Motivation Quote by Nancy Kerrigan

Kerrigan is doing something athletes rarely get credit for: naming the quiet infrastructure of “fairness” and pointing out where it leaks. On the surface, she’s talking about a procedural tweak - keep judges away from practices so they only evaluate the performance that counts. Underneath, she’s describing how reputations get manufactured in real time, how an “objective” score can be pre-loaded by a week of watching someone look sharp, look shaky, or look like the presumed winner.

The phrasing matters. “It seems” and “maybe” aren’t weakness; they’re strategic softeners in a world where calling out the system too directly can get you labeled bitter or ungrateful. “Taint” is the tell: a moral word, not a technical one. She’s implying that judging isn’t merely susceptible to error but to contamination - the kind that comes from familiarity, narrative, and proximity. Once judges see practices, they’re no longer simply evaluating a routine; they’re evaluating an expectation.

The insistence on “those four minutes” is a bid to protect the core drama of sport: the idea that the moment is sovereign, that pressure is part of the test, that anyone can rise or fall when it’s live. In figure skating’s media-saturated era - and especially in the Kerrigan/Harding moment, when storyline threatened to swallow sport whole - this reads like a plea to keep the outcome from being decided before the music starts. It’s not anti-judge so much as anti-mythmaking disguised as scoring.