Throughout all these scandals, one show epitomized the era's new public obsession with the sordid scandals of the rich and famous, and even the not so. Hard Copy was your one-stop shopping for the kind of "news" that pushed the boundaries of taste and the threshold for what the American public could stomach. By the time the Simpson murder happened in the summer of 1994 and the Monica Lewinsky scandal closed the decade, Hard Copy had been feeding us a steady diet of rabid meat that would lay the framework for the foaming-at-the-mouth Perez Hiltons and TMZs of the new century.

But back to Nancy and Tonya. We all know the story by now: Harding placed eighth in Lillehammer (after a shoelace snafu during her routine) and Kerrigan won the silver medal that year for women's singles. A balletic Ukrainian skater named Oksana Baiul took home the gold that year, seemingly tiptoeing to the winner's podium behind the blinding media frenzy surrounding the Americans. In February, Gillooly took a plea in exchange for his testimony against Harding. Gillooly, Stant, Eckhardt, and getaway car driver Derrick Smith all subsequently served time in prison for the attack. After the games in March of 1994, Harding pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder prosecution of the attackers and received three years probation, 500 hours of community service, and a $160,000 fine. After being forced to resign from every major skating organization in the United States, Harding became persona non grata in the sport.

It wasn't just the Olympics that were changed with that hit to Kerrigan's leg; the entire culture seemed to slink down to the Hard Copy programming model for the rest of the decade, a hit the media in many ways is still trying to recover from. The players may have changed, but the tactics haven't. More than any other scandal of the era, from Michael Jackson's child molestation allegations to even the newly revived Woody Allen/Mia Farrow ordeal, the Kerrigan attack came to sum up the media culture of the '90s.

The Olympics are literally a world stage; America's dirty laundry was aired for everyone to see and an event that was supposed to symbolize the best in teamwork and athletic determination came to expose the ugliness of competition and the underhanded games some were willing to play for an unfair advantage. But the dirtiest laundry of all was the media culture that turned Kerrigan's nightmare into the soap opera circus it became. Looking back now, it was another step in the loss of the culture's innocence that has led us to ritually crave human tragedy on a scale of consumption that only seems to get hungrier.

Harding went on to milk her ill-gotten fame for whatever quick bucks were available, from celebrity boxing tournaments to a sex tape with Gillooly. Kerrigan for the most part went on to the quiet career of a post-Olympian: marrying, skating professionally and eventually commentating. Although the players may have moved on 20 years later, on the eve of another Winter Olympics, the audience is still in recovery.

Nancy KerriganNancy Kerrigan

Nancy, Tonya and Tabloid Culture, 20 Years Later