire iron.

The two best female figure skaters, Michelle Kwan, 17, and Tara Lipinski, 15, have been mature enough to resist media efforts to turn their healthy competition into a feud.

But a prominent female ice dancer recently was accused of purposely slashing a rival with her skate during a practice two days before a competition in Munich. The next day, the woman responded to the allegation by allegedly slashing her rival’s male partner.

The public, of course, has been turned off by such misbehavior.

Sure it has.

Figure skating, a good television sport before the Norway Olympics, is now a great television sport. Some network executives say they can guarantee more viewers only for pro football games.

Recently, the tape-delayed European figure skating championships had higher ratings on a Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles than the basketball game between UCLA and then-undefeated Stanford.

“It’s absolutely mind-boggling that figure skating became so popular,” says Frank Carroll, who coaches Kwan at Lake Arrowhead. “As much as we sometimes put down Tonya Harding, women’s sports and figure skating in particular owe her a debt of gratitude.”

I’m sure he’s right.

But Kerrigan’s coach, Evy Scotvold, also spoke the truth when he recently told a couple of reporters, “I won’t do anything to thank Tonya Harding for anything. She was a shameful blight on figure skating, and that’s the nicest thing you can say about her.”