The incredible saga of figure skater Tonya Harding has taken another bizarre turn.
This one was a death threat Thursday, which led her to withdraw from regional qualifying for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
The threatening call, made anonymously, was received just before Harding was to begin the competition on her home rink in Portland, Ore.
After a five-hour postponement and discussions with security officials, Harding chose not to skate. She accepted the offer of a bye into December’s Pacific Coast sectional event. The technical program phase of the regionals was held without Harding late Thursday.
Harding, the 1991 national champion, must finish in the top four at sectionals to qualify for the January national meet, results of which will determine the 1994 U.S. Olympic figure skating team.
In the two years since winning that national title, Harding has been involved in several unsettling incidents, on and off the ice.
Last month, when police were called to investigate reports of a gunshot, they removed a handgun from Harding in a suburban Portland parking lot. She and her husband, Jeff Gillooly, told police the gun went off accidentally, and the investigation has been closed.
Then, in her first competition of the year at Skate America in Dallas, Harding seemed on her way to winning when she stopped during the four-minute free skate. After explaining that her blade had come loose, Harding was allowed to resume her performance but wound up stumbling to third.
Since she won the national title in 1991, Harding also has: twice filed for divorce and twice reconciled with Gillooly; threatened another motorist with a baseball bat, which she claimed was a Wiffle bat; fired, rehired and refired one coach; finished fourth in the 1992 Olympics; failed to make the 1993 U.S. team for the World Championships; and suffered a variety of physical ailments, the most recent an ovarian cyst, which she said risks being ruptured.
Harding, 22, left the rink Thursday with no comment. Neither she nor her coach, Diane Rawlinson, could be reached.
Icy comebacks: Both Nancy Kerrigan, the reigning U.S. champion, and Jessica Mills, the 1989 World Junior Champion, showed flashes of past brilliance last weekend.
Olympic bronze medalist Kerrigan, whose 1992-1993 season was a disaster despite the national title, started out the new season in the same position she had ended the last: on her rear end.
She fell on a triple-lutz jump in the technical program phase of the Pirouetten competition on the 1994 Olympic rink in Hamar, Norway, and was third going into the free skate. Kerrigan then rallied, landing all five triple jumps she attempted, to beat Josee Chouinard of Canada for the title.
Mills, 19, of Evanston, who has struggled with injuries since winning the world juniors, beat Chicago native Nicole Bobek, 16, for first place at the Southwest regional qualifying. Both Mills and Bobek go on to the Midwest Sectionals Dec. 5-11 in Indianapolis, where the top four advance to nationals.
Meanwhile, in an exhibition at Boston Garden last Sunday, two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt of Germany flawlessly executed the technical program she is using in an attempt to compete in a third Olympics. That program included a jump combination of triple toe loop-double toe loop.
Witt, 27, who has not skated under Olympic-style rules since the 1988 World Championships, will do three more exhibitions before the German National Championships in December. The Germans will not select their two women for the Olympic figure skating until after the European Championships in January.
Globetrotting: Susie Wynne and Russ Witherby, the No. 2 ice dancing team in the U.S., give an exhibition Saturday at the Barrington Ice Rink. . . . The 1996 U.S. women’s Olympic marathon trials have been awarded to Columbia, S.C., with a date to be determined. . . . The three world records (1,500, 3,000, 10,000 meters) set by Chinese women runners at their National Games in September have been ratified by the International Amateur Athletic Federation.
