IT DOESN’T ADD UP
Ice dance back under fire after Virtue, Moir place 2nd
As Beverley Smith, probably the most learned skating writer in Canada and the reporter who led the way on the judging scandal at Salt Lake City in 2002, said in an email after the short dance, “This discipline wears me out.”
By then, of course, the marks for defending Olympic champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir and their U.S. challengers, Meryl Davis and Charlie White, had gone through the Byzantine and opaque process that is judging in ice dance — you can almost hear the gears and machinery whirring, as element scores and component scores are factored and emerge out the other end in a total score which is incomprehensible to anyone outside the sport and even to some of those in it.
Virtue and Moir were in second place, Davis and White in first by 2.56 points, which apparently is a chasm in this mug’s game.
The Canadians allegedly had buggered up a Finnstep, which is a tricky, 36-second-long compulsory quickstep segment that is worth a lot of points.
Now, Virtue and Moir, who had just come off the ice and hadn’t yet had time to review the video, didn’t think they’d screwed it up, but then, maybe they wouldn’t.
But more tellingly, the guy who invented the bloody thing — the plucky Finn Petri Kokko, who invented the step when he and his future wife, Susanna Rahkamo, were competing in the 1994-95 season — was tweeting, “Hope Virtue/Moir wins. Americans timing off in #finnstep and restrained even otherwise.”
Then Kokko tweeted that Virtue and Moir “should be leading in my opinion” and said, “I don’t understand the judges in ice dancing.”
That’s a former ice dancer talking, baby, not this schmoe. And he and Rahkamo were world silver medallists and two-time Olympians. And, dare I say again, they invented the Finnstep, being Finns and all and having done it first.
There were other clues in the air at the Iceberg on Sunday and even before the Sochi Games opened.
In a Feb. 8 story for Postmedia, Smith — who now blogs at BevSmithWrites — detailed how, despite the changes to judging made after the scandal-plagued Salt Lake Games, it’s still possible for a single judge to influence the placings by lowballing one pair over another and consistently inflating the scores of another.
Defenders of the current system point out that low and high marks are dropped anyway, but if for instance it’s an 8.5 mark which is dropped, not a 9.5 that otherwise would have been, these are the fractions that add up.
The French sports magazine, L’Equipe, went even further, reporting on “petits arrangements entre amis” (small deals among friends) that would see U.S. judges help the Russian skaters win the first team gold and the Russian judges in ice dance thank them by placing Davis and White higher.
No American couple has ever won the ice dance gold.
Now, the L’Equipe report has been roundly and heartily denied, yet the skating chatter persists that an American gold is a done deal.
And that’s because, as one knowledgeable (anonymous) poster on insider skating site has noted, “Ice dance is the Cosa Nostra” of sport. Its history is sufficiently sordid that claims of nobility ring laughably hollow. The sport may be clean as a whistle now, though precious few seem to believe that, but no one — even those living and working in it — can be sure.
The system is most unfair, of course, to the athletes, as is ever the case, which is why they rely on personal joy and their own sense of accomplishment to sustain them.
Davis and White are known as the fastest ice dancers and their short dance was terrific; Virtue and Moir are considered the strongest and they also looked wonderful, if not equally good, then not as far back as they were scored.
Defenders of the current system point out that low and high marks are dropped anyway, but if for instance it’s an 8.5 mark which is dropped, not a 9.5 that otherwise would have been, these are the fractions that add up.
And the judging is so complex. There’s a technical panel, one of whom is a “caller,” and this is the panel which decides which level the skaters have achieved.
Then there’s the judges; there are nine of them and they decide how well the level was done. There are marks for quality of elements and program components; each move is assigned a base value, but also gets a “grade of execution” mark. It’s all clear as mud. And though the judges’ marks are kept anonymous — in other words, you would know that a judge from Japan was on the panel, but not how he or she marked the athletes — the judges sure aren’t.
They are introduced every night to the crowd and appear to relish the moment. In the short dance, Canada had no judge on the panel, while the U.S. did, Shawn Rettstatt.
The Virtue/Moir and Davis/White situation is rendered even murkier because they’re in a curious ménage a cinq in that they share the same coach, Marina Zoueva./
To the skeptical, even her remarks after the short program Sunday seemed a bit telling.
Asked about the Canadians, Zoueva pronounced herself “very happy” and said their program was “very nice.”
But, someone asked, what about Meryl and Charlie?
Zoueva grinned and, practically vibrating, purred, “They fly! They just fly!”
That’s nice, because the day that ice dance can be taken seriously, the judging as credible, pigs will also fly.