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How Did Tonya Harding Contribute To The American Scandal

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Olympic Scandal Rough Draft Body of Paper Cold as Ice: The Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan Olympic Scandal. Two women from separate worlds. Nancy Keerigan, upper-middle class from Plymouth, Massachusetts, America’s figure-skating sweetheart, and the gold-medal favorite for the 1994 Olympics. Tonya Harding, raised by her mother and her fifth husband, was perceived by the public as a rough-edged athlete who crash-landed into the elite world of figure skating. If it weren’t for their careers in competitive figure skating, these two women’s paths wouldn’t have ever crossed. Unfortunately for Nancy Kerrigan, her enduring acts of senseless violence cost her the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, a competition in which Tonya Harding triumphed, winning first place. However, it would seem that the advantages Tonya had from having one less rival would soon run …show more content…

Tonya Harding had an arduous upbringing. LaVona Fay Golden, her mother, forced Tonya into figure skating at a young age and was the very embodiment of a tiger mom. Golden wanted her daughter to have a better life than she did, which was spent bouncing from houses to trailer parks. Early in her skating career, Tonya’s mother would hand-sew her costumes. Despite her contributions to her daughter’s skating career, Golden abused her, allegedly having once thrown a steak knife at young Tonya. Her father also lacked a certain parenting instinct, having gifted Tonya a gun for her birthday when she was a child. Once she began to receive attention in the media from her competing in national skating competitions, the public perceived her as a white-trash girl from Portland who didn’t smile during her performances, skated her routines to ZZ Top and wore handmade costumes. No one knew Tonya Harding, who fought hard for her career despite having endured a tumultuous childhood; instead, they saw Tonya Harding, the

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