This year for the ice dancing category at the Olympics, Madison Chock and Evan Bates (representing America) were the favorite to win. They won almost every competition they competed at, and everyone expected them to obtain gold. However, earlier this year, the previous gold medalist Guillaume Cizeron got together with one of his good friends, Laurence Beaudry (representing France). They were also a dominant team at competitions, but would always fall short to Madison and Evan.
At the long program event this past week, Madison and Evan performed a perfect program. They also did very well during the short program, but were placed in second because of a twizzle/edge error that Madison did. That “bad” twizzle knocked the pair down 0.46 points. However, there were no mistakes during their long program.
Last to go was the French team; their program wasn’t clean. There weren’t any very visible mistakes, but the twizzles were very choppy and not clean at all. Even people who don’t follow the sport stated that they looked unpolished. So imagine the surprise when the pair were announced the gold medal winners. Outrage broke out online. Petitions were started to investigate the judges; a petition that I signed.
The public was all too familiar with what was going on. There was a very similar situation at the 2002 Winter Olympics during a pair skating event, where a French judge blew the whistle and stated that they felt “pressured” to vote for the Russian pair. After that, the silver medalists were awarded gold, and the original gold medal placers got to keep their medals. People rushed to speak their thoughts and again, sign the petition.
Very similarly to the 2002 Olympics, the French judge awarded the French team nearly eight points higher than the American team. If the judges were so strict about Madison’s edge that they took points off for, then how did they not deduct as many points for the French team’s disastrous twizzles?
The petition on Change.org received almost 20,000 signatures before the International Skating Union (ISU) finally made a statement. Their statement was less than useful. They responded saying, “It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations.” However, people did their own research and found that this same French judge has been giving higher scores to the French all season, even on performances where they fell and the Americans skated cleanly.
Sadly, I don’t think much more will be done, but Madison and Evan will always be gold medalists in everyone’s eyes.
