He has been caught on the phone numerous times trying to bribe judges and fix placements. He was also caught on camera giving foot signals to other judges. How dare the powers that be let him continue to have a place in the sport, let alone bringing him out when it serves their agenda best. No other judged sport would allow something like that (well other than the one sport that is worse- rythmic farcetastics which allow Moms, Coaches, and Agents of the gymnasts to judge).
Yup, I found numerous details about him and his past (by the way, Cinquanta thought it was a "minor violation")
According to Sonia Garbato (Italian figure skating referee):
"In the last ten years we had several cases for which the integrity of the ISU and the credibility of the sport were really jeopardised by the misconduct of a few judges. Nevertheless, Yuri Balkov, recorded on tape while going through "planned" placements for the free dance at the Olympics in Nagano in 1998, and Sviastoslav Babenko and Alfred Korytek, caught on tape cheating by Canadian television at the 1999 World Championships in Helsinki, got very mild sanctions and are all back judging. The ISU never felt that they would discredit or jeopardise the credibility and the integrity of the ISU, even if this was really the case. LeGougne will be back judging next month, April 2005, if she wants to."
Sharon Begley (Senior correspondent at Reuters):
Until the Tonya-Nancy soap opera, however, the skating establishment was always pretty adept at deep-sixing its dirty laundry. Before the Nagano Games in 1998, Canada's Jean Senft pierced the Olympian wall of silence by accusing her fellow ice-dancing judges of vote trading. The ISU's response? Slapping her with a citation for pro-Canada bias in her scoring. But Senft hadn't spent years in the piranha-filled waters of international figure skating for nothing: she had taped phone conversations with the Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov listing what order the ice dancers would finish--before it took place. Although suspended briefly, Balkov is here at Salt Lake City and again judging ice dancing. At the 1999 World Championships, the Russian and Ukrainian judges were videotaped sending signals to each other before recording their marks in the pairs final; a Russian team won and the results stand. And national chicanery was always easier to get away with than the international kind.
It's not a conspiracy. Nope. It's a fact.