Newport This Week

Figure Skating Controversy No Stranger to Jamestown Resident



For Claire Ferguson, there must have been a feeling of déjà vu when she watched the ladies’ figure skating competition at this year’s Winter Olympics. Once again, the eyes of the world were laser-focused on the sport. Once again, controversy swirled. Once again, the defining moment of an Olympic Games centered on quads, lutzes and toe loops.

“I was pretty ticked off watching it,” Ferguson said.

It must have felt eerily familiar to the Jamestown resident when Rus­sia’s 15-year-old skating prodigy, Kamila Valieva, took the ice last month in Beijing despite failing a doping test. Nearly 30 years earlier, Ferguson was in the eye of another storm that propelled figure skating onto the front page of every news­paper in the world. In 1994, she was president of the United States Figure Skating Association when the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding saga unfolded, shocking those within and without the supposedly genteel sport.

“It came down like a heavy rain­storm,” says Ferguson, now 86, reflecting on the most tumultuous time in figure skating history.

Ferguson had been around the sport a long time. She became a figure skating judge at age 16 and worked her way up to the national and Olympic level. In 1992, she became the first woman in the 75-year history of the USFSA to be named its president. But she had never seen anything like what took place two years later.

Kerrigan and Harding were fierce rivals, both striving to qualify for the U.S. team that would skate in the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. But at the ’94 U.S. Nationals in Detroit one month before the Games, Kerrigan was attacked after leaving the ice following a practice, her assailant whacking her on the knee with a police baton. It was soon sus­pected, though not yet proved, that Harding and her husband were behind the assault.

It was Ferguson’s job to decide if Kerrigan would be granted a spot onto the Olympic team despite not being able to compete at the Nationals, and what punishment should be given to Harding.

“This wasn’t only between the two skaters,” she said. “Everyone in the world was watching, and I was trying to settle the political and emotional needs of all the skaters and their families. It was an emotional time, and the longer it went on, the more people became involved. And a lot of it dropped in my lap.”

Ultimately, both skaters were allowed to compete at the ’94 Olympics (Harding was eventually banned from the sport), setting up one of the most highly anticipated events in the history of the Winter Games when they squared off in the ladies’ singles. Kerrigan would win a silver medal, while Harding would finish a distant eighth.

In the end, the scandal was the best thing that ever happened to figure skating. When Ferguson took over as president, the USFSA was still being run as a mom- ‘n’-pop operation and was more than $1 million in debt. Ferguson remembers going to a 1990 meeting at CBS, where she all but begged a vice president to televise the USFSA’s first Pro-Am event.

“He looked at me like I was some silly broad,” she told a reporter in 1994.

After Nancy-Tonya, the TV and cable networks couldn’t air enough figure skating. Over an eight-month period between 1994 and ‘95, 30 figure skating shows were televised on American tele­vision.

Ferguson was savvy enough to parlay that sudden interest into long-term relationships with network executives. But her time as president was, in her words, “exhausting.” As the first woman in the role, she met plenty of re­sistance from what could be de­scribed as the “old boys’ club.”

“They didn’t think a woman could handle the job,” she said. “I had lots of battles, because I was pretty stubborn.”

And Ferguson, who was elected to the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2017, won her fair share, none more important than when she successfully pushed to allow skaters to be paid.

“Before that, skaters were being asked to go to all these shows and they were being given a T-shirt, told thank you, and see you later,” she said. “I thought that was awful. They were being used. That’s when I stepped in and got everyone mad at me.”

Years later, Olympic medalist Paul Wylie thanked Ferguson for changing the rules to allow skaters to earn money. “He said it made the difference between him skating and giving up the sport,” she said.

Last month, Ferguson watched Valieva compete amidst a raging debate over whether she should have been allowed to step onto the ice, and she knew that politics had once again reared its ugly head.

“Anything as political as that damages the sport,” she said. “But I do think the people involved [with figure skating] are strong enough … that they understand the situation and they’re ready to fix it. They have to. There’s no other way to go.”

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