Ice tilted when dance stakes are highest? You be the judge
To a figure skating forensic auditor, the crick in the scores would leap out immediately.
At the Four Continents championships last month, Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir — Olympic gold and silver ice dancers, with the top results on the Grand Prix circuit in their comeback season, including the finals title — drew shockingly low marks from one particular judge, marks completely at odds with the rest of the panel.
Indeed, the Canadians were placed fourth overall, behind three American teams. The judge: Sharon Rogers of the U.S. For skating skills in the free dance: 8.76 (!). Transitions: 9.24. Performance: 9.50. Composition: 9.25. Musical interpretation: 9.50. Total: 46.25.
The American brother/sister team of Maia and Alex Shibutani racked up a first-place total score from Rogers of 49.25. Skating skills: 10. Transitions: 9.75. Performance: 10. Composition: 9.75. Interpretation: 9.75.
Fellow Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates were rewarded with the same total score of 49.25. Skating skills: 9.50. Transitions: 10. Performance: 9.75. Composition: 10. Interpretation: 10.
Folding together technical and component scores for the sum tally, Rogers had the Shibutanis first at 79.40; Chock and Bates second at 79.20; a third American tandem, Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue, No. 3 at 78.50. And the Canadians fourth, out of the medals, at 78.20. It beggars belief. The marks would not be so eyebrowraising had Rogers’ assessment been anywhere in the vicinity of the other judges. They weren’t.
So maybe Rogers saw something everybody else missed. Or maybe — because this is ice dancing, with a wretched history of scores engineering — Rogers was channeling shenanigans past, lowballing the Canadians and favouring her country’s skaters.
Now, these were the Four Continents, a less significant international event. But the conspiracy theorist in me suspects there’s a backstory being built, in advance of this week’s world championships and, more crucially, the 2018 Olympics.
That backstory evokes the whispering campaign which gained traction before the 2014 Sochi Olympics — that Virtue and Moir had lost a step since their Vancouver 2010 triumph, that they’d been surpassed by their American training stablemates, Meryl Davis and Charlie White, and indeed the Americans did waltz off with gold. Believe me, manoeuvering via influencing impressions is a sorry trademark of figure skating, especially in ice dancing where scoring directives are unfathomable even to the sport’s insiders, much less the ordinary fan.
Already Rafael Arutyunyan, an Armenian-born coach who moved to the U.S. and is now training teenage sensation Nathan Chen and Ashley Wagner, has been quoted on a figure skating blog as tipping the gold medal chances in Pyeongchang away from Virtue and Moir. “In my opinion, it will be a big surprise if Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir win in dance. They were Olympic champions, did not win in Sochi, took a break and now they’re back in the lead,” he said in an interview during Four Continents. “Can they still hold all year? In my opinion, it’s hard.”
It’s not paranoia to take those remarks as laying the groundwork for an upset in Pyeongchang. Were the Canadians to win there, they would become only the second ice dance duo in history — albeit a relatively short history, ice dancing adding to the Winter Games only in 1976 — to repeat as champions. (Russians Oksana Grishuk and Evgeny Platov did it in 1994 and 1998.) Davis and White were the first U.S. dance champions.
Virtue and Moir have made no comment about the marks they received from Rogers. It ill-behooves figure skaters to complain about judging. The blowback can be punishing, as Canadians Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz — 2003 world champions — discovered. Skaters can be slyly sent to Coventry for questioning biased judging.
Virtue, speaking to Canadian reporters last week, noted how the sport’s depth of field and technical proficiency has changed during the two years they were away from competition. “Teams are executing extremely clean turns and technical callers are also recognizing those things, looking for different things. The specific requirements are much more pertinent. You can’t miss. But there’s also a little more freedom in the rules creatively, which is nice.”
Moir concurred. “The biggest part is just the cleanliness of the turns. The callers are looking for the absolute perfect turn on the ice. In order to get that Level 4, you need to make sure that you don’t come close to hitting the toe pick, that you have clean entries and exits at every turn. They ( judges) can be a little more vigilant, a little hard.
“We expect them at world championships to be one of the hardest panels that we’ve come across all year. I appreciate when they reward people for executing. Unfortunately, the flipside of that is if you make a mistake you have to pay for it.
“The judging has been pretty spot on and we’re looking forward to another clean world championship that will be really good for ice dance. The people who have the best turns and the best whole package coming out on top.”
Their faith in the system is . . . sweet.
Two-time world champions Virtue and Moir have shifting their training base to Montreal and changed coaches since last they vied for global laurels. Training right alongside them are two-time and defending world gold medallists Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France, but second behind the Canadians at the Grand Prix finals in Marseilles in December.
“We’re lucky that we get to train beside Gabby and Guillaume,” said Moir, although the Gallic duo is from a newer ice-dance era. These teams didn’t come up the ranks together.
“We’ve watched them a lot in practice. Hopefully they’re watching us. For Tessa and I, when we watch them, there’s a lot of things they do well that we can take from . . . it’s just motivating to be able to watch younger teams excel.”
They all deserve the best of judging.
But nobody scores the judges.