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Judging System

Where is the IOC?

October 30, 2002
Article © Golden Skate

Think figure skating fans are old ladies who watch television with a handkerchief in one hand and a cup of tea in the other? Think again! At Skate America this past weekend in Spokane, Wash., fans spoke out in protest against figure skating's new secret scoring system. Designed to protect the judges from outside influence, the scoring system has come under harsh criticism from former authority figures such as Great Britain's Sally-Anne Stapleford, ex-chair of the ISU Technical Committee, who asserted that anonymity gives judges the freedom to do whatever they want without fear of reprisal. The public can no longer see which judge gave which score to a skater. Traditional event review meetings will no longer be plausible since even the referee will not know how certain judges placed certain skaters. The only evaluation of judging will come at the end of the season with nameless secret evaluators using - you guessed it - a secret computer.

The lack of accountability for judging misconduct has been a constant problem under the reign of ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta. Incompetent judges such as Juliana Beke of Hungary, whose marks in the 1998 World Championships prompted audience members to hold up a sign reading "The Hungarian judge needs glasses", and Yuri Balkov, who was tape recorded in a discussion of deal-making at the 1998 Olympics, are given slaps on the wrist and allowed to continue judging. Beke and Balkov both judged at the Olympics this year, and Balkov was also on the panel at Skate America. Ukraine's Alfred Kortyek and Russia's Stanislav Babenko, caught playing footsies at 1999 Worlds, are both still actively judging. Kortyek now judges for Israel. Fans and skaters, particularly Alexei Yagudin, are speaking out against the judges and Cinquanta - a speedskater who admitted during the Olympics that he doesn't know very much about figure skating, and a man who has tried to silence the criticism of the secret scoring system by sending out a harshly worded memo denouncing Yagudin and other critics of the system.

Almost everyone would agree that the problem is the lack of accountability for cheating or incompetent judges, yet the ISU inner circle's solution to everything is more secrecy and less accountability. As Stapleford put it, "the turkeys are unlikely to vote for Christmas." Cinquanta and the ISU have a serious public relations problem on their hands if the signs and outspokenness at Skate America are any indication. While there was always suspicion that the ISU was hiding something, now there is no doubt. The judges can't be trusted, so the public must be made oblivious to the misconduct.

Let's take the 2002 Olympic pairs competition. Under Cinquanta's theory, the outcome would have never been tainted because Marie-Reine LeGougne would have been able to vote her conscience without worrying about what French federation president Didier Gailhaguet would think. After all, Gailhaguet (and everyone else, for that matter) would never have known which marks belonged to her, or whether her marks were even counted. (Under the new scoring system, 7 or 9 judges are randomly chosen by computer from a panel of 10 or 14.) However, there is nothing in place to stop LeGougne or anyone else from voting in a corrupt manner and getting away with it! After all, with no formal event review meeting, LeGougne would have never had a chance to break down, or even to be confronted. Under the new system, the public and the media would have been clueless, and Sale and Pelletier would still be silver medalists.

The new system assumes that all judges are honest - a quick look at Balkov, Babenko, and Kortyek says otherwise - and would vote fairly if free from pressure. Even worse, judges still face pressure from federation presidents because the new system does absolutely nothing to remove power from them. If the current system were in place in Salt Lake City, LeGougne would still have had reason to vote the way Gailhaguet told her. If Gailhaguet heard so much as a rumor that LeGougne did not vote the way he told her, he would have the power to end her judging career. Even though he is serving a three-year ISU suspension for influencing LeGougne, Gailhaguet was reelected president of the French federation and still determines which judges are assigned to which competitions.

Cinquanta and cronies have been side-stepping the issue of corrupt judging for too long, and the public has finally had enough. What are Cinquanta and the ISU hiding? And, if Stapleford is correct that the turkeys won't vote for Christmas, then where is pressure from the IOC, which is perhaps the only hope in ending the nonsensical secrecy in the ISU? Figure skating will no longer be its cash cow if no one can understand the judging and corruption that is permitted to run rampant. And, gauging the reaction in the arena and in the press at Skate America, fans, skaters, and media alike have all realized that the emperor and his scoring system have no clothes.