But you were both so young, I said. And the press was so hard on you before they’d heard the full ——

Stop it, she said. Don’t compare her to Monica Lewinsky. She is nothing like Monica Lewinsky, she said. Tonya wasn’t making mistakes like a privileged person who gets an internship at the White House. Tonya was surviving. (Whereas Ms. Lewinsky wasn’t involved in a violent crime, so.)

She shook her head. Will we ever get it? For her, the rules made an ascent in skating nearly impossible for her despite her physical dominance over it. All she’d been trying to do was become a true American dream story. Do you know that in 1996 she was asked to move to Australia to skate for that country and represent it? She turned them down. (Ice Skating Australia told The New York Times that it had no record of contact with Ms. Harding.) “They loved me but America didn’t and I still said I’m sorry but I’m only going to represent my country. Because I love my country. If they don’t love me, I don’t care. I don’t care.”

She thinks that if she could have done a clean program at the Olympics, if her lace hadn’t broken, if she hadn’t been so frazzled and beaten down by the news media, we would be having very different discussions about her. We would be marveling at all she overcame. Her movie arc would have a heartfelt and triumphant trajectory like “Rocky” or “Rudy.” The international judges loved her, after all, she’s pretty sure. She just had to get past the American ones who found her existence and her dominance so disgraceful — the ones who set such an impossible gauntlet for her. But instead, by the time she got to Lillehammer, the Olympic committee seemed set on punishing the United States for its sideshow. Ms. Kerrigan, who skated a stellar program, even after all that had happened, should (arguably) have won the gold and got silver instead. There was a sense that the judges were sending a message, that the Olympics were no place for American scandal.

Everything she did back then was a continuation of the things she had always been rewarded for, which were her scrappiness and her invention and her survival. Was she supposed to play by the rules and let her talent rot inside her extraordinary body? She’s saying that for girls like her, playing nice and fair would have gotten her nowhere. If it had worked out, we would say she was the manifestation of the American dream. Now instead we just say she’s very American.