Tonya Harding - Early Life

Early Life

Harding was born in Portland, Oregon, the daughter of LaVona and Al Harding. She had a half-brother, Chris Davison (deceased). Her father had health problems that sometimes made him unable to work. She claims that her mother sexually abused her, a claim her mother denies. She began skating at an early age. She landed her first triple lutz at age 12. Her mother made many of her skating costumes.

She stopped attending high school during her sophomore year and later earned a GED as she started receiving invitations to international skating competitions while she was still in junior high school.

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