Figure Skating Has a Judging Controversy

The first big judging controversy of the Winter Games is here. American ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates won silver this week, but many of their supporters say Chock and Bates skated well enough for gold, reports the Wall Street Journal. The judging process in skating is subjective, and the main reason for the controversy is the scoring of the French judge. She gave the French duo of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron her highest score and the Americans her lowest in the free dance—the gap of 7.71 points between her marks was by far the largest of the nine judges, per NBC News. The French couple eked out the gold by a total of 1.43 points. Et, voila: controversy.

On its face, that looks like classic home-country favoritism, but the scoring system used in figure skating complicates the story, writes Justin Peters at Slate. Under the International Judging System, the highest and lowest marks for each technical element and each artistic component are thrown out before the rest are averaged. That design is supposed to blunt the impact of any one outlier. And national bias wasn't unique to France: the American, Italian, Spanish, and Canadian judges all gave their own skaters notably high scores, a pattern long documented by analysts and academics.

"In the specific case of Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron versus Chock and Bates, the scores were so close that it's unfair to claim that biased judging pushed the French duo into gold-medal position," concludes Peters, who nevertheless sees ways to improve the integrity of the system. For one thing, judges should recuse themselves when their home-country skaters take the ice, he suggests. Meanwhile, it's possible this particular controversy isn't over yet because the Americans haven't ruled out a challenge.

"I know the competition is over, and a rational mind would say, you know it's done," said Bates on Thursday. "But you never know." And Chock told Access Hollywood that they would consider it, per Fox News. "I think skating is such a subjective sport, but I do think that for fairness it is good when the judges are reviewed for their work," she said. "Not just after this competition but every competition to just make sure there's a fair and even playing field for all athletes."