Tonya Harding claims she's shockingly good at archery

(Image credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

published 10 January 2018

Tonya Harding — now Tonya Price — is best known for her professional skating career and the controversy that followed her ex-husband and bodyguard hiring an assailant to attempt to break Nancy Kerrigan's leg ahead of the 1994 Olympics. Speaking to The New York Times about the new biographical film I, Tonya, though, Price revealed she also has another skill that she unexpectedly excels in: archery.

[Harding] and [Joe Price, her husband] would spend hours hunting together, just as she used to do with her beloved father — Mr. Price with a muzzleloader and Ms. Harding with a bow and arrow because she wanted "to give the animal a 50-50 chance to make it interesting and fair" (and also because felons aren't technically supposed to possess guns in Washington State). Do you know how good of an archer she is? She says she has successfully done no fewer than eight Robin Hoods — shooting an arrow that splits another arrow, which itself was already in a bull's-eye, 30 yards away — and that's nothing compared to her fishing skills. (But she doesn't want to elaborate. "Some people," she said. "If you eat a carrot you're killing it.") [The New York Times]

Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner noted that during the interview "a lot" of what Price told her "wasn't true." But Price wanted to clear up disinformation of her own. Price said one of the few details she quibbles with in I, Tonya is that the way the film is edited makes it "look as though she hunted for rabbits and that is how she got her fur coat. Not true. She bought that coat." Read the full profile at The New York Times.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.