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Decision to share gold may bring new problems
By Jenifer Nii
Deseret News Olympic specialist
Pandora, meet the Olympics.
The brouhaha over pairs skating at the 2002 Winter Games exploded Friday when gold medals were given to Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier after a probe showed evidence of wrongdoing on a judges panel.
But the precedent-setting decision by the International Skating Union and the International Olympic Committee to force Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze to share the gold medal opens a Pandora's box of problems.
For example: Will skaters be more prone to demand investigations of collusion? Will skating officials be more willing to overturn the votes of judges? Have officials allowed public opinion to sway the outcome of an Olympic event?
Perhaps there should be — as many have suggested — an overhaul of the figure skating judging system.
But a specific "system fix" is much harder to come by, say figure-skating insiders, officials and former Olympians.
Gerri Walbert, executive editor of Blades on Ice magazine, has covered figure skating for 17 years. She points out a central challenge in patching the wounds left raw by the week's events: Figure skating by its very nature is a subjective sport. Part athletics, part dramatics.
"Both Anton and Elena and Jamie and David are excellent teams," Walbert said. "It's not like one was a dud."
But that's not the rub, she said. "The scandal was in the judges. Nobody says they all have to vote the same. That's why there are nine of them. But you don't want judges making deals."
Figure skating has a rather lengthy deal-making rap sheet.
Most recently, in the pairs event at the 1999 World Championships, judges from Ukraine and Russia were suspended by officials after they were caught giving each other signals with their feet indicating how they would vote.
But the suspension of two judges did not affect the result, which was decided by a 7-2 vote in favor of Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze over Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao of China.
The sport has also made some changes in order to address judging irregularities. Among them, a video replay system in effect in time for Salt Lake's Olympics and an elaborate scoring system by which placements are calculated.
ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta said this week he planned to submit a proposal to the 11-member ISU council to further improve the judging system. "I think we are on the eve of a possible revision of our judging system," he said. "We must limit the possibility of misunderstandings."
What Cinquanta did not say was exactly how he planned to accomplish that. Insiders say the ISU should do for the rest of skating what it did for ice dancing: choose the panel of judges just minutes before the event.
Others have suggested selecting the panel from a "neutral" pool of judges — those nations who do not have skaters in the competition.
Walbert advocated making the technical mark the tie-breaker so that in close competitions more weight is given to strengths in the elements — jumps, spins, footwork, — than the more theatrical aspects of a skater's program.
Christopher Bowman, the 1989 and 1992 U.S. men's champion and two-time Olympian, warned against reducing figure skating into a jump-fest.
"The bottom line is that figure skating is called figure skating for a reason," he said. "It's not called figure jumping. It's not called figure popularity or figure choreography. I think that what the Canadians have tried to do is force the ISU into sequestering the judging panel and turning them into jurors. That's disturbing to me, because that takes the subjectivity, people's likes and dislikes, out of the sport."
And, Bowman said, while there are flaws — even corruption — in figure skating, what happened this week poses even more nefarious possibilities for the future.
He took issue with the way the Canadian skating federation, ISU and IOC relied on "one-sided," "hearsay" information, calling it more a muscle-job than a search for truth.
"I don't want to give people the impression that skating judging is crooked," he said. "It is what it is. It is subjective. People have their opinions. But people, like myself, who are Olympians, know this coming in. It's not up to us to decide, or for any federation to overturn, unless we want to turn figure skating into 'America's Home Videos,' where winners are chosen by the studio audience."
Cinquanta will submit his proposal to the ISU council on Monday in Salt Lake City. It won't be the first stab at improving the way figure skating judges work. And, if history has shown us anything, it won't be the last.
E-mail: jnii@desnews.com
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February 16, 2002
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