Another Olympics, Another Scandal

So Canada is the alleged victim in another Olympic figure skating scandal, this time in ice dance. There are the usual calls for ending all judged sports at the Olympics, as if questions about fairness arise only in judged sports. (I guess these people haven’t heard about questionable calls by referees in team sports.) Every sport is plagued by allegations of unfairness, and there is rarely much recourse: the decisions of officials are almost always final.

In this case, rumors of dirty dealing started early. During the team event at the beginning of the Games, Canadian skaters were apparently subjected to drug tests that seemed aimed to disrupt their performances: some were awakened in the middle of the night; one was disturbed during her pre-performance nap. (Drug tests are typically held after a performance, not before.)

Next up, a magazine in France called L’Equipe reported an anonymous source saying that US and Russian judges had entered a deal to give the team event gold to Russia and the ice dance gold to the US. I suspect that this “anonymous source” was a con to mess with Canadian skaters: provoke a reaction, cause an anti-Canada backlash, and throw the skaters off their game. In 2002, there was collusion between the Russian and French judges, but this allegation involves Americans, who have a lot more credibility.

The team event involves all four figure skating disciplines, each of which has its own judges. Rigging it would be a heck of a big conspiracy. In the end, Russia won gold by a landslide, with 75 overall points to Canada’s second place finish of 65. There were the usual questions about the judging (such as Evgeny Plushenko beating Kevin Reynolds), but there were no signs of egregious judging. Russia medaled in every leg of the competition, and won gold in most of them.

Then we had the short program in ice dance, which Davis/White won, 2.5 points ahead of Virtue/Moir. The main reason for DW's win was the difficulty level given to the Finnstep portion: VM were awarded a difficulty level of 3, while DW got a 4. Finnish ice dance legend Petri Kokko (who invented the Finnstep) stirred things up with two tweets yesterday: "I don’t understand the judging in #icedancing. @Virtue_Moir should be leading in my honest opinion." and "Hope @Virtue_Moir wins. Americans timing off in the #finnstep and restrained even otherwise."

The Globe is critical of the judging, but admits that "the most tangible difference between their two performances appeared to be a small bobble by Virtue and Moir in their Finnstep segment." A small bobble could make the difference between a 3 and a 4. (In fact, that had already happened to VM twice this season.)

According to our own CBC commentators during the Davis/White performance, Davis/White have not been defeated since the World Championships in 2012, and they have set six world records with their short dance - this performance is just the latest time they've broken their own record.

The history is this: DW and VM are close friends; they train together and share a coach; White and Moir have been friends since childhood. For the last five or six years they have been the top two teams in the world. For the first several years of that period, VM consistently topped the podium, and then DW got the edge.

Their scores tend to be extremely close, but they’re very different skaters. As the Washington Post wrote yesterday, “Virtue and Moir are fighting to solidify their legitimacy as the best ice dancing team since Great Britain’s Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean. They are a team of exquisite detail – pointed toes, extension body lines – and have tremendous chemistry on the ice. Davis and White are different. They are rugged and powerful and fast.” To my eye, White looks a little rough around the edges: in particular, his leg extensions are poor, he doesn't have great artistic interpretation, and he's sort of heavy on the ice - the opposite of light and elegant.

Sports is full of questionable acts, and figure skating has an atrocious history of skating scandals: judges caught on camera colluding; a brave Canadian judge who gathered evidence of cheating but was suspended by the ISU for doing it; decades of dominance by Russian skaters that seemed dubious at best. Within the Russian competitions, scandals have been even bigger: skaters’ cars getting blown up the day before a competition, a skater’s fiancé being kidnapped.

But after the 2002 Salt Lake City fiasco, the ISU cleaned itself up. Scores are based on well-defined criteria now; judges’ scores are anonymous (so it’s more difficult to pay them off); high and low scores are kicked out. Insiders say that the sport is a lot fairer now. One big piece of evidence for the success of the new rules is this: the Russians no longer dominate ice dance.

I'm no judge, but I'm not bothered about the outcome of the Olympic ice dance contest, for a number of reasons.

• Both teams skated beautifully, along with the rest of the field, so the event was a treat to watch.
  
• I do not believe that American judges would get messed up in a cheating scandal with the Russians.
  
• Even if the Americans were unscrupulous, there was no need to fix this fight: Davis and White have been besting Virtue and Moir all season.
  
• Virtue and Moir are already Olympic champions, from 2010.

Virtue and Moir's influence will resonate for a long time for their hard work, athleticism, artistry, fine lines, ability to put down their finest performances in the highest stakes competitions, and their ability to simultaneously be tough-as-nails competitors and friendly collaborators.

Winning in figure skating is about adding up points on elements, and Davis/White got the most points today. I firmly believe that Virtue and Moir are the greatest ice dancers in the world, and their silver medal does not diminish that. The Canadian commentators even said today that after attaining Olympic gold in 2010, VM made a conscious effort to do things in their programs that advanced the sport, rather than single-mindedly going after points.

I can't wait to see what they do next.

Olympic Update

CBC coverage of the Olympics has been fantastic. I don't have TV reception in my home so have been watching events via olympics.cbc.ca. CBC shows live events, webcasts of the entire event (including qualifying), highlights of individual performances, and editorials. Commentators are former competitors and do an excellent job.

I have a quibble though: coverage of women's curling assumes that the audience is knowledgeable. I have curled, but I'm baffled. Most galling is when they make comments about the ignorance of the Russian crowd cheering for the wrong things - but don't explain why the audience is wrong, or what's right.

My favorite sports are ones where people fly through the air while twisting: figure skating, snowboarding, freestyle skiing. Here's a competitor bonking the doll in slopestyle skiing:

I think slopestyle defies the laws of physics. Here's a truck driver grab in slopestyle. I assume the name is because the arms are spread as if grabbing a large steering wheel.


(Watch the slopestyle finals here: olympics.cbc.ca.)

Much as I enjoy figure skating, I nearly died laughing while watching this spoof. Oh, so simple and so classic. Figure Farting

A recent poll found that for most Canadians, the only gold that really matters is men's hockey. (That doesn't mean that the entire country isn't riveted on every other event, and that women's hockey isn't huge.) I'm the ultimate fair weather fan: I watch hockey every four years, when the Canadian men and women are in the finals, and never any other time. Still, I love those Olympic finals. Here's what I wrote four years ago when the Canadian men beat the US: Losing is not an option.

Losing Was Not an Option

As I write this in my apartment, I can hear the shouting and honking in downtown Waterloo. Much of downtown Toronto is closed for the celebrating fans, as are downtowns all over the country.

I was at an opera in Toronto this afternoon from 2 to 5:30. (Unfortunate timing on the season's tickets.) I was in the ladies room during the second intermission when an elderly woman burst in, shouting, "We scored!" During the intermissions the score was broadcast above the stage, and since Canada was ahead everyone (including the orchestra) cheered.

A hokey Hollywood sports movie couldn't have made this victory more important. It wasn't like the "shot heard round the world" when we beat Russia in '72. These guys all play together on the same NHL teams; there's not the usual separation between competitors. But a series of events over the last year... Jim Balsillie being denied another attempt to move a team to southern Ontario; our loss in an early game at the Olympics, ratcheting up the anxiety; Sidney Crosby salvaging our chances in overtime of another match; having a chance, with this victory, to make a new world record for one country's gold medals... then the USA tying the score 24 seconds before the end of the game! And Crosby winning again in overtime!

As I was driving home from Toronto I heard a CBC newscaster ask the question, "But did the better team win? Was Canada better than the US?" What a dope. Of course the Canadian team wasn't better: the US team had a much smoother run at the Olympics. The difference is the fans. This is our game. This is our Olympics. Losing was not an option.

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Tough Guys sur les bicyclettes

There were some heavy-duty protests at the opening day of the Olympics yesterday, with masked protesters smashing windows, damaging cars and spray-painting things. If this were happening in Ontario the Mounties would be out on horseback, something I've seen in Toronto many times. (In fact, I noticed when living in Liberty Village in west Toronto last year that even the parking police are on horseback.)

But the Olympics are in Vancouver, and things are a little different there. To thwart the main protest, CTV reports, "bicycle police formed a line across one of the main streets in the downtown."

Bikes... hmmm. It's an interesting development in crowd control techniques, and we need to hear more about it. Is it a kinder, gentler approach to policing angry mobs? Or just the way Van cops get around?

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The True North Neurotically Insecure and Insular

The opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics were spectacular. KD Lang's rendition of Hallelujiah was a highlight. But I was completely put off by the "I am Canadian" type diatribe by BC slam poet Shane Koyczan.

For one thing, it was tacky. It was too much like that famous beer commercial of several years ago. Also, it was ignorant and insular, with lines like "We say zed not zee" (only the US says zee - many other countries around the world say zed, and it's not even original to us). But mostly, what Olympic host has ever been so blatant about trumpeting themselves? We are the HOST for Pete's sake. We are supposed to be welcoming other countries, not thumbing our noses at them.

Apparently Koyczan was a last-minute addition to the show. I'd like to know who put him in and why. I just forced myself to watch him again: "Some say what defines us is something as simple as "please" and "thank you"... but we are more than genteel and civilized... we dream so big there are those who would call our ambition an industry... we reforest what we clear because we believe in generations beyond our own... we are the abandoned hesitation of all those who can't wait... we are the surprise the world has in store for you... Canada is the "what" in "what's new"... we are the true north strong and free. And what's more is that we didn't just say it; we made it be."

Ick. What is it in our national psyche that leads us to trumpet our insecurity? We seem to have some deep-seated need to yell at the US: "We're better than you!" while muttering to ourselves, "We know we're not! We're not worthy!"

We see ourselves as the eternal underdog, but we're one of the richest and most powerful countries on earth. With a population less than California's, we're a member of the G8. We're at or near the top of all the quality indexes: wealth, health, quality of life.

Do we feel unworthy because we lucked into vast natural resources that are the backbone of our economy? Or because we are such poor guardians of our great luck: clear-cutting forests, spewing pollution from the tar sands, selling our steel companies to the Chinese, paving our farmland, embroiling first nations in endless land claim settlements, and tearing down our heritage buildings?

That beer commercial was just a stupid campaign to sell crappy beer. If it has become our model for displaying national pride, we're in trouble.

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Some Thoughts While Watching the Olympics in German

The littlest Chinese gymnast doesn't look 16... or 14... she looks like she's 7 years old. Hasn't she just lost one of her baby teeth?

When you see the headline "Tyson Gay!" and you can't understand what's being said, it's a natural reaction to think the boxer was outed, right? (I actually googled that one before I found out who Tyson Gay is.)

You'd think that the other sports would get the idea from swimming and start piling up nearly-duplicate competitions so their athletes could win multiple medals and vie for the "greatest athlete of all time" tag.

How widespread is this male armpit-shaving thing?

If someone's wearing a crucifix, why do we assume they're Christian? What if they're just afraid of vampires? (Okay, that doesn't have anything to do with sports, but all that swimming is boooooorrrring.)

Like sprinting: they could have the regular 100-meter, and then they could run it backwards, and then they could do four or five funny gaits.

As she left the mat after one of her routines, the littlest Chinese gymnast nearly got bowled over by some big guy rushing past her, and he didn't even stop to make sure she was okay. If you weigh 200 pounds and you bang into someone who weighs 50 pounds, shouldn't you stop for a second - even if she has a passport that says she's 16?

Girl Athletes

At the Beijing Olympics' diving venue there are cameras aimed at the pool-side showers. Divers shower in their bathing suits every time they get out of the pool, presumably to wash off the chlorine. I'm in Bulgaria this month and my hotel TV only gets the Olympics on the German EuroSport channel, so I don't know if this applies elsewhere, but EuroSport shows the female divers showering after every dive. In terms of time, we see more of these teenagers in the shower than anywhere else. (And lest you think that this is time-filler in a live broadcast, EuroSport is showing clips on a time delay.)

I know - big deal - it's pretty mild stuff. But think of it this way: There is no justification for showing anyone in the shower. The Olympic committee makes its money from TV ratings, and it appears to be using the bodies of female athletes, mostly underage teenagers, to boost ratings. (It will be interesting to see whether male divers get the same treatment - we may reach "equality" by exploiting teens of both sexes.)

The central Olympic committee is not the only group to blame. The national organizations that choose the outfits their athletes have to wear are also pretty crass. The French female gymnasts are wearing outfits that are cut so high in the leg that they're bare almost up to their belly buttons. The male beach volley ball teams were given nice, comfortable outfits: baggy tank tops and baggy shorts, while the female teams were given little two-piece bathing suits.

The commercialization of young women in sport is not the exclusive domain of the Olympics committees, of course. Young women sometimes sell themselves, which is why the top earners in women's tennis are frequently not the top seeds. One of the gymnasts I saw today was wearing light blue glitter eyeshadow that was about as tacky as anything I've seen. But it's fair game for a woman to want to capitalize on her looks, get herself noticed, vie for endorsements. It's a whole nother thing when women who just want to compete are forced to become sex objects. It's quite possible that most of them want to look sexy, but what of the female athletes who don't?

Update August 11: Yup, the boys are also being filmed in the shower. I guess I'm starting to change my mind about the shower thing. In the town where I grew up, women taking showers was a strip club favorite that was regularly advertised on the front page of the KW Record's entertainment section (with tag lines like "Our girls get wet for you"). (Kitchener-Waterloo has since got rid of most of the strip clubs, and the Record has instituted some standards in advertising.) So to me, filming women showering is pretty gross. Now that I see the boys, even though they're also wearing itty-bitty bathing suits, it takes on a different tone. The Olympics are a celebration of the body, after all, and the triumph of the mind over it; the celebration is about the body at its finest, which in most sports means the teenage body. Our society has got so creepy with the commoditization of people that I think I misinterpreted this.

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Review of "On Edge" by Jon Jackson

On Edge: Backroom Dealing, Cocktail Scheming, Triple Axels, and How Top Skaters Get Screwed. Jon Jackson (Hardcover, 2005)

There's a lot one can say about this book. It's a personal account, full of bitterness against figure skating officials Jackson doesn't like. It reveals a bias against non-US skaters so strong that I can't believe he was ever a fair international judge. However, memoirs that reveal the biases of the author are often the most interesting, and they allow us to form our own informed opinions. Jackson does not hide that to reach the top ranks as a judge and skating official he played the game, and he even refers to himself as a "phony amongst phonies." (p183)

I am very critical of the book, but I recommend it heartily. It's an engrossing and fascinating look at the corruption in amateur figure skating judging by an informed insider.

An intriguing part of the book, never fully developed, is the allegation that the Russian mafia is behind figure skating corruption. Jackson alludes to this in several places:

- Following the 2002 Olympic pairs judging scandal, the Italian police arrested Russian mobster Alimzhan Toktakhounov and released the transcript of a phone call in which he told his friend Chevalier Nusuyev that he had helped fix the Salt Lake City ice dance competition in order to get a French visa. (p229) The 2005 murder of Chevalier Nusuyev meant that "the preparations for Russian Gold in 2006 had begun." (p291)
- After Maria Butyrskaya said she was tired of sharing her skating wealth with Russian mobsters, her car was blown up and her boyfriend, Sergei Sterlyagov, was murdered. In each case, the crime was committed shortly before she was to skate in an important event. (p209)
- After blowing the whistle on figure skating corruption, the FBI warned the author never to go to Russia again because the Russian mob was involved in the corruption and his life would be in danger. (p232-3)

A strange omission in this book is any reference to proven judge collusion before Salt Lake City. In fact, Jackson claims repeatedly that the Salt Lake pairs debacle was the first time there was proof that judges cheated. In reality, it had been proved numerous times before.

For example, at the 1998 Olympic games, Canadian judge Jean Senft was approached by Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov, who asked her to vote for Ukrainian skaters in exchange for his support for Canadian ice dancers. Senft agreed to discuss the deal, but only so that she could tape the conversation. The result? Her recording was so damning that the Internatinal Skating Union (ISU) was forced to take action against Balkov, but in a warning to all whistle blowers, the ISU also suspended Senft.

During the 1999 world championships, Canadian television captured obvious collusion between Ukraine judge Alfred Korytek and Russian judge Sviatoslav Babenko during a controversial pairs event in which Berezhnaya & Sikharulidze won gold over Shen & Zhao, who many thought should have won. The result? Korytek and Babenko got a suspension, and TV cameras are no longer allowed to film judges.

But back to the book...

Jackson spends so much time on his personal grievances that his analysis of what's wrong with figure skating gets somewhat lost in the mire. The following allegations, some of which are just hinted at, deserve more thought:

- The US Figure Skating Association (USFSA) has a budget of $16 million, with a surplus of $3 million, and yet spends only $1.6 million on athletes (p247), even if there are spots for US athletes on international events that go unfilled because athletes can't afford to attend, and even if US skaters have to travel to ISU events without their coaches because they can't afford to take them.
- USFSA and ISU officials are volunteers, yet live like kings when attending skating events, while skaters and coaches stay in modest, often inconveniently located, accommodations.
- ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta, who has autocratic control over the ISU, has amassed millions since taking control of the ISU, possibly from kickbacks from national federations wanting his support for officials or skaters. (p265 and elsewhere)
- The ISU and USFSA do not exist for the skaters, but for the personal profit/enjoyment of the officials.
- The International Olympic Committee is also corrupt, and supports ISU corruption. Only the IOC can fix the problems with figure skating. (p280)
- There may be a doping problem in figure skating, as evidenced by Irina Slutskaya's heart problems, which may be due to steroid use. (p147)

Jackson is an opponent of the new scoring system, and he repeatedly says that it will alienate skating fans. He is wrong in this. The new scoring system (minus the anonymous judging rule that came in with it) is extremely popular. Instead of focusing only on who wins, we can see that skaters have achieved a personal best or even a record. It may still be open to abuse, but it's a vast improvement over the old 6.0.

However, I agree completely with Jackson in his detailed analysis of how Tonya Harding was hosed by the USFSA (p144-9). When he's not talking about a skater he favors, he provides a lot of insight.

But in the end, I'm sad to say, Jackson is so much a product of the corrupt system that he isn't competent to critique it. His bias towards "his" skaters and "his" officials is so extreme that he is not credible. That's a real pity, because lovers of figure skating like myself are horrified by the level of corruption that we see over and over again in competitions. On Canadian TV, the commentators barely express an opinion anymore about the relative quality of skating performances, presumably because the outcome is too often unrelated to what happens on the ice.

See also:
Figure Skating at the Olympics 2006

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Figure Skating at the Olympics 2006

If I had been asked prior to the 2006 Olympics who I hoped would win mens and ladies figure skating, I would have answered Emanuel Sandhu and Sasha Cohen.

I tend to think of skaters in terms of what they are doing for the progress of the sport. Evgeni Plushenko is a great skater and deserved to win, but I find him boring, boring, boring. If all men skated like him, I wouldn't watch figure skating. I felt the same way about Brian Boitano, Elvis Stojko, and Todd Eldridge.

I like most male skaters (really, I do). A big reason to see skating events live is to see the male skaters who don't score high enough to make the TV coverage. Guys with no big triples are often awesome skaters with beautiful choreography. The men's short program is the highlight of figure skating for me: they skate to the music and the good ones make every second count, with a minimum of hockey-pucking (simple stroking).

I like Irina Slutskaya a lot more than Plushenko, but Sasha Cohen has such stunning artistry that she's my favorite.

Or was. At the end of the ladies short program, Cohen was first, followed by Slutskaya and then Shizuka Arakawa. But I really didn't feel, based on their short program performances, that Cohen or Slutskaya deserved to win. For one thing, Cohen flutzed her triple lutz (she took off from an inside and not an outside edge), which means that she really did a much simpler triple flip. Also, her jumps were very, very small. Slutskaya repeated the Bielmann position over and over in place of interesting spirals or spins, and she looked a bit wobbly. What both Cohen and Slutskaya did in spades was sell their programs. There was too much sizzle and not enough steak.

So in the end I was glad that Arakawa won. She's an elegant skater with some exceptional moves (in the long program, her Ina Bauer and donut spin were perfection).

As for the men, I'm ever hopeful about Emanuel Sandhu. Who knows, the World Championships are just around the corner... I can hope. Meantime I've learned to check the outcome before I watch the coverage, so I don't get too crushed when my guy goes down in defeat. And I'll be very happy if a number of other men do well, including Matt Savoie, Johnny Weir, Jeff Buttle, Shawn Sawyer, and and and...

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