Tonya Harding

In the end, Harding was allowed to skate at Lillehammer by the U.S. Olympic Committee and the Lillehammer Games Administrative Board, but the media frenzy seemed to finally unnerve her. Banks of television cameras lined up for her practice sessions, and she skated poorly in the events themselves. At one point, she botched a jump, and skated over to the judges to show them the broken lace on her skate, which she claimed caused her misstep; they allowed her to do it over. Harding finished in eighth place overall, with the Ukraine's Oksana Baiul taking the gold medal and Kerrigan earning a second-place silver.

Harding and her personal life continued to be the source of tabloid fodder and water-cooler jokes. Gillooly sold a private videotape of their wedding night, in which Harding appeared topless in her wedding dress, to the television show A Current Affair. On March 16, 1994, she entered a guilty plea in a Multnomah County, Oregon court—the jurisdiction in which the Kerrigan attack had been planned—and admitted to lying to police and hindering prosecution efforts. She was saddled with a $100,000 fine and equally onerous court costs in addition to her own legal bills. A $50,000 donation to the Special Olympics as well as 500 hours of community service were also part of her sentence. Her community service sentence was the largest ever meted out in Oregon, and at one point Harding petitioned the court to have it reduced, but the judge refused. Her obligations included serving meals to the elderly.

In June of 1994, a USFSA disciplinary panel stripped Harding of her 1994 national championship, and banned her from skating competitively for life. She worked thereafter as a landscaper and enjoyed a brief career as a celebrity manager for professional wrestlers. She remarried and divorced once again, attempted without success to skate for another country's Olympic team—both Norway and Austria declined—and skated in a Fox television event with Kerrigan in February of 1998. They did not appear on the ice together, but made a brief joint studio appearance. One of its producers, David Krieff, told People writer Michael Neill that Harding seemed to want to make amends with Kerrigan. "She had nothing to lose," Krieff said. "She'd lost it all already."