It happens every winter olympics, complaints about prejudice in judging the finals in figure skating. It happened again last night when the favorite and last olympic gold medalist, South Korea's Kim Yu-Na lost to Russia's Adelina Sotnikova. The South Koreans were furious claiming questionable judging.
What else is new? I'd bet all of us have watched enough olympic figure skating over the years to come to our own conclusions about who did best. Who was most graceful, strongest, fastest, had higher jumps and tighter spins. Who tripped, who didn't. But what the actual judges look for is whimsical to most of us and as an IOC spokesman said, "this matter over the judging is a "purely hypothetical thing."
What's different this time is that the judges individual ballots or judging sheets are anonymous. Other years one judge or another may have been singled out because their ballots had their names on them.
But judge for yourself. I really don't care that much, it seems like such a closed club anyway.
One of the nine judges who picked a young Russian skater over two more refined competitors for the Olympic gold medal Thursday night was suspended for a year for trying to fix an event at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.
And another is the wife of the former president and current general director of the Russian figure skating federation. Another Olympics, another huge skating controversy involving the countries of the former Soviet Union.
All the "judge" sports are difficult to watch as a pure athletic event. The judging is so subjective and bias, even the announcers show their bias.
Maybe, those events should just be for pure entertainment and no medals are awarded.
Posted by: Ron | February 21, 2014 at 01:53 PM