FIRST DAY, FIRST SCANDAL

‘Ridiculous’ judging forces McMorris into slopestyle semifinals

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia

To the untrained ear, it sounded as though the Sochi Olympics had its first real scandal on the boil — and a judging scandal to boot.

Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris had just finished his second qualifying run of the new slopestyle event. He looked a little sore (he has a broken rib) and a lot pleased with himself (he had a grand run, and threw in a nifty triple cork).

But when his marks flashed, they were merely ordinary. He stood seventh in his heat with 89.25, which means he has to compete in Saturday’s semifinal just to get through to the final later the same day.

As he plodded forlornly through the mixed zone to meet reporters, he clearly believed he’d been jobbed.

“It’s pretty ridiculous,” said McMorris, who at 20 is the topranked slopestyler in the world. “It’s a judged sport; what can you do?”

Someone shouted that it must be confusing, to lay down a good run to such unremarkable results. “Tell me about it,” McMorris said, and trudged away.

To put it in snowboarder lexicon, it was super-sad.

But the real question was, was there something super-fishy, or God forbid even sketchy, also going on?

Enter Leo Addington, head freestyle coach for the Canadian team, about 20 minutes later.

“It’s a judged sport,” he replied when asked about the marks. “And they saw what they saw and they put down what they thought.”

Someone offered the view that McMorris’s second run was better than Max Parrot’s first one, but was marked behind it.

“It’s always hard to tell,” Addington said, “without putting each run side by side, and the judging has many criteria — execution, amplitude, use of force, variety, progression. All those things are included in their thoughts … and they’re judging the entire run, completely, all those little things that sometimes we miss or don’t miss. It’s really hard to tell unless you study each one in slow motion all the way through.”

He was then asked to talk about the top three Canadians who conceivably could sweep the slopestyle podium — Parrot, who won the X Games two weeks ago and is leading going into the final with a stunning 97.50 on his second run of his heat; Seb Toutant, who also qualified directly for the final; and, of course, McMorris.

The 19-year-old Parrot, he said, is “super-focused” and “supercompetitive;” Toutant is also “super-competitive”, “a super-solid rider”, “super-easy” to work with, and “super-positive;” McMorris is “super-positive.”

By this point, I was super-suspicious.

“Olympic Games have a rather checkered history with judged sports,” I said, thinking of the great figure skating scandal of the 2002 Salt Lake Games, which led to the new, allegedly cleaner and certainly more convoluted scoring system. Did anyone smell a rat of a similar sort here? Addington oozed calm. “We know the judges very well,” he said. “Our head judge is Canadian, Brandon Wong from Calgary, and he’s an incredible human being and he’s been judging for so many years. The judging panel here has over 100 years combined of judging, they’re at many events, so many events I can’t remember (how often) we’ve worked with (them).”

Addington pointed out just how new slopestyle is — even three years ago it hadn’t been added to the Olympics and 15 years ago, he said, “it was barely a sport” — and he said the event is constantly evolving, with new tricks “coming out continuously” and the judges “working hard to keep up with that.”

“And everybody works together, and it’s always difficult; we try to find the middle ground where people are happy.

“And,” he said, “if you really sit down and look at most runs, a lot of (the judging) is very, very accurate. And (the judges) are looking to get a ranking. They’re looking to put these top runs forward and then re-rank them at semis.

“if it were a one-shot deal, it would be different,” he said.

Now, my colleague Rob Longley from the Toronto Sun asked, “Because you know the judges so well, doesn’t that make (McMorris’s marks) even more baffling?”

“Well,” said Addington, “the thing is, the judges are very open for discussion.

“We sit down with them afterwards and say, ‘What happened here?’ We can actually do that.”

Any comparison to figure skating was completely off, he said.

That sport “had real corruption,” Addington said. “There’s definitely nothing like that here.”

With a smile, he reiterated in what appeared to be a gesture of reassurance that “the head judge is Canadian, so we’re pretty sure that that’s all good. And we can sit down and discuss and say, ‘What did you see, what did we see?’ Maybe we missed something, and we learn from it and that’s how it’s evolving. They learn our perspective and we learn their perspective.” Longley and I were reeling. “You actually sit down with them?” I asked.

“All the time,” Addington said serenely.

“I can walk right now to the judges’ tent and knock on the door and say I’d like to discuss (McMorris’s) run. It’s really good that way,” he added, unnecessarily.

Now, it may not be a conventional-type scandal, but surely there’s something a tiny bit off when a head coach praises a head judge from his own country as a super-nice person and when judges and team officials routinely huddle to discuss marks.

And bets are none of it goes very far to allay the gnawing alarm of that kid from Regina, who looked at a scoreboard and felt “a shock to the heart.”