Truth and Lies: The Tonya Harding Story (broadcast recently on ABC, David Sloane executive producer) makes an excellent case (unintentionally) for abolishing the Olympics, which has become a sordid mess of cheating and obnoxious nationalism, where the only thing that matters is winning. It is still unclear whether Harding knew about the physical attack on her main competition, Nancy Kerrigan, before the 1994 Olympics but Kerrigan still won a medal there and Harding did not.
I find figure-skating a dubious "sport," since the judging is necessarily subjective. Harding was the first skater to do a triple axel in combination with a double toe loop and even she was unable to describe what exactly that was and what it meant. Perhaps it is something of the equivalent of the thirty-two fouettes in Swan Lake, though that is only a small part of the complex characterization required in that ballet. But figure-skating has other problems, particularly its elite image, which was not particularly enamored of lower-class high-school-dropout Harding, though she had many fans who appreciated how she overcame her poor and abusive childhood. Still, many of those who think in terms of class may be more offended by her use of "drugged" as a past tense of drag than the fact that her mother beat her with a hairbrush after she was drugged into the bathroom, and equally amused by Tonya's mother saying "we were not trailer trash; we had a brand-new trailer."
It is an unfortunate aspect of our consumer-mad society that sports and the Olympics are seen as a way to become rich and famous, even if it means cheating to win.
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