When the ISU released the list of judges who would be on the panel of judges for the men’s competition at the latest World Championship, I wrote some quick comments based on what I remembered about the judges. I wrote about Salome Chigogidze that she is one of the judges with the highest bias, then due to lack of time I have not studied her way of judging competitions.

Now I am doing a rather long check, which I don’t know if it will lead to interesting results – the problem with my investigation system is that only in the end, after spending a lot of time, do I know if what I have done is of any use – and the name of Mrs. Chigogidze has returned to attract my attention, so I stop for a moment on her.

If you don’t know how I calculate the national bias of judges, I have explained it here. And this is Salome Chigogidze’s national bias updated at the end of the 2020-2021 season. Keep in mind that before the 2016-2017 season we did not know which marks each judge had assigned, but Chigogidze is a very experienced judge, who judges important competitions at least since the 2006-2007 season.

Twenty-four competitions, almost always with a very high bias, and in reality these numbers don’t really say how high her bias is, because the values ​​given by SkatingScores do a check on all skaters, but no skater really competes against everyone else.

I give a concrete example with the last competition judged by Chigogidze, the 2021 World Championship. Morisi Kvitelashvili was one of the 33 skaters. But Kvitelashvili did not competed against 32 skaters. We all knew, even before the competition started, that Nathan Chen and Yuzuru Hanyu were much stronger than him and that, barring really surprising events, Kvitelashvili would not be competitive with them. And, in the same way, we knew that Kvitelashvili was much stronger than Valtter Virtanen or Mikhail Shaidorov. Although they all competed in the same competitions, some are rivals, others not, because the level is too different. For this a general check with all the other skaters is useful but incomplete. To make a real check we have to look at the individual skaters in every single competition, considering only the potential rivals, and this is a long and complicated job.

The competition that caught my attention is the 2020 European Championship. Chigogidze’s bias, not surprisingly, is very high. I put together the summary chart on the national bias of SkatingScores and then the rankings according to Chigogidze.

Nice. According to Chigogidze, Kvitelashvili made the best short program and the second best free skate, and if she had been the only judge Kvitelashvili would have won the silver medal, not the bronze one. Her bias is very high. Of course, what she did was partly mitigated by the marks of the other judges. Nine judges sit on a panel of judges precisely to prevent a single judge, too fond of his homeland, from assigning medals to whoever he likes. But does the presence of nine judges really prevent even a single judge from distorting the results of a competition?

There were no an Italian judge in that panel of judges, so we can assume that no one helped Daniel Grassl. I only watch the free skate, but Chigogidze has judged both programs, so her influence on the final result of the competition is greater than what I calculated. For seven of the nine judges Grassl did the second best free skate. He was awarded the highest marks by the German judge Carmen Laun, but since Laun was also generous to Kvitelashvili, we cannot say that she helped Grassl. With Kvitelashvili the judgment was much less uniform, however Chigogidze was the only one to think that his free skate was the second after that of Dmitri Aliev, on the occasion clearly the best.

Okay, Chigogidze helped Kvitelashvili. Did her marks influence the result of the competition? To find out, I removed her marks from the protocol. We are used to competitions where the number of judges is odd, but it is not mandatory that this is the case, the Finlandia Trophy is judged regularly by eight judges.

So what would have happened if the panel of judges had been made of just eight judges, without Salome Chigogidze? After the exclusion of the highest and lowest marks, the average would have been linked to the marks of six judges. With this hypothesis I calculated the final score of Morisi Kvitelashvili.

I have left visible what I have deleted, so that anyone can check which marks go off the score. I did the same kind of calculation with Daniel Grassl’s protocol.

Putting all the data together, this is the final result of the competition compared to what it would have been if we excluded Chigogidze’s marks (only for the free skate) from the final result.

The bronze medal was kindly given to Morisi Kvitelashvili by Salome Chigogidze, with all due respect for Daniel Grassl.

Chigogidze continues to judge very important international competitions. Why?