Blind Justice

Those 1988 Olympics produced the most egregious example of prejudging in recent memory when Paul and Isabelle Duchesnay of France, whose breathtakingly original programs were the highlight of the ice dancing competition, placed eighth. The judges may as well have been watching from Mars, and their placements were part of a pattern of predictability that has consistently plagued ice dancing and kept it on the outer fringes of sport. "They don't know how to judge choreography, and they're not trained in any sort of aesthetics," one prominent coach says of the ice dancing judges, who train separately from singles and pairs judges. "So the judges just line the skaters up in a certain order and stick with it so they don't get confused. It's the herd instinct."

Even judges are embarrassed by ice dance judging. "Dance is a real political thing," says Australian figure skating judge Cathy Taylor. "I like watching it. I don't understand the politics."

At no time are the politics of judging more apparent, and suffocating, than in an Olympic year, when the U.S. Figure Skating Association (USFSA) and its judges know there are medals at stake. Last month 21-year-old Michael Weiss outskated the five-time national champion, Todd Eldredge, at the U.S. nationals in Philadelphia. But because Eldredge is a former world champion, and Weiss is a relative unknown, Eldredge got the nod from seven of the nine judges, who propped him up with a string of inflated presentation marks. "Todd's our best chance of winning a medal," admitted one high-ranking judge who wasn't involved in the decision. "For us to send him to the Olympics as anything less than national champion hurts those chances."

No sooner did the Games in Nagano begin last week than another controversy flared: In the short program of the first figure skating event, the pairs, a Russian duo that performed a badly flawed death spiral finished first, ahead of German and U.S. pairs that skated flawlessly.

So there's unquestionably room for improvement in judging (box, left). Figure skating judges do as good a job as officials in any sport, despite having one of the most difficult assignments. Judging pairs—and I've tried it—is humanly impossible. You need four eyes, two brains and an abacus. A judge is told to simultaneously watch two skaters execute, say, a triple jump, making sure both takeoffs are on one particular edge and both landings are on one foot. Many coaches choreograph the triples so the better jumper, usually the man, is between the judging panel and his partner, blocking the judges' view. Was that two revolutions or three? Clean landing or two-footed? A judge cannot ask. Each works alone and is forbidden to communicate with other judges or the referee (who runs the event and judges the judges). A pairs judge must also take into account the relative difficulty of the six types of lifts and remember to count the revolutions (there must be eight) in the combination spin, which requires each partner to change feet once and change positions once, though not necessarily at the same time. Meanwhile the judge must be mindful every second of the most important element a pair can display, unison, by watching four arms, legs, feet and hands to see if they get out of sync. The judge then has about 45 seconds to punch in a mark that, 23 pairs later, can't be changed.

But hey, that's why judges get the big bucks, right? The USFSA pays a $500 honorarium to judges who work the eight days of nationals, but the vast majority of all assignments are expenses-only propositions. Judges also must continue to work at their craft. Once every four years international judges must attend a three-day seminar to keep up with the latest jumps, lifts, holds and theories. Lately the judges have been pushed to use the presentation mark, also referred to as the artistic mark, more effectively.

By the way, the USFSA, which oversees American judges, doesn't require judges to attend any seminars, nor does it impose any age restrictions. "Once you're a USFSA judge, it's virtually for life," says Wright, a septuagenarian who has lobbied the USFSA's board of directors to bring new blood into its judging ranks. "You can be blind and 100 years old. For many years we had a dance judge who was deaf." (No one who has watched dance judging will be surprised by that admission.)

By contrast, a decade ago the ISU declared that no one age 50 or older could become an international judge and that all international judges must retire at 70. So the Tolkienesque tag no longer applies, at least in world and Olympic competition. In recent years even the older judges have shown a refreshing willingness to reward newer and younger talent without making them work their way through the ranks. In '93 Baiul won the first world championship she entered. Rudy Galindo finished third in his only world championship as a singles skater, in '96, and Lipinski jumped from 15th place to first in '97 to become, at 14, the youngest world champion ever.

Two things have opened the door for the new faces. First, the elimination of compulsory figures has squashed the practice of propping up defending champions simply because they could do a cleaner figure eight than their challengers. Second, the death of cold war politics has eliminated poisonous alliances within the sport. "The Russian judges would lose their flats in Moscow if they didn't put their skaters first," says Monique Petis, the honorary chairwoman of the French figure skating association. An exaggeration, perhaps, but Soviet judges were so apparently biased in favor of their countrymen and countrywomen at the 1978 world championships that the entire judging delegation from the U.S.S.R. was suspended by the ISU after the event.

Today, nothing gets a judge in hot water quicker than showing national bias. Any judge who places a skater from his country two spots higher than the panel's average must write a letter of explanation to the referee, who then forwards it with his comments to the all-powerful technical committee. The letter then goes into the judge's file. It's an intimidating procedure. The referee, who wields enormous clout, can also order a judge to write a letter of explanation for other placements he deems out of whack. The system is designed to ensure accountability, but many judges chafe under such scrutiny. A Croatian judge, Nenad Orban, remembers being asked by a U.S. referee to write a letter of explanation for putting a Russian skater, Maria Butyrskaia, ahead of America's Tonia Kwiatakowski at the World University Games a few years ago, even though the panel was split five judges to four. "So it's not just the old East Bloc countries that have bias," Orban says.