Outside opinion:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/705183.asp?pne=msn
However you figure, decision wrong
Canadians should have won gold in pairs, but judges blew it
COMMENTARY
SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 11 — This, folks is figure skating, ethereal and poetic, beautiful and moving on the outside, but inside, wracked by preconceptions and decisions that are as egregiously unfair as the worst that boxing has ever offered.
IT WAS ALL out there, an ugly, festering sore despoiling a marvelous performance by the Canadian pair of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. They skated a perfect program, filled with energy and life, perfectly mated to their music, so obviously better than that of their opponents that anyone but a figure skating judge could see it.
And that was the rub, because the Russian pair of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were the judges’ favorites long before these Olympics started. As such, they were expected to win the gold, not just by fans, but by the judges.
It is a story as old as the sport. As long as they didn’t skate the entire program on their butts, the Russians were going to win.
They lacked luster in the free program on Monday, and Sikharulidze missed a jump and bobbled a couple others. Their program was graceful and fluid, a dreamy, languid and romantic, the way the judges like a pairs program to be. But it was far from their best, far from what the Canadians, who followed them on the ice, put out.
Four judges put the Canadians first; five the Russians. The crowd booed when the scores went up. Pelletier waved his hands dismissively in bemused disgust, saying later, “This is figure skating, people. If I didn’t want this to happen to us, I would have skied.” Sale, who had the wind knocked out of her during the warm-up when she accidentally collided with Sikharulidze and skated the program in pain, fought the battle of her life to keep from bawling on camera.
Even Scott Hamilton, the NBC analyst, former Olympic gold medalist, and one of the biggest fans the sport has, refused to accept the decision as fair. “If you’re upset with anything, put it on the judges,” he said, begging viewers not to blame the Russians, who did, after all, skate as well as they could and were innocent of complicity in their medal.
The Russians didn’t even watch their Canadian rivals skate, so they could legitimately claim ignorance. Anyway, the skaters are never involved in these judging controversies. That’s something that goes on with the national federations. We’ll do this for you; you do that for me. In those games, the Canadians always lose, because the Canadians are honest. And from now on, everyone in the sport will be watching the judging of future events to see who might have done the Russians a favor and what they might get in return.
It’s depressing to have to talk about things like this, but figure skating, like boxing, leaves you no choice. The sport boils with rumors. No one can prove them, but over the years, there are decisions that everyone questions. And the rumors continue.
“We skated absolutely perfect,” said Sale, who beamed when their program was over, knowing that no one could deny her partner had won the gold. Poor, naive young woman.
“It’s a perfect moment for us,” added Pelletier, who kissed the ice when they were done. “It was amazing.”
Said Sikharulidze: “We’re all skating our best and the judges make a mark and that’s it.”
The problem is that the judges sometimes make their marks long before the Games begin. There is no objective judging in the sport, nor can there be, because the judges are utterly involved in the sport, go to the competitions, form opinions of who’s best. When when it comes to the big competition, they already have their favorites, and that’s true whether you want to believe in backroom deals or not. And then they make their expectations reality.
They don’t need much reason to do it. It’s enough for them to say that the Russians may have had a few flubs, but they had a better program and so deserved a higher score. It’s all smoke and mirrors, but there’s no appeal. What’s done is done, even if it’s wrong.
It’s a good thing they don’t decide many sporting events this way. If they did, the Yankees would be reigning World Series champions and the Rams would have won the Super Bowl — on technical merit and artistic presentation. And it’s nothing if not ironic that another sport who comes up with results like this is boxing, the brutal antithesis of the ethereal grace of skating.
Maybe some day skating will fix the judging problems. Don’t wait for it to happen, though. The shame of it in these Olympics is that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze would be a great story whether they won the gold or not.
She’s 24, blond and petite and just over 5 feet tall. He’s 25, dark and broad-shouldered and nearly a foot taller. She started her career with another skater, Oleg Shliakhov, in another country, Latvia. But they had a stormy relationship and she would later say he beat her and abused her. But she stayed with him, until, in 1996 during a practice session, Shliakhov’s skate accidentally hit her full force in the temple, caving in her skull and putting her in a coma.
She had been planning on leaving him, and after her hospitalization and a long recovery, she moved to her native Russia and teamed with Sikharulidze. They won their first world championship in 1998, two months after winning silver in the Olympics, and repeated the next year. In 2000, she was suspended for taking a banned stimulant — unwittingly in medication, she said — but they came back in 2001 to win the worlds and came here as the favorites.
With them, they brought a 10-Olympiad winning streak in pairs, an unmatched run of domination of a sport by one country. Russian skating has a lot of pride and identity wrapped up in that streak, and apparently, they weren’t going to lose it this year, even if they weren’t the best.
That’s how it happened. Figure skating took something beautiful and made it ugly, staining the sport, staining the Olympics, staining us all.