Despite the judge's advice to Tonya that she needed to present herself as the wholesome American girl with the wholesome American family, the skater who won the gold medal that year for women's skating was Oksana Baiul, a Ukrainian orphan.
... but being an extremely young and fragile-looking orphan made it easy for audiences to 'adopt' her as a wholesome figure worthy of being an ice princess. A feel-good story, just as Nancy was constantly promoted at the time with stories about her visually-impaired mother in order to make her someone to root for. (Media coverage of Oksana took on a much more 'tsk, tsk' attitude in the following years after she turned 18, went to the US, and started partying more.)
