You can read the details of this completely predictable and in general ridiculous ice-dancing judging scandal here, here, and here. I’m not going recount the details because the details are misleading.
The ethics story is that the American ice dancing team of Madison Chock and Evan Bates lost the gold to the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron because a French judge, Jezabel Dabouis, favored Beaudry and Cizeron by nearly eight points (make that “points”) over the three-time world champions in the free dance, a margin inexplicable when compared to the scores of the other judges, and so large that if her score were removed entirely, Chock and Bates would have won the top prize easily.
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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.