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Don’t let the ornate costumes and beautiful choreography fool you, figure skaters are no strangers to scandal. In 1994, a little club-and-run thrust the sport of figure skating into the spotlight. National Figure Skating Championships in Detroit was heard round the world, as were the allegations that her main rival, Tonya Harding, may have been behind it all. Olympic team bound for Lillehammer, Norway, she gets clubbed in the knee outside the locker room after practice. Kerrigan is forced to withdraw from competition and Harding gets the gold.

Questions about Harding’s guilt remain two decades later, and the event is still a topic of conversation today. Recently, both an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary and the Oscar-nominated film I, Tonya revisited the saga, proving we can’t get enough of a little figure skating scandal. Usually it’s the top three medalists at the U. Nationals that compete for America at the Winter Olympics every four years. What about the bronze medalist, you ask? In reality, the athletes that we send to the Olympics are not chosen solely on their performance at Nationals—it’s one of many criteria taken into consideration, including performance in international competition over the previous year, difficulty of each skater’s technical elements, and, to some degree, their marketability to a world audience. Objectively, this scandal rocked the skating world the hardest, because the end result was a shattering of the competitive sport’s very structure.

When Canadian pairs team Jamie Sale and David Pelletier found themselves in second place after a flawless freeskate at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, something wasn’t right. The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze placed first, despite a technically flawed performance. Jackson Haines was an American figure skater in the mid-1800s who had some crazy ideas about the sport. Haines is now hailed as the father of modern figure skating. He also invented the sit spin, a technical element now required in almost every level and discipline of the sport. In 1902, competitive figure skating was a gentlemen’s pursuit. Her actions sparked a controversy that spurred the International Skating Union to create a separate competitive world event for women in 1906.

Olympics weren’t held until 1924 in France, several years after Madge died in 1917. Norwegian skater Sonja Henie was the darling of the figure skating world in the first half of the 20th century. The flirtatious blonde was a three-time Olympic champion, a movie star, and the role model of countless aspiring skaters. She brought sexy back to skating—or rather, introduced it.