91av

A NEW anti-cheating system for counting the judges’ scores in ice skating is
flawed, according to leading sports specialists. Ice skating’s governing body
announced the new rules last week after concerns that a judge at the Winter
Olympics may have been unfairly influenced.

Initially the judges in the pairs figure-skating event at the Winter Olympics
in Salt Lake City voted 5 to 4 to give the gold medal to a Russian pair, even
though they had a fall during their routine. But the International Skating Union
suspended the French judge for failing to reveal that she had been put under
pressure to vote for the Russians. The International Olympic Committee then
decided to give a second gold to the Canadian runners-up.

The ISU, skating’s governing body, now says it intends to change the rules.
In future 14 judges will judge each event, but only 7 of their
scores—selected at random—will count.

The ISU won’t finally approve the new system until it meets in June but
already UK Sport, the British government’s sports body, has expressed
reservations. “I remain to be convinced that the random selection system would
offer the guarantees that everyone concerned with ethical sport is looking for,”
says Jerry Bingham, UK Sport’s head of ethics.

A random system can still be manipulated, says Mark Dixon, a specialist on
sports statistics from the Royal Statistical Society in London. “The score of
one or two judges who have been nobbled may still be in the seven selected.”

Many other sports that have judges, including diving, gymnastics and
synchronised swimming, have a system that discards the highest and lowest
scores. If a judge was under pressure to favour a particular team, they would
tend to give it very high scores and mark down the opposition teams, so their
scores wouldn’t count. It works for diving, says Jeff Cook, a member of the
international governing body’s technical committee. “If you chuck out those at
the top and bottom you’re left with those in the middle, so you’re getting a
reasonable average.”

Since the 1998 Olympics in Sydney, diving has tightened up its system still
further. Two separate panels of judges score different rounds of diving during
top competitions. Neither panel knows the scores given by the other. “We have
done this to head off any suggestion of bias,” says Cook.

Bingham urged the ISU to consider other options. “This should involve
examining the way in which other sports deal with the problem of adjudicating on
matters of style and presentation,” he says. No one at the ISU was available for
comment at the time 91av went to press.