I’ve already written that I’m reading The Second Mark. Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold, written by Joy Goodwin. The first part of the book say the story of three really strong pairs, Elena Berezhnaya/Anton Sikharulidze, Xue Shen/Hongbo Zhao and Jamie Salé/David Pelletier. All the stories are fascinating. We see closely the struggle of the skaters and, at least for the Chinese pair, for the coach. We can not to don’t love them all, and it’s a pity that a win for a pair means a defeat for the others. But, until the result is fair, we can accept it.
What, when the result isn’t fair?
I’ve just started the second part. The episode isn’t new for me, I’ve already written about it. Berezhnaya/Sikharulidze were the reigning World champions, and had already won a silver at the Olympic Games. Shen/Zhao were defeated by the Russians at the previous World Championship, where they had won the silver, but had won the gold at the last Grand Prix Final, ahead of the Russians, so all knew that these were the two strongerst pairs. Salé/Pelletier, a recently formed pair, weren’t there because of an injury. All the quotes of Goodwin’s book came from pages 189-192.
Within a few hours of the Russians’ victory in Helsinki, everyone backstage had heard the news: During the pairs final, Canadian television cameras had caught two judges colluding on videotape. There it was, plain as day–the Chinese took their bows, the Ukrainian judge looked over at the Russian judge and tapped his foot to communicata his vote. Two taps–second place. The Russian nodded. Then both judges punched in second place marks for the Chinese.
In the post that I linked there’s the video. Goodwin don’t write the names of the judges, so I write them here: they were the Russian Sviatoslav Babenko and the Ukrainian Alfred Koritek. Koritek isn’t exactly an Ukrainian, with a rapid search on Google I find that
Alfred Koritek is the father of Stanislav Koritek, who coached Oksana Baiul for seven years before emigrating to Canada in 1992. Alfred Koritek, a Russian who is the only championship judge from Ukraine, then arranged for Galina Zmievskaya to take over the coaching of Baiul.
Philip Hersh in his article JUDGES: TRUE PRIME-TIME PLAYERS was writing about the juges in the Ladies competition at the 1994 Olympic Games, where the Ukrainian Baiul and the American Nancy Kerrigan were the favourites for the gold. The gold was awarded to Baiul after a 5 to 4 split of the judges. So already in 1994 there was some perplexity about Koritek’s impartiality. After, Koritek started to judge for Israel, but it’s some years that he isn’t a judge anymore, I don’t know if he is anymore involved in figure skating. Checking which nation a judge is tied to is not always easy, and sometimes a judge is loyal to several nations. Babenko… Babenko has judged the Men’s competition at the last World Championship. Why? Shen/Zhao retired in 2010, Berezhnaya/Sikharulidze retired in 2002, and a judge suspended at least two times is again there to decide on the lives of the skaters. He has the power to hurt skaters of different generations.
I add a detail that perhaps count nothing but that for me is interesting: in the 1999 World Championship the Assistant Referee was Alexander Lakernik, now vice president of the ISU.
The videotape caused a stir not because two judges had cheated, but because finally there was proof that two judges had cheated. For an ISU judge moves in a shadowy world of atmosphere and implications; proof is a rarity. In a shuttle van, say, a judge overhears snatches of conversation, gossip that threee judges will vote together, and wonders of the rumor is true. A group of judges sits together at practices, eat dinner together, and who can say if they are accomplices in a scheme–or merely friends? At the endless cocktail parties in hotels, a judge listens to a steady stream of innuendos, trying to gauge what is true and, ultimately, who can be trusted.
Truly a nice environment. So all know that someone cheat, the only thing that lacks is proofs. ISU, to check better on your judges, to do inquiries and to disqualify – non suspend, disqualify – who cheat seems so bad? In addition to the lives of athletes, the seriousness of sport is at stake.
It’s hard to tell; it seems everybody’s working an angle. Some judges are tightly controlled by the presidents of their national federations–that’s clear. They know that if they don’t follow orderd their federation presiden will never throw them a good judging assignment again.
And this is exactly the reason for which the judges must be nominated by the ISU and not by their federations. And, for the Olympic Games, the judges must be nominated by the IOC. The IOC know little about figure skating? Even so, they can pick the judges from the list of the judges that has the competence for judging at the Olympic Games, ruled out who was suspended in the past and the most biased. Who are the most biased? I’ve cheched all the judges here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
The judges from poor countries are easy to spot […]. They take all their meals in the judges’ dining room so they can save their honorarium to take home. To them, a hundred dollars a day is a lot of money, and they try not to do anything to put their future assigments in jeopardy. The question is how far a judge might go to keep on judging.
Even if Goodwin don’t write anything about it, there’s another question. I’m not accusing anyone, any accuse needs proof, and I don’t have any. I’m rising a legitimate doubt. For me the sport is fun. For the athletes is their lives. For some people is money. So, if someone – the mafia with interests in betting, the television who is interested in the victory of someone because only a certain athlete can attract the spectators (at least of a certain nation) and consequently the sponsors – want that a certain skater win, we’re really sure that this someone would not corrupt some judge? I’m not yet read what Goodwin writed on the 2002 scandal, but we’re sure that the mafia, in the operate of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, played a big role in this. And also…
Some judges spend their lives in a workaday jobs–teacher, office worker–and only feel important when they stay at a four-star hotel in Tokyo or Paris and decide competitions with their learned opinions. One can imagine that they would be willing to do a federation president a favor to protect their position.
Some judges are simply power-mongers. They like the feeling of manipulating a panel, of working a deal. In secret, they broker complicate vote-trading schemes, participate in fixes that are in clear violation of the rules.
Hi ISU, are you reading? This book was published in 2004, have you done some inquiry? Have still you monitoring your judges?
Other judges lobby using the old-fashioned method–by giving their opinion loudly in the hopes that it will influence their colleagues. “Her death spiral has improved,”, an esteemed judge says, or “Their program is the most difficult this year,” or “That lift is illegal,” and by tiny increments, the general consensus shifts. This method has the advantage of being legal.
This method has the advantage of being legal. And this is exactly the reason why I feel that I must write when I see propaganda. If some judge (or some journalist) try to manipulate other judges, I write, even if I know that my voice is weak and that none will hear me. About the legal way of manipulating other judges I’ve already written when I commented Jon Jackson’s book On Edge. In that case he was writing (not criticing) about Lorrie Parker, a judge that judged the Men’s competition at the last Olympic Games, and I’m really worried to see her again in some international competition. Perhaps in Bejing… And there were also the episode of Joe Inman’s mail.
Of course, a decent percentage of judges are scrupolously honest, and these judges were invigorated by the emergence of the videotape evidence in Helsinki, especially since it was discovered at the biggest event of the year, with the full force of the world’s media to keep pressure on the issue. Finally, these judges said, finally Ottavio will have to do something.
Ottavio is Ottavio Cinquanta, president of the ISU from 1994 to 2016. For an opinion on him, you can read this book, but also Sonia Bianchetti Garbato’s Crepe nel ghiaccio (English edition Cracked Ice), or Jon Jackson’s On Edge, or Kelli Lawrence’s Skating on Air, or Push Dick’s Button, a book of which I must write. After the 2002 scandal, Cinquanta promised not fairness in competitions, but that there would not be another scandal. Goal achieved! The most important thing is: no scandal. So, returning to 1999,
The ISU would wait until after the World Championships to investigate wheter the pairs result had been tainted by cheating, so as not to “distract the athletes.” Someone pointed out that the athletes involved had already finished competing
This remind to me what happened recently at the Japan Championship. A spin done by Yuzuru Hanyu was invalidated and the Technical Panel refused to say why because an explanation can give an unfair advantage to the skater. Why knowing which was his mistake was an unfair advantage? If someone fall, there’s a deduction, all know where the deduction came from. Also if there’s a time violation, of an illegal lift in Ice Dance, or a costume failure, or we know if a skater broke the Zayak rule. Why should be so strange to say why an element was not valid? Perhaps the Technical Panel was busy to search an explanation, or hoped that the press would forgot the question. They said that they needed time for answering to all questions, but only three skaters among 59 Men and Ladies needed an explanation, where was the problem to give it to them?
So Mami Maeda responded later for fairness, as Ottavio Cinquanta didn’t investigate for not distract athletes that had already ended their competition. Perhaps we have some problem with timing and transparency. Cinquanta
was savvy enough to know that it was better to expose any potential corruption after the reporters had gone home.
After a month, at the ISU congress, Babenko and Koritek were suspended. According to Goodwin both were suspended for three years, according to Bianchetti Garbato the first was suspended for three years, the second for two. The gold remained at the neck of the Russians. It’s true that the panel was split seven to two, so only two judges can’t change the result, but for me a wider inquiry was needed. A strange detail is that the American judge Franklin Nelson give an higher mark to the Russian non only for the presentation but also for the technical merit. This after that Berezhnaya fell on a double Axel. And if two judges cheated, we’re sure that all the others were honest? Sometimes an inquiry could dissolve all the shadows.
By now the story had cooled and only few papers ran it, and after several months had passed the two judges felt emboldened to quietly appeal. Without comment, Cinquanta’s ISU reduced both suspension. And so within two years, both of the judges were back working two of the biggest events of the year, the Worlds and Junior Worlds. By this time, however, there was no danger of being caught cheating, for the ISU had by now restricted television cameras from focusiong on the judges’ stand.
Nice! If we have any doubts that for the ISU avoiding a scandal is better than to have fair judging… for me at least in the ISU Championships, Olympic Games and Grand Prix Final a camera should register the judges, and the video should be always visible on the ISU’s site. This can’t prevent agreements at the cocktail parties, but it’s a little step toward fairness.
How reacted the judges to this episode?
Some of the most earnest judges declared that cheaters should be kicked out of judging for life. On the other side were the cynical types who shrugged and said that everyone was doing it, and if you didn’t do the same, you only hurt your own country’s skates.
I’ve already quoted an affirmation done by Peter Dunfield, according to whom cheating is the only way to respond, and this does me a chill. No, if someone is unfair, we aren’t justified to do the same. We must work to stop the unfairness. And not all cheat, if you watch my table, the judges of some nations are fair. These value indicates the average for nation. If a nation has a bias high, probably for that nation the fairness isn’t important. We must anyway check what all the judges does, not only if the judges of a nation are, by average, biased.
In any case, after Helsinki, all judges knew that the worst penalty you could get for open collusion was a two-or three-year suspension, and they knew from experience that whistle-blowers were few and far between. Nobody wanted to turn another judge in. The risk was too great. The last time a judge had tried to turn in another judge, after the 1998 Olympics, she had been smart enough to tape-record his voice on the phone when he called to ask her to trade votes. The ISU suspended the cheating judge– but they also suspended the whislte-blower. After that, most judges who overheard something just didn’t want to get involved.
Again Goodwin didn’t writes the names, but we know them [edit: I’ve seen after the publication of this post that Goodwin wrote the names, with some more explanation, in the notes, at page 311]. The judge who asked for cheating was the Ukrainian Yuri Balkov, and he is judging the competitions even now. The judge who recordered his words was the Canadian Jean Senft. This episode is narrated, with a lot of details, by Sonia Bianchetti Garbato. I suggest to you to read her books, as I suggest to you to read all the books from which I’m quoting some phrases. They are people that know wery well the subject on which they had written, and there’s a lot of interesting details that I don’t quote.
The other problem with catching croocked judges was that the system itself was so subjective. It was easy for any judge to manipulate the placements. When two teams were as closely matched as the Chinese and the Russians, you could justify putting either one of them in the first place. You could vote for the Russians because your federation president had told you to, and no one could ever prove it. All you had to do was to say that you thought the Russian were slightly better that night and justify it using the second mark. And if your federation president asked you to put the Pussians first, you’d better do it, because quite often the only way for a judge to get international assigments was to keep the federation president happy.
Now the second mark didn’t exist anymore, but we have the Components, and they are used in the same way. And also in the GOE we see some strange things. For example, in the short program of the last World Championship the Georgian judge, Salome Chigogidze, give a +4 to Chen’s and Kolyada’s triple Axel, a +3 to Hanyu’s, a +2 to Aymoz’s, Rizzo’s and Bychenko’s and a -4 to Uno’s, even if Uno fell and in the short program, if there’s a fall in a jump, the final GOE must be -5. For quick reference you can watch the jumps here (Kvitelashvili’s and Semenenko’s jumps are from the free skate):
Writing of the power of the president of the federation, Goodwin do the name of Didier Gailhaguet, fully involved in the 2002 scandal, and who lost his chair at the head of the French federation only after the pubblication of Sarah Abitbol’s book Un si long silence. Probably a day I will buy this book too. Yes, I can read also French. So Gailhaguet
was alleged to have dismissed judges who disobeyed his orders. At least three of the dismissed French judges went public with their claims.
Again no names from Goodwin [edit: again the names are in the notes at page 311: Francis Betsch, Alain Miquel [sic] and Giles Vandenbroeck. Thanks to the note I found an interesting article written by Amy Shipley, Skating Judge Alleges More Misconduct].
On Alain Miguel, Bianchetti Garbato wrote
One produced a letter Gailhaguet had written asking judges to do “important political work.” The dismissed judges gave specific instances of being asked by Gailhaguet to rank skaters higher or lower than they deserved. But there were no negative consequences for Gailhaguet, and in fact he was known to be on quite familiad terms with the ISU president, Ottavio Cinquanta.
For the familiarity among them I suggest to you to read Bianchetti Garbato and Jackson’s books. Bianchetti Garbato and Goodwin (I don’t remember for Jackson, but there are other interesting things) remember that the French federation was almost bankrupt, that the ISU give them the 1999-2000 Grand Prix Final and World Championship, and that the income saved the federation. In conclusion,
What the videotape scandal in Helsinki demonstrated was that the reality was actually grimmer than most people had imagined. When a judge got caught on videotape fixing the World Championship and was back in the same chair two years later–well, the ISU was sending a pretty definite signal.
