Dana Olsen/The Oregonian (left) KATU (right)

On Nov. 12, 1970, two infamous characters were given life in Oregon.

On the same day Oregon engineers used dynamite to remove a beached whale's carcass from an Oregon beach, figure skater Tonya Harding was born in a Portland hospital. Both characters would inspire awe through their sheer power, and both rose to and fell from grace, leaving behind a trail of debris that would captivate people for decades to come.

Because like the huge chunks of blubber that rained from the sky, Harding's actions would later crash down upon the world of sport with thunderous force, their echoes still reverberating today. In these two stories is a lesson for us all – the real-life fables of Tonya Harding and the exploding whale.

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KATU

BIG BLAST OF BLUBBER

The massive sperm whale came first, three days earlier in fact, when all 45 feet and eight tons of it washed ashore on a beach near Florence, about a mile south from the mouth of the Siuslaw River. Local officials weren't sure what to do with it, and as the whale carcass began to stink people started coming out to see it.



Something clearly had to be done.



The problem was, as KATU reporter Paul Linnman said in his now-famous broadcast of the event, "it had been so long since a whale washed up in Lane County, nobody could remember how to get rid of one."



You could bury the carcass, but waves would just unearth it eventually. And it was certainly too big to burn. With no better ideas, locals turned to the Oregon Department of Transportation, which decided to treat the sperm whale like a troublesome boulder and simply blow the thing up. Once disintegrated, their thinking went, seagulls and scavengers would take care of the pieces.

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And so on Nov. 12, with bystanders lined up on the dunes to watch the spectacle, ODOT engineers packed 20 cases of dynamite under the whale and set a charge. With KATU's camera rolling, the engineers counted down and within seconds a big blast of brown and red filled the air.



"The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere," Linnman reported.



Chunks as big as three feet square descended from the sky, forcing everyone to evacuate the area. One piece landed on a car, caving in its roof. Miraculously nobody was hurt, however "everyone on the scene was covered with small particles of dead whale," Linnman said.

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Oregonian file photo

A TALENTED, TORTURED SKATER

As the whale's life came to a bizarre end at the coast, a new life came into the world up in Portland. That same day, LaVona Golden gave birth to a daughter, whom she and Albert Gordon Harding named Tonya.



Tonya Harding was a talented child. She started ice skating at 3 years old, practicing at the ice rinks at the Lloyd Center and Clackamas Town Center shopping malls. By the time she was a teenager she was placing in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, her eye now on Olympic gold.



In 1991, Harding made history by landing a triple axel at the national championships, making her just the second woman in the world to ever land one in competition. It earned her first place, gave her a newfound celebrity status and punched her ticket to the 1992 Winter Olympics, where she placed fourth.

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Harding continued to skate well in the years that followed, but as she prepared for the 1994 U.S. championships and that year's Winter Olympics, everything began to fall apart.

In the days before the national competition in January, her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and one-time bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt, hired two men to assault fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan, who had won the previous year's event. One of the men tracked down Kerrigan after a practice session in Detroit and hit her in the leg with a baton. Kerrigan had to sit out the competition, in which Harding placed first.



Harding denied knowing anything about the assault in advance, and went on to skate in the Winter Olympics the next month. It was a bizarre moment. One jump into her routine, she broke a boot lace and tearfully asked for a do-over. Judges allowed it, but her performance was messy, earning her eighth place amid a chorus of boos from the audience. Kerrigan, who had recovered, won silver.



Later that year, Harding plead guilty to covering up the assault on Kerrigan. The U.S. Figure Skating Association handed down a lifetime ban, in addition to stripping her of her recent championship title. Three years after becoming the most famous skater in the world, she had suddenly become the most infamous.

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KATU

LIVING IN INFAMY

What's so incredible about Tonya Harding and the exploding whale are not just the characters themselves, but the infamy that followed them for decades to come.

In 1990, a year before Harding landed her famous triple axle, humor columnist Dave Barry resurrected the exploding whale in an article titled "The Farside Comes to Life in Oregon." The story brought renewed attention to the incident, but it wasn't until around a decade later, when viral videos stormed the internet, that the original KATU broadcast finally resurfaced. A 2006 study showed it had already been viewed 350 million times.



Meanwhile, Tonya Harding's legacy lived on in tabloids, TV appearances and publicity stunts. In 1994, a sex tape leaked to Penthouse. In 1996, she appeared in a low-budget action movie called "Breakaway." In 2002, she stepped into the boxing ring with Paula Jones for "Celebrity Boxing" on FOX. She won that fight, but her battle for respect has raged on.

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Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

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"The media had me convicted of doing something wrong before I had even done anything at all, before I had talked to anyone, before I get out of bed. I'm always the bad person," Harding said in a 2018 interview with ABC, following the release of biopic "I Tonya" the previous year. "Is it a challenge from the Lord to see how far I can be pushed until I break and become nothing?"



Tonya Harding and the exploding whale are cautionary tales for us all. It can be tempting to try to blow up our problems or bludgeon them out of our way, but some obstacles are simply too big to solve with brute force alone.



As they both celebrate their 49th birthdays today, let’s remember the wise words of Paul Linnman, as he wrapped up his blubber-soaked broadcast that day: “It might be concluded that should a whale ever wash ashore in Lane County again, those in charge will not only remember what to do, they’ll certainly remember what not to do.”

--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB

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