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Skating controversy has forever changed sport — for good or ill
By Jenifer K. Nii
Deseret News Olympic specialist
Figure skating changed forever on Feb. 11, 2002.
The day Canadian pairs skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier "lost" the gold medal to Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze in the first figure skating competition of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games altered the course, not only of the skating competitions to follow, but possibly of the Games themselves.
Suddenly, the International Figure Skating Union, the sport's international governing body, found itself sullied anew by allegations of corruption within its ranks and pressed from all sides to fix a system that apparently buckled under the weight of one judge's "emotional instability."
The judge, Marie Reine Le Gougne of France, admitted (and then recanted the admission) that she was pressured to vote for Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze. Though the investigation into the truthfulness of her admission is ongoing, Le Gougne was suspended, the Canadians awarded a gold medal, and a new system proposed that would take the sport in a new — and possibly frightening — direction.
But the pairs debacle did more than that. It took only a few days for other federations in other sports to begin contesting the results of their events: the Koreans in short-track speedskating, the Russians in cross country and ladies' figure skating. Though the genesis of their allegations varied — a failed blood test for the Russian cross country athlete, and a cross-tracking violation in speedskating — the bottom line was the same: Something unfair had happened, and they wanted the result of the event changed.
Perhaps the same allegations would have been made even if the pairs incident had not occurred. But clearly, national sport federations now appear more willing, more empowered, more driven to question referees, judges and results.
The Canadian skaters succeeded in their effort to expose the seedy underbelly of skating — bloc judging, politicking and vote-swapping. And skating fans worldwide applauded. It took hours to do what nearly a century of bureaucracy had failed to do: bring the ISU to seriously consider changing the system by which its athletes are judged.
The proposal for change, submitted by ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta, was ambitious: scrapping the entire deduction-based system in favor of a merit-based one; randomizing the judge's votes; rewarding harder tricks with bigger scores.
But it also raised the eyebrows of some few insiders, who worried that such a system would do little to make judging the sport fair, while diminishing what makes it the most popular sport of the Games. Such a system may punish skaters like Michelle Kwan, possibly the most beloved of the past decade, in favor of artless figure-jumpers who rack up points but bore audiences.
Perhaps if Sale and Pelletier had, as Russians Artur Dmitriev and Natalia Mishkutenok did at the 1994 Lillehammer Games, where they lost in similar fashion to their countrymen Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, simply taken their lumps and gone quietly into the night, much of the protests of 2002 would not have happened. But perhaps it is good that they did not.
E-mail: jnii@desnews.com
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February 25, 2002
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