ISU needs to address judging issues in figure skating
Sergey Bubka, the great Ukrainian pole vaulter who now heads his country’s National Olympic Committee, found time to see that a reporter’s query was answered despite the fact that back home, his countrymen are dying on the streets and the former republic of the old Soviet Union is rived with violence.
Not so much the International Skating Union, whose media aide — ostensibly here in Russia — has yet to acknowledge an aged query about the judging in ice dance.
Only late Friday, in fact, did the ISU even make fleeting reference on its website to the new brouhaha in town, this one about the judging in women’s singles. The statement confirms that the ISU “is confident in the high quality and integrity of the ISU judging system,” which is heartening.
The latest blow came after Russian teen Adelina Sotnikova was awarded the gold medal over defending Olympic champion Yuna Kim of South Korea and the graceful Italian, Carolina Kostner, who won bronze.
Before the tears had dried in skating’s infamous kiss-and-cry area, Christine Brennan, a fine sportswriter for USA Today, was reporting that among the nine judges on the bench for the event was a Ukrainian who had been previously suspended for cheating and another who just happened to be married to a bigwig on the Russian skating federation.
The Ukrainian is Yuri Balkov, who was kicked out of the sport — for all of a year — after he was caught red-handed, trying to fix the ice dance event at the Nagano Olympics in 1998 in a tape-recorded conversation with a wily Canadian judge.
He served his cruel penalty, and then it appears returned to judging without missing a beat.
The Russian is Alla Shekhovtseva, who is married to the unhappily named Valentin Pissev, the director-general of this country’s skating federation. How they marked any of the women is, of course, a secret to the public.
The ISU overhauled its judging system two years after the fullblown scandal at the Salt Lake Olympics, and while the changes ostensibly make the judging more objective, it also renders it more opaque than it was in the old days, in that judges’ nationalities are now hidden, the marks anonymous.
Thus, while it may be harder for them to collude, if they manage to do so, it’s easier to hide the collusion.
Overnight, a petition on Change.org demanding an investigation sprang up, and by this writing had more than 1.7 million signatures, and was still growing at the rate of 30,000-40,000 an hour. Certainly, at least in the petition’s early stages, many of those signing were from South Korea, where Kim is regarded as royalty.
Adding fuel to the fire were remarks from American Ashley Wagner, who finished seventh despite failing to fall in either of the two programs which make up the women’s final. Falling, apparently, is de rigueur for the women and no one told Wagner; she finished behind several crash-land-burners, including the Russian mite Julia Lipnitskaya, who is 15.
“People don’t want to watch a sport where you see people fall down and somehow score above someone who skates clean,” Wagner said. She believed the scores of the two Russians were unfairly inflated, and snapped, “People need to be held accountable.”
Skating insiders can parse the judging of the women’s program ad infinitum, and they will, just as they did the scores in ice dance. There are those who believe Sotnikova fully deserved the gold, and those who believe Kim should have won, and those who believe Americans Meryl Davis and Charlie White earned their gold and those who believe Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir were robbed.
That’s not the point — and it wasn’t Brennan’s, or Wagner’s.
The point is: is the sport so low on judges it has to rehire a cheat and appoint another who has an obvious conflict of interest? As for accountability, fat chance. Phil Hersh of the Chicago Tribune managed to get Ottavio Cinquanta, the ISU boss, on the phone Friday.
Why, he was even unaware that there was a controversy, he said.
Hersh filled him in, whereupon Cinquanta said, in part, “Would you rather have an idiot acting as a judge than a good one who is a relative of a manager of a federation? It’s far more important to have a good judge than a possible conflict of interest.”
Athletes, now, athletes are always accountable — instantly, painfully so, whether they win or lose, fall or don’t. Bets are they’d prefer idiots and non-cheaters, and they’d probably rather know who’s from which country, too.
But ethics and transparency, these are concepts wholly beyond the grasp of the old greybeards of their governing bodies. The boss of the ISU didn’t know what the fuss was all about when the Trib guy got him. Worse, he still doesn’t.