I did this a while ago for one competition, and it was pretty scary: judges TOTALLY gave higher score to their own skaters, all judges, and they also lowballed the direct competition.
Data analysis of scores/results?
- Thread starter narcissa
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I did this a while ago for one competition, and it was pretty scary: judges TOTALLY gave higher score to their own skaters, all judges, and they also lowballed the direct competition.
Totally agree. Have the judges forgotten that the judging is no longer anonymous, or do they think that no one's going to bother going into the details, like yourself? If so more power to whoever highlights the discrepancies.
I did one of the first competitions of the season and the bias was like BIAS BIAS BIAS =)
Maybe now its a bit more moderate. But still.
Another thought from my experience - it is worth to study SP and FS separately.
In my study, FS showed way more abnormalities such as a judge lowballing competition and so on.
Also, those things are not restricted to tops - judges totally fight for whatever rank they can get, not only medals.
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As I understand the ISU culture, it is expected that judges will favor their own skaters. In fact, they would be in trouble with their own federations if they did not.
For big competitions like Worlds and the Olympics, each federation sends its team. The team consists of skaters, coaches, officials and judges. The goal of the team is to bring back medals. he judges are expected to do their part.
That doesn't mean to say it's right.
It doesn´t mean its a good thing.
And even if it was fine, lowballing other skaters for a #5 placement instead of a #6 placement is still shady.
Also, while it is known in theory, I believe it should be made public and very public. Because olympics will be you know how =)
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- Jun 21, 2003
Of course it's not right. Who would ever disagree bout that? Fair play is better than cheating. That goes without saying.
But the question is this. The CoP was put into place under pressure for the IOC after the Salt Lake City thing. Its purpose was to slow down the crooks and cheaters a little. Has the IJS done any good, or are things as bed as ever.
In 1927 five time and defending ladies' champion Herma Szabo was up against a young Sonia Henia at the Wporld Championships in Oslo. The judging panel had five Norwegians and two Austro-Germans. The three Norwegian judges put Henie first and the two Austro-Germans put Szabo first. Henie won, three first-place ordinals to two.
Szabo was so outraged that she quit the sport and never competed again. The ISU responded by making a rule that from then on each country could have only one judge.
Have we made progress since then, or are we still stuck with "people will always cheat if the reward is large enough"?
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By the way, there were tons and tons of statistical analysis of figure skating back in the day. It used to be a favorite topic for statistics professors to assign to their graduate students. For some reason ordinal judging was particularly easy to examine for evidence of national bias, bloc judging, etc.
One interesting thing that came of these studies was this. Canada always turned out to be the most nationalistic country in terms of figure skating judging. People in the West always went into these studies expecting to be able to prove that the Soviet Union was the biggest culprit, but the USSR turned out to be only in the middle of the pack. This despite the fact that in 1980 the whole Soviet federation was banned for a year from sending judges to any ISU event because Russians are so evil.)
The explanation for Canada's rise to the top was usually something like this, at least for American studies. Canada always found itself to be isolated and bullied in the iSU Corridors of Power, so they had to cheat twice as hard to make up for the mighty European voting blocs that were against them.
(The U.S.A. was not quite so picked-on, because they gave a lot of money to the ISU back then, so they were treated a little more gently, even though they were regarded as naive bumblers in terms of ISU power politics.)
Is any of this true? Well, statistics don't lie, right?
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Well let's hope that no more anonymous judging helps, and especially in this day of more and more social media etc. It'll be far harder in the overall scheme of things e.g. the TSL boys calling out the American Ice Dance judge in their latest broadcast. I would be hopeful that things could change, if the ISU is willing to pursue it. More subjective things like PCS, well that may be a different matter - see all the different discussions going on, but if different individual judges know that people can be onto them so quickly then maybe more overall things might get tackled as well - 'come out with the wash' if you will.
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