The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition.

Judgment on the judging in figure skating: more rotten than ever

By E.M. Swift

I tried. I really did. For several hours on Monday night and yesterday morning I tried to find someone, anyone, who agreed with the judging of the pairs skating competition, which had Jamie Salé and David Pelletier of Canada placed behind the Russian pair of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

I failed, just as those five judges who voted for the Russians failed their sport and their Olympic oath. Not one person I talked to, fan or expert, skater or judge, was anything less than absolutely certain that the Canadian pair had been robbed. It was the worst decision I've seen in my 18 years covering figure skating.

Two-time gold medalist Katarina Witt was nearly teary-eyed at the injustice. "Halfway through Salé and Pelletier's program, I knew I was watching the gold medalists," Witt said. "It was the performance of their lives. It's what you train for all those years, to be in perfect harmony with yourselves, your music, the program and the audience."

Not one person but those five judges from China, France, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Next I ran into Tai Babilonia; she and Randy Gardner were the last U.S. pair to win a world championship, in 1979. "It's what I hate about our sport," she said. "This sort of thing has been going on for years with the Russians, and you can quote me."

What was the judging panel at rinkside looking at? Who knows? The International Skating Union (ISU) doesn't make those folks available for comment, inviting speculation from the likes of me. Perhaps they were rewarding Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze for past excellence, a sort of Olympic gold medal-lifetime achievement award. That would bode well for Michelle Kwan.

Then there's the Eastern Bloc tit-for-tat theory. The Russian, Polish and Ukrainian judges stick together for old times' sake; and maybe a steak dinner later on, then get the Chinese judge to go along with their bloc with the promise that they'll vote the Chinese pair of Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao into the bronze medal slot. The French judge? Ah, payback time for France comes during the ice dancing competition. Look for the French dancers Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat to win, followed by the Italians and the Russians. (Ottavio Cinquanta, head of the ISU, is Italian.) That should leave the popular Canadian dance couple of Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, who in December won the prestigious ISU Grand Prix finals, in fourth.

When the sport puts forth a transparently bad judging result, it's impossible not to look for goblins everywhere. The untidy fact remains that the more than 16,000 people in attendance, and countless millions more watching on TV, have walked away from a brilliant night of skating feeling the sport is either beyond their comprehension, or irredeemable.