Abby Haight - Fire on Ice: The Exclusive Inside Story of Tonya Harding

I t should have been a triumphant return for Tonya Harding. On Monday evening, January 10, 1994, Hardings reign as the queen of U.S. figure skating was only forty-eight hours old. The dynamic twenty-three-year-old blonde from rural Clackamas County in Oregon had finally proven her doubters wrong and won the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship, the highest accolade in the sport besides Olympic gold. Hardings victory two days before at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit was special because it met another huge goal, a berth on the U.S. Olympic team that would compete in a month in Lillehammer, Norway.

Since she first laced up skates as a three-year-old, Tonya Harding had wanted to skate in the Olympic Games. When she was young, she had a childs dream of beauty and glory. As she aged, the dream took on a harder edge of the reality around her. An Olympic medal meant the kind of money that would wipe out a lifetime of want. When Harding looked at the Olympic rings, she saw dollar signs, she told reporters.

Harding didnt get to celebrate much in Detroit. Everyone was more concerned about the bizarre attack January 6 on Hardings rival, Nancy Kerrigan, which had forced her to drop out of the competition. The favorite to win her second title, Kerrigan was the reigning American skating queen. In the post-competition press conference, reporters wanted Harding to talk about what it felt like to win without Kerrigan. Harding wanted to talk only about her skating. Even with the gold medal around her neck, it was obvious that Harding was still in Kerrigans shadow.

As they walked up the ramp at Portland International Airport, Harding and Jeff Gillooly, her on-again, off-again husband, were worried about the more than four hours they had spent over the last two days talking to investigators in Detroit, including an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agent had wanted to know about the attack on Kerrigan. He had talked of trivial things for a while, then abruptly asked Gillooly if he knew someone named Derrick. Gillooly was startled. He said he didnt.

A big homecoming celebration had been planned for Harding when she arrived at Portland. Members of the Tonya Harding Fan Club had made sure the local media knew Hardings flight and time of arrival, and the information was broadcast on television newscasts and published in The Oregonian. More than forty members of the Portland Rosarians, a civic group, were at the airport with a proclamation from the City of Portland. Dozens of fans waited with balloons, flowers and posters that read, Go for the gold, Tonya!

Their wait was long and disappointing. At the last minute, Harding had changed her flight plans.

Now it was almost 9 p.m., and a couple dozen loyal fans were back at the airport. So were local reporters.

Harding and Gillooly entered the gate lobby, and a large man in a trench coat immediately stepped up behind Harding and placed a protective hand on the small of her back. The man was Shawn Eric Eckardt, a longtime friend of Gilloolys who had been hired as Hardings bodyguard. Eckardts three-hundred-pound frame dwarfed the five-foot-one Harding as he guided her through well-wishers.

As he usually did when he and his wife were in public, Gillooly stepped back into the crowd. Television newscasts later showed the short, mustachioed Gillooly walking grimly a few feet away from Harding. Gillooly didnt stick out in a crowd, but on this night, his frowning, worried face set him apart from the happy fans.

Eckardt shepherded Harding through a small gantlet of well-wishers and reporters. Hardings training partner, seventeen-year-old Angela Meduna, had brought her friend a stuffed animal. Several people wore the lemon-yellow Team Tonya T-shirts that Harding herself had designed before the national championships.

The skater laughed only once, when a television cameraman, jogging backward to keep Harding in focus, crashed into a post and almost fell down.

Harding had agreed to a short press conference, and her most zealous fan, a Vietnam veteran named Joe Haran, had arranged for a small airport meeting room where the press could set up their tripods and lights. Harding, looking small in her black coat and black turtleneck shirt, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, sat down in front of the bright lights and cameras and waited impatiently for the first question. Ordinarily, her return to Portland after a competition would go mostly unnoticed by the Portland media. But the Kerrigan attack made that impossible. The television stations sent out their top reporters, and radio stations that had never previously mentioned Harding had their microphones ready.

Harding was tired. She had never liked talking to reporters. She was sure they would want to go over the same things shed been talking about for daysthe fear she said she felt about Kerrigans attack, how the championship wasnt complete without her rival, how she thought she had skated great. Then a reporter asked if the FBI had asked her if she had been part of the attack on Kerrigan.

Im really disappointed that you guys would even ask me that, she said. You guys know me better than that. I had my hopes for a long time of competing against Nancy and proving Im as good as her and better. In fact, Harding said, she was looking forward to skating against Kerrigan at the Olympic Games so she could kick her butt.

After a few minutes, Gillooly and Harding signaled that the questions were over. Hardings father, Al, had been told to wait at the main entrance of the airport, then drive his daughter to Gilloolys mothers house. Eckardt had rehearsed the plan with Al Harding several times, and when the bodyguard whisked Tonya out the doors, Al was waiting. But instead of driving off immediately with her, Al waited. Go! Go! Go! Eckardt screamed, until Al revved the car and sped away.