The Winter Olympics are underway, and that means Americans are getting outraged about something they understand even less than politics: figure skating. More specifically, figure skating judging.
While visiting my sister in Texas for her 50th birthday this week, ice dancing came on as part of NBC’s prime time coverage and the usual debate began over whether or not that is an actual sport. My position on that has been consistent forever: while figure skating is certainly athletic, it is not a real sport, if for no other reason than the method used to determine a winner is so subjective and has a sketchy history at best.
You can certainly argue that in any sport with a referee, an umpire, or a rules official the winner can be determined as much by those people as by the athletes themselves. But in baseball, hockey, football, and soccer there is still a scoreboard showing how many times the players on the field have scored, which determines the winner–not a decision by those in stripes as to who they think “did the best job” playing the sport that day.
One thing that amazes me about figure skating judges is that they have the greatest vision of anyone involved in any sport. While football, baseball, hockey, and soccer refs have to use super-slo-mo, 4K, blown-up, frame-by-frame replays to determine if a ball hit the ground, the throw beat the runner, or the puck or the ball completely crossed the goal line just a few feet away from them, figure skating judges are able to determine if a skater had proper hand, arm, leg, and foot position in multiple jumps and passes in every routine on a sheet of ice 197-feet long and 98-feet wide all day every day. I mean, how else could you possibly determine if one skater did one-tenth of one point better than any of the other skaters did on each of the same elements? (Actually, video replay is used–nobody ever mentions it during the broadcast.)
Which brings me to a point that doesn’t get talked about enough during our Olympic obsession with figure skating: judges save their “big scores” for the favorites in each event. When was the last time there was a true “upset” in figure skating–you know, a winner that had never medaled at a World Championships, who skated before TV coverage went live in the United States, and wasn’t highly promoted before the Games? I’ve found a couple of cases (Sarah Hughes in 2002 and Oksana Baiul in 1994)–but those “upset” wins involved all of the favorites falling on jumps during their routines, leaving the judges no choice but to downgrade their scores–while the winners “stayed clean”.
But the judges know who is expected to win and who is going to do more difficult routines later in the program, so if they give the first skater out on the ice anything close to perfect scores, what will be left for them to give to the favorites later on? So those that hit the ice earlier in the competition get naturally lower scores, giving them little, if any, chance to medal.
And then there is the rampant homerism. As fate would have it, the “ice dancing is not a sport” conversation came on the night that a French couple edged out an American couple for gold. While each judge’s score is posted on the TV screen, what isn’t shown is how those judges scored skaters from their home country against those from the other countries. Fortunately, there is a website called SkatingScores.com–which has a National Bias-O-Meter page with those comparisons in an easy to read and understand graph.
In the case of the ice dancing, the French judge scored his or her country’s team a whopping eight-points better than the American couple. While the American judge gave his or her country’s team three points more than the French team. Another graph shows even more outrageous spreads of judges’ scores in favor of their home country versus the rest of the field. The fact that a National Bias-O-Meter exists, and fully exposes why some skaters win and some lose, reveals the obvious problem that exists in the judging system.
If judges aren’t fudging scores for their own country, they are being coerced into fixing events for skaters from other countries willing to apply pressure on them. Who can forget the “fragile French judge” at the Salt Lake Games in 2002 who inflated her rating of the Russian ice dancers to seal a gold medal victory over a Canadian couple. When public outcry put pressure on the International Skating Union to investigate, they uncovered the intimidation plot and awarded co-gold medals to both teams (when obviously, the Russian couple should have been DQ’ed and gone home with no medal at all due to the interference of their team).
Of course, the vast majority of those watching wouldn’t have any idea what the scores should “actually” be if it wasn’t for the over-the-top commentary of NBC’s skating announcers. Every time that Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski yell out about “A BOBBLE” or “THAT WASN’T CLEAN” or “THAT WAS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT” the viewers at home are set up to believe that points are coming off, or perfect scores are on the way. But when those Russians or French or Japanese skaters still get a high score, everyone is like ‘THERE WAS A BOBBLE!! THERE WAS A BOBBLE!!” or if the Americans come up short it’s “THEY WERE PERFECT!!! HOW CAN YOU GIVE THEM THAT SCORE!!!”
So how does one fix a system that can’t really establish a transparent way to determine a winner, and that is ripe for fraud and manipulation? When there were issues about blown calls in all of the sports I mentioned before, more officials were added to crews working the game and replay was introduced as a backup to ensure greater (but not complete) accuracy. Rules were re-written or simplified to make calls easier in the moment. But when the entire premise of “victory” is based on the opinions of a panel of judges, nothing will feel legitimate–at least to real sports fans.
And that brings me to my final point: figure skating is not for real sports fans. We have hockey, and downhill skiing, and speed skating, and curling, and all the sliding events to satiate our love for good, honest competition. They have scoreboards and clocks that determine clear-cut winners and losers. Figure skating is for an audience more interested in the drama, the controversy, the whining, and the outrage. If figure skating came up with a clear-cut way to score the competition, all of that would go away–and so would the TV ratings–and all of the TV rights revenue for the International Olympic Committee. So no solution will be coming anytime soon.
Fortunately, we are just two years away from Summer Olympic gymnastics, so all of the outrage can ramp up again.
