Rivals: Legendary Matchups That Made Sports History

6. The Battle of the Carmens: Debi Thomas versus Katarina Witt

six The Battle of the Carmens Debi Thomas versus Katarina Witt A L I S O N M . W R Y N N A N D A N N E T T E R . H O F M A N N Graceful figures gliding effortlessly across the ice—Who would think that this type of activity would elicit stark competitive fire? How could rivalries emerge in a sport where throughout most of its history the competitors met only once a year at the World Championships—and National or European Championships, if they were from the same nation or continent—and once every four years in the Winter Olympics? Women’s figure skating, however, has given us some of the fiercest rivalries in the sporting world. From Tenley Albright and Carol Heiss to Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding and beyond, in the words of male figure-skating champion Brian Boitano, “[The] girls are ruthless.”1 The first Ladies Figure Skating World Championship competition was held in 1906 in Davos, Switzerland. Olympic competition preceded the establishment of the 1924 Winter Games in Chamonix with contests in 1908 in London and 1920 in Antwerp during the Summer Games. British skater Madge Syers entered the men’s figure-skating World Championships in 1902 and placed second. Syers and others pushed the International Skating Union (ISU) to include women, which they finally did in 1906.2 Women’s figure skating in the late 1920s and through most of the 1930s was dominated by Norwegian Sonja Henie, who won ten World Championships in a row as well as three Olympic gold medals. World War II interrupted international competition for much of the 1940s, but following the war Canadian Barbara Ann Scott captured two world gold medals and one Olympic gold medal. In the 1950s women’s figure skating saw a competitive rivalry bloom between Americans Tenley Albright 1WIGGINS_pages:Layout 1 2/11/10 3:25 PM Page 133 and Carol Heiss. Albright was viewed as the more athletic of the two, but she still was considered an artistic skater in the era before triple jumps made us consider the athleticism of female figure skaters. Over the span of four years, however, Heiss was only able to defeat Albright once, in the 1956 World Championships.3 In the 1960s an international skating rivalry flourished among the Netherlands’ Sjoukje Dijkstra, the German Democratic Republic’s Gabriele Seyfert, and American Peggy Fleming. Among the three of them they captured all but one World Championship gold medal in the decade and both the 1964 and 1968 Olympic gold (Dijkstra and Fleming, respectively). Fleming’s Olympic victory in Grenoble was the first to be televised in color, bringing the visual appeal of figure skating to more viewers then ever before.4 According to Gina Daddario, as recently as the late 1980s, television executives still considered the athletic successes of women athletes as trivial.5 Daddario contends that it was at the 1992 Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France, that television executives finally fully realized the potential of the female viewer/consumer and began to provide broadcasts aimed directly at this demographic; and the centerpiece of this coverage was women’s gymnastics in the Summer Olympic Games and figure skating during the Winter Olympic Games. Figure skating moved beyond its popularity as an Olympic event to a sensationalist news story in 1994. You do not need to be a figure-skating aficionado to remember the drama between American figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan that year. Kerrigan was attacked as she left the ice following a practice session at the National Championships. The bruising and swelling to her right knee made her unable to continue in the competition. This left the door open for Harding, who won the event for the first time since 1991. As we now know, Harding’s husband and his close friends were behind the attack on Kerrigan. Harding, however , was able to keep knowledge of her involvement in the plot quiet long enough to compete in the 1994 Winter Games. At Lillehammer, Kerrigan skated well enoughtowin, but herperformance was outshined by Russian Oksana Baiul, who captured the gold. Harding, who continued her theatrics at the Winter Games with a broken skate lace, finished a distant eighth.6 134 ALISON M. WRYNN AND ANNETTE R. HOFMANN 1WIGGINS_pages:Layout 1 2/11/10 3:25 PM Page 134 “Sex Komma Null für Kati”: Sex and...