A Brief History
On January 6, 1994, American figure skater and favorite to win the US Figure Skating Championships, Nancy Kerrigan, was attacked by two men hired by the ex-husband of her rival, Tonya Harding, beating the skater’s leg with a metal baton. In trying to clear the way for Harding in the US championships and presumably onto the Olympic team, the thugs failed to prevent Kerrigan from headlining the US Olympic figure skating team, although she was out of the US championship contest due to her injuries.
Digging Deeper
Athletes have been attacked, assaulted, or forcibly robbed many times, and today we look at a few of the worst incidents.
In 2024, Ugandan Olympic marathon runner, Rebecca Cheptegei, was doused with gasoline and burned to death by her boyfriend in Kenya.
Bizarrely, another Ugandan Olympic runner was also murdered in Kenya, this time in 2023, when Benjamin Kiplagat had his throat cut during an alleged robbery.
Proving that Kenya was not a safe place for star athletes in the early 2020s, Kenyan Olympic marathon runner Agnes Tirop was murdered by her own husband in 2021.
Finally, in 2019, American archer, Tracy Otto, was attacked while in bed with her boyfriend by her ex-boyfriend who shot out her eye with a pellet gun and then severed her spine with a knife thrust to her neck, leaving her blind in one eye and paralyzed. Oddly enough, it was this attack that spurred her into competitive archery!
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What famous athlete do you know who has been attacked?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Kerrigan, Nancy. Lucky Enough: A Journey. Grayson Books, 2019.
Rex, Sarah T. THE STORY OF REBECCA CHEPTEGEI: HONORING A LEGACY AND ADDRESSING THE EPIDEMIC OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. Independently published, 2024.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of Kerrigan during an interview in 2006 by Gianluca Platania, gianluca at Flickr, from Torino (Turin), Italy, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.