Tonya Harding Planning A Comeback

Tonya Harding is struggling to rebuild her life, pals say, after the figure-skating queen's nightmare plunge into disgrace, booze, obesity and poverty!

That’s the reality movie audiences don’t see in the hit flick "I, Tonya," based on the notorious Olympic bad girl’s competition with U.S. Figure Skating Championship goddess Nancy Kerrigan (left), who was kneecapped by a hit man hired by Harding’s then-hubby Jeff Gillooly in 1994.

Tonya — once a 105-pounds skating phenom who was the first woman to land two triple-axel jumps in the same competition — hit 225 pounds at her peak, The National ENQUIRER learned from one of the skater's pals, who said Tonya “has struggled with obesity all of her life — and a lot of it’s due to her drinking.”

As the movie starring Margot Robbie is branded “a sham and a whitewash,” Tonya is trying to clean up her act — swearing off drinking and whipping her flabby bod into shape for an ice-skating exhibition for the film’s release.

The blue-collar girl Tonya was linked to one of the most despicable scandals in the sport’s history — the attempted crippling of her rival Kerrigan. At the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Nancy was attacked by Shane Stant, who struck her about an inch above the knee with a police baton.

The assault was traced back to Gillooly, who Tonya married at 19, and her bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt. Plucky Nancy recovered in time to win a silver medal at the 1994 Olympics, and went on to headline in ice shows in the ensuing years and competed just last year on "Dancing with the Stars."

Tonya made a plea deal with the FBI, admitting to conspiracy to hinder prosecution, and was banned from the U.S. Figure Skating Association for life. The five-foot-one athlete “got as big as a house!” after getting kicked off the ice, says the source. “She smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish.”

She’s since made headlines with a sex tape and a few bucks boxing and wrestling. According to Tonya, drinking runs in the family. She says her mother was a brutal alcoholic, who degraded and beat her and moved the family thirteen times before she was in the fifth grade.

“I was told my whole life, you’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re never going to amount to be anything,” she said. She claimed Gillooly and two others raped her at gunpoint to keep her from talking to the FBI. They denied her charges. A 99-day marriage to Michael Smith in 1996 followed her 1993 divorce from Gillooly.

She’s been married to Joseph Jens Price since 2010. They have a six-year-old son, Gordon. Tonya has moved numerous times, was evicted once for not paying rent, and now lives in a rundown ranch-style house in Washington state. She also did time for a DUI conviction.

Her new manager Michael Rosenberg plays down Tonya’s boozing and says, “She occasionally drinks only beer.” He admits she ballooned and was “fat” following the scandal, but insists she’s now just a few pounds above her skating days. “Her life now is wonderful,” he insists.