Gilbert Quiñonez The stat geek also
thinks that ice dancing and gymnastics aren’t real sports. E-mail
him hate mail at [email protected].
Figure skating sucks. Any game that requires corrupt, biased
judges to determine a “winner” is not a sport. Even
worse, figure skating uses a formula so complex and illogical that
even I, the stat geek, didn’t understand it at first
glance.
These judges make Steve Lavin look like a consistent coach. The
media went into a frenzy when French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne
voted for Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze ahead of
Canadians Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. However, it seemed
to forget that four other judges also voted for the Russians. The
media just seemed to accept that the Eastern bloc and communist
countries would vote for the Russians.
The Russian judge, Maria Sanaia, was obviously biased toward the
Russian figure skaters. The scores she gave the three Russian pairs
accounted for the highest score each of them received.
So I decided to call the Russian Olympic Committee to inform
them of this. As I dialed the number and the Daily Bruin’s
long distance bill accelerated rapidly (it’s not exactly 10
cents per minute either), I realized it was 1 a.m. in Moscow and
figured no one would answer the phone. Of course, the Russians were
awake, probably busy whining about the Olympics.
“Hi, I’m Gilbert Quiñonez, the stat geek from
the Daily Bruin,” I said in very slow English.
“How can I help you?”
“Are you aware that the figure skating judges from Russia,
Slovakia and Belarus gave significantly higher scores to Russian
skaters? What is your response to this?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The scores for Irina Slutskaya and the other Russian
skaters were always higher from those judges.”
“The Olympic Committee is meeting tomorrow.”
Here’s where I lost it. Throughout the Olympics, the
Russians complained that they were treated unfairly and were
threatening to pull out of the Olympics. Now, I find that it was
the Russians who cheated. I accidentally starting laughing.
“What are you laughing at?”
It was only 10:15 p.m. in Denmark when I called the Denmark
Olympic Committee.
“I don’t have an opinion on the figure skating
judges,” the Danish man said.
Apparently, the rest of Europe doesn’t seem to have
grasped the concept of answering machines yet, as all of the
countries I called didn’t have one.
In ladies figure skating, the judges from Russia and Denmark
actually had Sara Hughes fourth, and the judges from Slovakia and
Belarus had Hughes third and second.
Of course, all of them had Slutskaya first. Who gave sixth-place
Russian Maria Butruskaya the highest scores? Of course, it was the
Russian and Belarussian judges, giving her a score of .4 higher
than anyone else did. Along with the Slovakian judge, they also
gave ninth-place Russian Viktoria Volchkova and twelfth-place
Ukranian Galina Maniachenko scores an average of .5 higher than
anyone else. Are these judges being impartial? They didn’t
give Hughes, Michelle Kwan or Sasha Cohen higher scores.
This phenomena didn’t seem to occur with the other judges
and skaters. However, four corrupt judges out of nine is four too
many.
Many of you are probably wondering how these judges affected
fellow Bruin Michelle Kwan. If the Russian judge were to have put
Kwan in front of Slutskaya (who she gave a very high score to) in
the long program, Kwan would have won the gold medal.
Part of this can be blamed on the formula used to rank the
skaters. An ordinal scale (1 = 1st place, 2 = 2nd place, etc.) is
used and the formula doesn’t take the actual scores into
account at all. All of the judges ordinal scores are added (short
program worth only half) and the skater with the fewest points
wins. Under this system, four skaters can be given the exact same
score by a judge, but two of them will be separated by three
ordinal points. Also, beating someone by a wide margin counts the
same as beating them by a small one.
This ordinal system has several flaws. If a simple addition of
all of the judges’ scores was used, there would not have been
controversy in the pairs figure skating, such as in the case of
Salé and Pelletier, and the system would be understood by the
NBC commentators, who could now explain why a skater wins.
Of course, if it were up to me, there would be no figure
skating. Figure skating is not a sport.
But that’s beyond comprehension for the stat geek.