LOS ANGELES — “Skating, for Tonya, is her ticket out of the gutter.”

That is what figure skating coach Diane Rawlinson said of Tonya Harding, a rising teen star she had plucked from a broken Portland home and shot onto the ice in the mid-1980s. “She lives in a terrible rental house. There’s no supervision at all. She has no direction. Tonya would have nothing in her life if it wasn’t for her skating.”

We all know what happened next.

Harding’s husband, Jeff Gillooly, conspired to whack Nancy Kerrigan out of competition at a practice session before the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the event that would determine the American delegates to that year’s Winter Olympics.

Kerrigan recovered and won the silver medal, then reigned over Disney floats, game shows, TV specials and charity spokeswoman gigs.

Harding biffed her Olympic routine, pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder the prosecution of the attack, and was barred from competition for life. She turned to exploitation films, celebrity boxing and landscaping work. She never got her ticket out.

Now, 20 years after the Kerrigan attack, ESPN’s new documentary “The Price of Gold” (which airs tonight at 6 o’clock) complicates the narrative of the American skater who triumphed against adversity to great fortune, and the one who sank to the bottom after a brazen attack on her biggest rival.

As Nanette Burstein’s documentary makes clear, the Kerrigan-Harding affair unfolded in a commercial landscape in which economic potential hinges on appearance as much as it does athleticism. By the early 1990s, Kerrigan and Harding were toe-to-toe in American figure skating competition, but when it came to monetizing their skills, Kerrigan was skating on an elevated plane. Though both athletes emerged from working-class backgrounds, Kerrigan was blessed with patrician good looks and a sophisticated air that easily courted corporate sponsorships and Hollywood attention.

“Nancy looked like she was wealthy,” is how Boston Globe reporter John Powers puts it in the documentary. Harding, counters Connie Chung, was the “girl with frizzy blonde hair from the wrong side of the tracks.” And their performance styles reinforced the divide: While Harding powered through technical routines, Kerrigan danced.

While Kerrigan could profit off of personality and appearance without taking the gold (she won a bronze in 1992 and a silver in 1994), Harding needed to defeat everyone else, at any cost, to collect anything from her skating prowess. So even as federal investigators zeroed in on Harding in connection with the Kerrigan assault, she told reporters at a pre-Olympics presser that her mind was consumed with “these little dollar signs in my head.”

When Harding turned in a dismal performance in Lillehammer, punctuated by a false start because of a broken lace, it marked the end of a career that had never brought Harding dividends. Meanwhile, the scandal that loomed over the games attracted Super Bowl-level viewing numbers and vaulted ice skating to an unprecedented level of popular interest. Everybody made money except for Harding.

But what would have happened had Harding won? Perhaps she had miscalculated. Even if she had managed to neutralize Kerrigan at the Olympics and take home the gold, it is unlikely that Harding would have inherited all of Kerrigan’s endorsements, too. She might no longer have been dismissed as “crap,” but she would never be the queen.