A Sport on Thin Ice

There were a lot of smiles at the final outcome of the figure-skating fiasco at the Winter Games, especially from the Canadians. Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, who had been forcing smiles all week, flashed real ones when they heard that their silver medals in the ferociously disputed pairs skating event would be traded in for gold. But what made the biggest difference last week were tears.

Early on Tuesday morning, just hours after the gold medal had gone to the Russians, Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the nine judges of the pairs event and two referees convened in a windowless basement room of the Salt Lake Ice Center. The door was sealed with thick tape that kept prying reporters from eavesdropping on the deliberations. It also prevented them from hearing the weeping of the French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne. Ron Pfenning is the U.S. referee who would bring Le Gougne’s accusations to Ottavio Cinquanta, president of the International Skating Union. Last week he told TIME that Le Gougne, 40, the crucial swing vote of the pairs-skating event the night before, had sobbed to the astonished judges that her decision had been coerced. Le Gougne claimed that she had voted for the Russian skaters at the direction of the French skating federation and its president, Didier Gailhaguet. “She was very emotional,” recalls Pfenning. “She said she was pressured, that she had to put the Russians first, and she said, ‘We must do something!'”

Maybe this is what people mean by a watershed event. All last week in Salt Lake City’s Olympic Village and in many other parts of the world, there was speculation that someone had leaned on Le Gougne to vote for the Russians in exchange for Russia’s vote for the French team in the ice-dancing competition. One Olympic skating judge, who asked to remain anonymous, insisted to TIME that a deal had been struck: “The French have been trying to figure out how to win in ice dancing. I know Gailhaguet has been working for those votes.”

Gailhaguet denies those claims and suggests that pressure was brought upon Le Gougne from “left and right”–implying that it came from Canadian skating officials as well. Whatever the truth turns out to be, international figure skating and the Olympic movement itself have been shaken as never before. Even before Tonya Harding went gunning for Nancy Kerrigan, figure skating had an image problem. Not on the ice. On the ice it’s all double Axels and triple Salchows and Kristi Yamaguchi twirling straight onto the Wheaties box. Say all you want about the smiley dudes on their snowboards, but when it comes to making the Winter Games a global fascination and a very considerable cash machine, it’s the Brian Boitanos and Michelle Kwans of the world who count most.

Where things get cloudy is at the judge’s table. For years the sport has been shadowed by stories of vote trading, favoritism and collusion among judges who agree on the winners before the unknowing losers even start their routines. At the world championships three years ago, two judges from Russia and Ukraine were suspended for signaling to one another with their feet. Skating is full of fancy footwork, but we like to think it’s confined to the skaters.

Until last week, only real fans of the sport knew the extent to which skate judging can involve intrigue, deceit and shady arithmetic. For them it was just mildly surprising that a flawless performance by the Canadians could get a silver medal while the gold went to a bumpier routine by the Russians. What was truly surprising was that the matter exploded. For that, credit is due to Jacques Rogge, the new president of the International Olympic Committee. It was Rogge who pressed on Cinquanta the idea to award a second set of gold medals to Sale and Pelletier–a notion suggested to him by Richard Pound, a Canadian member of the I.O.C. Rogge’s joint press conference with Cinquanta was a diplomatic measure, allowing Cinquanta to say that the second gold was his idea. “It was the most graceful way of handling it,” says Pound.

That was a sign that Rogge is determined to depart from the laissez-faire ethics of his predecessor, Juan Antonio Samaranch. An even better sign will be an aggressive reform of Olympic judging. But for now it’s plain at least that he means to distinguish himself from Samaranch, who winked at controversies such as the bribery scandals that led up to the choice of Salt Lake City as the site of this year’s Winter Games and routinely ignored reports of bogus judging. Rogge understands that the value of the Olympic brand is on the line. He was determined not to let the figure-skating fiasco–which had already overshadowed a Winter Games more joyful and exciting than any in recent memory–make the Olympics in general look as phony as professional wrestling. He rescued it for now. Did he rescue it for good?

JUDGE NOT–AT LEAST NOT LIKE THIS

Whether figure skating should be in the Olympics at all is a question some people have been asking for years. “Maybe it’s not objective enough,” says veteran Olympic coach Frank Carroll. “Maybe we should just let ’em all race against the clock.” Don’t count on figure skating’s being booted from the Games. It’s too valuable a franchise. It always draws the biggest TV audiences of the Winter Games. And controversy only makes it more golden. The face-off between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 gained the largest audience of any Olympic broadcast in history.

But if figure skating is here to stay, the judging in its current form must go. No one would accuse the judges of being in it for the money. They are mostly unpaid. (For the Olympics this year, they get air fare, hotel accommodations and a daily meal allowance.) Most are former skaters who work their way up to the Olympics after years of judging lower-level events. They are regularly retrained and tested to keep them sharp on new developments in their field. But the very nature of the judging process in figure skating, which does not rely on clocks or tape measures, allows them to inject personal and national prejudices. Skaters are scored on two standards. Technique–things like the speed of their jumps and the intricacy of their footwork–is supposed to be the more objective of the two. Artistry is plainly in the eye of the beholder. There are no tape measures to judge originality, harmonious composition or the matching of movement to music.

The more serious problem is that the close ties of most judges to the national skating federations that name them to competitions lead some to act like operatives for their home-team skaters. At several competitions leading up to the ’98 Winter Games in Nagano, Jean Senft, a Canadian Olympic judge, was disturbed to have been privy to conversations in which judges agreed in advance on the outcomes. When she complained to skating officials, they demanded proof. So Senft brought a tape recorder with her to the Nagano games. On the day of the pairs competitions, she surreptitiously taped a phone call from a Ukrainian judge, Yuri Balkov, who asked her to vote for the Ukrainian skaters in exchange for his support for the Canadian skaters Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz.

Senft submitted the tape to the I.S.U. As a result, Balkov was suspended from his duties for one year. But to Senft’s astonishment, she was suspended for six months, a move by skating officials that would not do much to encourage other whistle blowers. “They felt I was part of the misconduct just by being on the other end of the phone,” she says. “For heaven’s sakes, if I were part of it, why would I bring it forward?” Meanwhile Balkov, his suspension complete, is at the Salt Lake City Games–as a judge in the controversial ice-dancing competition.

THE BIG NIGHT

Going into the pairs final on Monday night, Sale and Pelletier were not without their critics. Their routine was one they had performed at competitions two years ago. As music they were using the theme from Love Story. Compared with the Russians’ more nuanced classical choice, Thais, by the French composer Jules Massenet, it sounded a bit sappy and show biz. Looking over the roster of judges, many people expected a kind of cold war face-off. The judges from the U.S., Canada, Germany and Japan were more likely to back the Canadians. The Russians could likely count on the judges from China, Russia, Ukraine and Poland. That would leave the French judge, Le Gougne, as the likely deciding vote.

But the Russians did not skate their best. Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze had as many as six flaws in their program, notably Sikharulidze’s stumble on the side-by-side double Axel. Berezhnaya’s landings on the throw jumps were also not as smooth as Sale’s. Though the Russians peppered their program with innovative moves–at one point Berezhnaya opened into a spread eagle with Sikharulidze clinging to her in a spiral–Sale and Pelletier were a miracle of unity.

Then came the astonishing vote. The technical scores for the Canadians were all high, but the scores for presentation favored the Russians, 5-2 (with two tie votes), with the French vote in their camp. Sale and Pelletier looked briefly stunned. The crowd of some 16,000 at the Salt Lake Ice Center exploded in boos. The possibility of a judge’s deal was in the air immediately. The Russians were eager to sustain a long tradition of winning the gold medal for pairs skating–10 Olympic Games in a row. The French wanted just as badly to win gold in the ice dance, in which Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, the World silver medalists in that discipline, represented France’s only real shot at a first place in skating.

After Le Gougne’s outburst at the post-event meeting on Tuesday, the American referee Pfenning wrote a letter outlining her accusations and took it to Cinquanta, the I.S.U. chief. Cinquanta says that when he confronted Le Gougne with the accusations, she denied them at first. But in the days that followed, he was presented with several affidavits from people who said Le Gougne had told them she had been pressured. A high-ranking member of the I.S.U. also told of reports about malfeasance in the pairs skating. On Wednesday Gailhaguet told a reporter for the Associated Press that Le Gougne had been “somewhat manipulated” by people outside the French federation. Though he later said he had been misinterpreted, A.P. stood by its story.

That same day the I.O.C. executive board sent a letter to Cinquanta urging quick action, a message he had already received in person from Rogge. “We didn’t step in on the merits of the matter,” says Olympic committee general director Francois Carrard, “but we wanted it expedited as quickly as possible.” Toronto’s Globe and Mail reported last week that on Thursday afternoon Rogge told Cinquanta he could take the matter out of the I.S.U.’s hands entirely because Le Gougne had violated the Olympic oath she took during the opening ceremonies of the Games. To avoid that embarrassment, Cinquanta would have to act fast.

On Thursday night the I.S.U. board met to draft its plan. Le Gougne, an international judge for 15 years, would be suspended indefinitely for failing to tell the skating union immediately that she had been approached by people seeking to sway her vote. The only equitable solution would be to award a second set of gold medals to Sale and Pelletier while allowing Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze to keep theirs. For the first time, an Olympic medal decision would be changed as a result of a judge’s misconduct.

By that time Rogge and the other members of the Olympic committee were aware that the Canadian Olympic Association had filed an application before the court of Arbitration for Sport, a non-Olympic body, asking the court to hear its request for a second gold medal and to compel the pairs judges to testify. The court agreed to hear the case on Friday. That threatened to carry the dispute to a forum beyond the control of the committee and the I.S.U. On Friday morning the nine-member I.O.C. board ratified the I.S.U. plan by a 7-1 vote. China opposed it; Russia abstained.

Pelletier and Sale, meanwhile, were being pelted with valentines. Their constant sportsmanship and shrugging good cheer was probably as a good a performance as any they gave on the ice, but it was what the moment required, and it earned them a lot of goodwill. Jay Leno and Rosie O’Donnell swooned for them. Endorsement offers flooded in. They didn’t say if they were going to Disney World, but by now it would probably be willing to come to them.

For Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze, it was a much more trying week. “This kind of scandal, the TV people, the media, they make our life harder,” said Sikharulidze. This situation makes us very unhappy.” Their coach, Tamara Moskvina, insisted that their transitions and footwork were superior to the Canadians’. She stressed that her side did not protest the result of last year’s World championships in Vancouver, when Sale and Pelletier beat the Russians. “We considered that Yelena and Anton won, but it went to the other couple,” she said. “We just accepted it.”

WHERE NEXT?

At the Friday press conference at which Rogge and Cinquanta announced the dual-medal solution, Cinquanta refused to make public the evidence against Le Gougne or to offer details on just who had pressured her. It was reported that he has received four additional complaints of judging misconduct related to last week’s pairs-skating event. One claims that at the Skate Canada Grand Prix in Saskatoon, Sask., last November, Le Gougne was allegedly asked by a Russian judge to vote for the Russian pairs team at the Winter Games.

Cinquanta insisted last week that there was no evidence of Russian involvement in the judging scandal. He also promised a continuing investigation. But once the Olympic committee decided to give Sale and Pelletier the gold, the Canadian Olympic Association dropped its request to have the matter go before the more independent sports arbitration court. That means that any investigation will continue largely within the more secretive confines of the I.S.U.

“Justice was done,” Pelletier said. “It doesn’t take away anything from Yelena and Anton. This was not something against them. It was something against the system.” Will the blow-up lead to reforms in that system that have been talked about for years? One idea is that Olympic judges should no longer be nominated by the national skating federations but chosen instead by the I.S.U. While that would do nothing to solve the problem of judges’ being partial to skaters of their own nationality, it would break the tight links of association that now bind them to their national skating groups. Another idea is to choose judges just half an hour or even 10 minutes before each competition, making it more difficult to conspire among themselves and trade votes.

“I am happy for the resolution,” Rogge said last week. “I believe the full attention will come back to the athletes.” But until it’s clear just who was seeking Le Gougne’s vote, it won’t do to declare the case closed and move on. “This absolutely needs to be aired,” says Claire Ferguson, an eight-year member of the I.S.U. Council. For that matter, attention must be paid to shady judging throughout the world of figure skating and sports in general. Are the Olympics competitions or just “games”? To retain any credibility, they need to be judged in keeping with some principle higher than “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The athletes deserve nothing less. For that matter, so do the rest of us.

–Reported by Alice Park, Robert Sullivan, Jane Wulf and Mary Jollimore/Salt Lake City