This is Ethics 101. No judge with a competitor from his or her nation in an Olympic sport should be allowed to judge that competitor. This is particularly true in subjective judging sports like ice skating and gymnastics. Chock and Bates missed out on a gold medal by 1.43 points. What constitutes .43 points in ice skating? It’s nonsense. This is the unethical practice of assigning numerical values to subjective judgments to give them the illusion of accuracy. The judging in these sports is as fair and reliable as the solemn and silly judging in dog shows, when the top prize comes down to impossible subjective comparisons like “This Pug is a better pug than that Irish Setter is an Irish Setter.” The prizes really are based on judgments like “Gee, a Cocker Spaniel hasn’t won this show in a while; let’s give Best in Show to the Cocker Spaniel!”
The International Skating Union “defended” the tainted final result, which a 12-year-old could figure out was the product of bias and the lack of integrity in judging. It intoned, “It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations,” and that it has “full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness.”
This is like Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security insisting the southern border was secure. Or Big Brother saying “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
The syndicated improvised comedy show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”mocked subjective scoring by awarding points in haphazard fashion for stated reasons that were usually ludicrous. If the Olympics were genuinely interested in fairness, they would just have an applause meter like they had on the old “Queen for a Day” TV show, or have TV audience voting, like on “American Idol.” Can’t the Olympics admit that its impossible to “score” a sport like ice dancing except in the crudest way? If a skater falls on his or her face, that’s a loss.
I am glad this controversy came up, though. Not only is it an ethics story, but it reminds me why I abandoned Olympics broadcasts years ago. I hereby score this cheating incident at 106.643 points. Don’t ask me what that score means, because you wouldn’t understand.
Ethics Alarms 
For the younger set here, a glimpse back to the scoring practices of the Cold War days. The Bulgarian, Romanian, East German judges always gave outlandish scores to Soviet bloc performers. And lower scores to the others. In the summer it’s diving, synchronized swimming, and gymnastics.
Hehe, reading this story my mind immediately flashed to “And the East German judge scores a 6.0”
Jack wrote, “I hereby score this cheating incident at 106.643 points.”
Well, clearly, you are biased in favor of the other team. Everyone could see that the U.S. team’s performance should have been scored at 106.644, at minimum. The U.S. guy’s twizzles* were far and away better than that other guy’s twizzles.
I saw that competition. From my untrained, uneducated, and mostly uninterested eyes, the U.S. team’s performance was better with higher degrees of difficulty. The French team, though, did a great job but their performance did not have the same degree of technical difficulty (even the play-by-play announcers made that comment). The French team seemed to make errors overlooked by the judges where the U.S. team made one minor mistake which in my mind did not merit deductions. My wife thought the French team scored higher because their routine was a more modernistic dance interpretation of the sport (including choice of music) where the U.S. team’s routine was more traditional even with their music (“Paint It Black” and flamenco – bullfighting motifs**).
A colleague of mine is a crazy fast middle distance runner. To him, any competition result based on subjective decisions is flawed and the only way to judge a winner is by pure, verifiable results: The clock, the height of the bar or the hurdles, the distance from the end of the ramp, the number of goals/runs/baskets/holes in targets measured from the center spot. I don’t know that I disagree with. Except curling. Curling is the greatest sport. Ever. There is no competition.
To me, though, the bigger ethics scandal is the whole Lindsey Vonn mess. I get that an elite athlete is governed and driven by some other thing than reality. We saw it with our son when he was competing at highest levels in swimming. Yet, Vonn was injured, having suffered damage to her ACL just one week before the competition, and was still recovering from an earlier, terrible recent injury requiring surgery, medical treatment, and physical therapy. Yet, there she was competing in the downhill. What doctor cleared her for competition? What team organizer accepted that decision and welcomed her to the team? What Olympic official thought it was a good idea?
Who would have guested that she would wipe out and smash her leg in the process. If she had won the downhill, she would have been lionized as a fierce competitor with the heart of a champion and a will of steel.
jvb
*Ed. Note: Any sport using the term “twizzle” should not be taken seriously. Ever. Sorry. Bias makes me happy.
**Ed. Note: I thought we abhorred bullfighting and its ghastly toxic masculinity. Chock, by the way, should have covered her skates. The white skates against her black and red outfit were distracting. I don’t know if there is a rule about that because the other women stakers wore white and the men wore black.
Of course it was ‘the French judge’. The ‘French judge’ to the Olympics is what ‘Florida man’ is to the US.
I have long held that the Olympics should only have sports in it. How do we define a sport?
(1) Competitors score points by scoring goals, hitting a target, etc.
(2) It is a timed event. Fastest time wins.
(3) The event is measured in distance (longest distance, closest to a goal, etc).
(3) There is a defense.
Everything else is a performance and performance scoring is subjective. So, horseshoes is a sport because you score points by getting an object close to a goal. Figure skating is a performance. Now, I guess we could add a defense to performances and make them sports. Figure skating with defense. Last team skating wins.
Since the Olympics is traditionally a demonstration of martial prowess, we should modernize the Olympics with:
(a) Tank marksmanship. How many moving targets hit with 6 rounds from 1 mile away.
(b) substitute grenade toss for discus
(c) ruck march instead of Marathon.