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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The figure skating people were amusing for a while with their little controversy. Why won't they go away?
Feb 19, 2002 | You're sorry now, aren't you?
You're sorry you got all exercised over that skating decision last weekend, the ones where the cute Canadians wuz robbed by Osama bin Laden and the French lady with the alligator purse. It seemed so unfair, you thought. Am I right? And you talked about it at the water cooler and you read the papers and you watched the TV coverage and it seemed important.
And now you're sorry, right? Because these people will just not go away.
On Monday, when we should have had a holiday from the figure skating controversy as well as our jobs, the biggest news in Salt Lake City was ... the figure skating controversy. International Skating Union president Ottavio Cinquanta, suddenly a very famous person, announced a proposed new judging system that he called a "total revolution" in the sport, and the French judge reversed her position yet again about whether she was or was not pressured to vote for the Russian pair. If you're keeping score, her story as of this writing is that she was not; she voted her conscience. The National Weather Service announced plans to provide real-time updates of her position on this matter on its Web page.
Under the proposed new scoring system, which Cinquanta called "the project," there would be 14 judges, not nine, but seven of them would be drones. Their votes wouldn't count. Only a computer would know which seven votes were real. And the world would only see a final, cumulative score, not the individual scores we see now. The idea here would be to prevent "bloc voting" -- all the Eastern Europeans give the Russians higher scores, for example, though I don't see how this system prevents that -- as well as vote brokering.
As Cinquanta so quaintly put it in his Italian-accented English, "Suppose that I want to ask a judge to help my skater. OK, I go there, I say, this is a beautiful month in Honolulu for you, your girlfriend and so on. But to whom I say this? Firstly, I do not know if this judge who has gone to Honolulu with my money is the one voting. Secondly, the judge can go to Honolulu with the nice girl, I pay his expenses, and then he doesn't vote for me, because nobody knows who has voted." In other words, the secret ballot means there's no way to know if the judge you bribed has come through.
The other part of the proposal would do away with the familiar 6.0 scoring system, under which skaters start with a 6.0 score and then have points deducted as they go through their routine, and replace it with a system in which the skaters would get a fixed number of points for each element -- two for a double axel, three for a triple axel, for example -- and those points would be multiplied by some number determined by whether the moves were performed in a way the judge thought excellent, very good, mediocre or whatever.
Now, as entertaining as it was to listen to Cinquanta outline his hypothetical cheating scenario (I had a brief reverie in which I pictured myself canoodling in a Motel 6 in Columbus, Ohio, with Bea Arthur and $150 in unmarked bills while thinking, "Oh, yeah, baby, the Belarusian skater has got the gold!"), I couldn't get over the feeling that somewhere along these last few days, the pairs figure skating controversy jumped the shark. It ceased to be interesting. Now these people are just hanging around.
I'm thinking the key moment was when the skating honchos announced that Canadians David Pelletier and Jamie Sale would be awarded gold medals to share with the Russians, Anton Sikharulidze and Yelena Berezhnaya. (If this controversy goes on much longer, I'm going to be able to just type their names, instead of cutting and pasting every time.) OK. End of story. Happy ending for the cute couple. Bummer for the Russians. Let us move on. There are hockey tournaments to tend to. The curling is rocking. Bobsledders and ski jumpers and various other fly-down-the-mountain types are flying down the mountains.
The proper thing for skating officials to do at this point would have been to announce that they were conducting an investigation -- they did this -- then skulk around a little, and then drop the whole thing and let us enjoy the Games. They've had the same stinking rules for a hundred years. They didn't need to fix them this week.
But no. We, the public, were apparently clamoring! For change! Right! Now! Never mind that in three weeks you'll be able to spray Main Street with machine-gun fire at lunch time without hitting a person who cares at all about how figure skating is judged, or even one who plans to care at any time in the next three years, 11 months and a week.
