Winter Olympics: How figure skating wants to fight judging controversies

While this is by far the most high-profile controversy regarding figure skating refereeing in recent years, it is by no means an isolated incident.

After the Olympic final, Piper Gill and Paul Poirier of Canada were happy. The veteran duo, in perhaps their last Olympics, came out of contention to win the bronze medal.

It was a very different scene two months ago at the ISU Grand Prix Final in Nagoya. There, Gill and Poirier dropped from third place after the rhythm dance to fourth place, finishing 0.06 points behind Lilah Fair and Louis Gibson of Great Britain.

“It’s definitely frustrating. We can’t lie, we’re human,” Gill said at the time. “We’ve skated a couple of successful programs, and emotionally and physically we feel good and strong in those moments, only to be kind of left wondering what we’re doing, is this enough?”

Gill then posted an infographic on social media that included a quote that said: “Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are being trivialized and manipulated by people with agendas.” She tagged ISU., external

After winning the bronze medal in Milan, she told BBC Sport: “Our main focus was to take a moment for ourselves and let the refereeing do the trick.”

In fact, all three Milan medal-winning pairs have criticized the ISU and the judges in recent months.

In November, Cizeron said he was not happy with the result of their rhythm dancing at a Grand Prix event in Finland.

“I see some weird games being played that are ruining ice dancing,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a competition like this in my career, from a judging standpoint.”

Naturally, in any sport where results are decided by a panel of judges rather than the deciding factor – who scores the most goals or crosses the finish line first – there will always be differences of opinion.

The problems come when those differences of opinion are between the experts – those who have won the biggest prizes in the sport.

In Milan, Fair and Gibson achieved their best result of the season for their Spice Girls-themed rhythm dance in the team event – and looked to have improved in the individual competition.

“They were better here than they were in the team event,” said 1980 Olympic gold medalist and BBC analyst Robin Cousins ​​after their performance.

But the Brits then received lower scores than they had in the team event. This left them in fourth place after the rhythm dance, and they eventually placed seventh overall after a mistake from fear.

There have been questions in the team and men’s events too, where the flamboyant and sometimes error-prone Ilya Malinin scores higher than his often tidier Japanese rival Yuma Kageyama, partly because his free skate gets high technical marks for the tricks he attempts, meaning he is almost guaranteed to win even if he’s not perfect – although these Olympics have proven there are limits to that.