SALT LAKE CITY – Finally, figure skating may have had its epiphany. If NBC’s source is right – that French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne told referee Ron Pfenning she was pressured to vote for the Russians in the pairs figure-skating Monday night – the sport picked the perfect forum to blow itself up so it can start over again and get it right.
The fix, apparently, was in. And now figure skating has no choice but to fix itself up by spilling out all the arsenic held to judges’ lips and concealed under its competitors’ pretty costumes for years. This is the Olympics, when the world cares. And it won’t care about skating any more if there is no integrity to its results.
So, it’s all out in the open now, even if Le Gougne apparently denied the allegation when Ottavio Cinquanta, president of the International Skating Union, confronted her with Pfenning’s allegation. By Monday’s meeting of the ISU, Cinquanta will have on his desk an official appeal and call for an independent inquiry from the Canadians on behalf of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, who lost the gold to the Russians on the basis of one vote they never had a chance to earn.
The Canadians are on record as saying all they want is a second gold medal, which is the only right thing to do, since we don’t know how that vote that swung first place the Russians way would have gone had it not been coerced.
Canada got the IOC to award another gold after synchronized swimmer Sylvie Frechette finished second in Barcelona because the judge was not allowed to correct a score she recorded by inadvertently hitting the wrong button.
“You can be assured if we find something improper, the [ISU] punishment will be very tough,” Cinquanta told a news conference. His definition of “tough” is as open to question as his sense of propriety. The 11 members of his council don’t assemble until Monday, after two stages of ice dancing, the event in which the French vote for the Russian is supposed to be coming back for a French skater.
If the IOC wishes for action before Monday, if the Russian and French judges aren’t removed from the panel immediately, there should be no delay in getting rid of Cinquanta. He knew the seriousness of the allegations when he met the media yesterday, moved his lips about reform and then got defensive.
“We are on the eve of a possible review of the judging system to limit the possibilities of misunderstanding,” Cinquanta said. That sounded like a good thing until he was asked about eliminating the practice of a judge coming from the same nation as a competitor.
“It’s like saying these judges are cheating,” he said.
Well, that is what people are saying, and for the good of the sport, the idea is to get them to say it less. The bias safeguard already in place – any judge who votes a countryman two or more places above the consensus of the other eight must submit a letter of explanation to the referee – is almost worthless if countries are trading votes.
Changes in the way judges are selected and policed have to be significant. A Ukrainian one suspended for improprieties in Nagano has been restored for these competitions. “The suspension was served,” shrugged Cinquanta, a reminder that accepting a mandate for changes and making sound ones are two different things.
Nothing that happens now can be just for the sake of appearance, or else it mirrors the object of the whole sport: Making an impression. You can’t leave a worse one, before all the world, than tampering with the results of an Olympics.
