Yeah, it’s another single-topic Olympics post. Forgive me, Gentle Reader. There may or may not be a combo post about
the Olympics in the next few days. We
shall see.
Curmie’s lack of interest in what he regards as trash
sports, or, rather, non-sports, i.e., those decided by necessarily
subjective judges rather than by points or times or some other objective
criteria, has been well-documented.
Traditionally, Winter Olympics events were largely objective: hockey,
skiing (both Alpine and cross-country), curling, speed skating, luge, bobsled, biathlon,
etc. But even before the more recent proliferation
of judged events on skis or snowboard, there was figure skating. This discipline, alongside gymnastics in the
Summer Olympics, stands as the most prominent pseudo-sport on record. Be it noted: Curmie does not in any way
demean figure skating or its practitioners; he just thinks that, like ballet, which
also requires considerable athleticism, it’s more of an art than a sport. (Curmie, who has contributed in one way or
another to well over 200 theatre productions, is unlikely to use any variation
on the word “art” as an insult.)
The problem with competitions conducted in these terms is
two-fold. First, we’re not merely
comparing the proverbial apples to oranges; we’re comparing the apples’
apple-ness to the oranges’ orange-ness. In
Curmie’s field, that means comparing one actor’s Macbeth to another’s Hamlet,
or even to another’s Tartuffe… or his Rufus T. Firefly, for that matter. There’s a reason Curmie cares little about
the Tonys, Oscars, etc., unless a nominee is a personal friend. (That has happened, but, needless to say, not
very often.)
More importantly, at least in terms of the present
discussion, is the fact that judges will disagree. Fans of Team X will always argue that Team Y gets
all the breaks on close calls. It’s also
true that sometimes referees or umpires or whatever they’re called in a
particular sport just get something objectively wrong. That was one of the problems in the
women’s floor exercise debacle in Paris two years ago. But some events
are particularly susceptible to differences of opinion. Figure skating is certainly near the top of
that list, and ice dancing is the most subjective of the figure skating events,
as there are fewer required elements. It
is completely reasonable that one judge might privilege athleticism, another technical
mastery, another the difficulty of the routine, yet another grace or
coordination with the music.
But there are two more serious problems, in that they affect
the legitimacy of the “sport.” One has bothered
Curmie for decades: the fact, and it is a fact, that judges tend to give higher
scores to the athletes who are supposed to win, irrespective of whether they
deserve it. We saw a variation on that phenomenon
in the women’s slopestyle finals this year.
The gold medalist did significantly easier tricks than either the silver
or bronze medalist, and her execution, if it was any better than her
competitors’, was barely so. One of the
announcers for USA (the network, not the country) declared the judging
“abysmal.” Ah, but the winner was the
defending Olympic champion, so of course she was wonderful this time, too, right?
The ice dancing competition this year serves as another example. The order of performance by the finalists is
determined by their standing after the short program. The first to go are the lowest-ranking
finalists; the last are the leaders.
With one exception, a pair whose fairly significant errors were obvious
even to a novice spectator like Curmie, every team moved into first place. As far as Curmie was concerned, a number of
the later teams weren’t even close to as good as earlier pairs had been. But the order after the short program
remained unchanged except for that one team that made obvious mistakes.
More importantly, of course, the French team that led after the
short program held on for gold despite some pretty clear errors (like the lack
of synchronization seen in the photo above).
But whereas the slopestyle competition mentioned earlier may have been judged…
erm… whimsically, there was no hint of nationalistic impropriety. One of the skiers whom just about everybody
agreed should have been placed above the winner was from the same country,
Japan. The other was from New Zealand,
and it was she, not the American who finished just off the podium, that the USA announcers (and Curmie) thought had been slighted.
But Curmie is old enough to remember the jokes about “and
the Russian [or East German] judge gives it a…”
Soviet bloc countries cheated every way they could. Some Eastern European athletes, like Nadia
Comăneci in gymnastics or Katarina Witt in figure skating were clearly the best
of their respective sports. But others,
to be polite, were not. That doesn’t
mean that they didn’t get unreasonably high scores from judges from other Communist
countries (or that Western athletes didn’t get lower scores than they deserved
from those same judges).
And now we just might be experiencing a little déjà vu:
a particularly apt term, since the perpetrator is, well, French. OK, OK, alleged perpetrator. After the short program in ice dancing the
French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron held a narrow
lead over Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates. In the final free skate, French judge Jézabel Dabouis gave her country’s pair 7.71 more points than their American rivals
despite some errors. The US team
received a lower score from Dabouis than from any other judge, more than five
points below the average. She also gave
the French pair a score nearly three points higher than the average score.
That sure seems suspicious, and there were allegations of similar partisanship from her at earlier events. It’s been
over a half century since Curmie took the one freshman-level statistics course
of his collegiate career, and he’s forgotten more than a little of what he
learned then. He’s therefore not in position
to endorse or undermine the accuracy (or relevance) of SBNation’s James Dator assertion
that “Not only did she judge the French pair 6.45 points higher than the mean,
but she undervalued Chock/Bates by -7.19 [this apparently includes the short
program]— giving us a +13.64 delta favoring France over USA in the final score.
This represents a staggering 6.37 standard deviation z-score difference across
the event.” Dator concludes that “there
is no doubt that the scoring of Dabois [sic.] was the key differentiator
in deciding who won the event.”
Well, maybe. In ice
dancing, as in a number of other sports (competitive diving is the first to
come to mind), the high and low scores are omitted from the final
calculation. In other words, Dabouis’s
under-scoring of the Americans on the free skate had only an indirect effect on
the rankings: the lowest other score was counted, and it wouldn’t have been had
Dabouis scored them at or near the median.
Dabouis’s score for Beaudry and Cizeron did count, but that’s because
the Czech judge scored them higher than Dabouis did, meaning her score wasn’t
completely out of line. The highest
score for Chock and Bates came from the American judge, and three of the seven judges
from other than the US or France had the French pair ahead. It was very close, in other words. Beaudry claims their routine was more technically demanding. Perhaps it was; Curmie’s not the guy you want
making that decision.
The powers-that-be supported the judges’ decision, which of course would have been the
case no matter how egregious the ethical violation might have been. The International Skating Union issued a
statement asserting that “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.” The ISU claimed
it has “full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to
fairness.” Uh huh.
But there’s one more thing.
Allow Curmie to quote two of the competitors. One said, “I see some strange games being
played that are destroying ice dance…. I don't think I’ve ever been to a
competition like this in my career, from a judging standpoint.” Another said, “Any time the public is
confused by results, it does a disservice to our sport. I think it’s hard to
retain fans when it's difficult to understand what is happening on the ice. People need to understand what they’re
cheering for and be able to feel confident in the sport that they’re
supporting.”
Destroying the sport?
A disservice to the sport? Those
are pretty serious charges, especially coming from top competitors. OK, Gentle Reader, wanna guess who said what? The latter is Madison Chock after receiving
silver instead of gold in Milan. The
former? Guillaume Cizeron, after the rhythm
dance at a Grand Prix event in Finland in November. Indeed, at least one member of four teams (at
least), including all three on the podium in Milan, has criticized the ISU and
judging, just in the last few months. True,
there’s no doubt a little egotism at play, but it sure does look like there’s a
real problem that the ISU doesn’t seem terribly interested in acknowledging,
much less fixing.
There’s a suggestion that AI could be used to “judge” the
technical elements, leaving human judges for the more artistic stuff, but that’s
definitely creepy and almost certainly ineffective. Not allowing judges from any country with a
competitor sounds good in theory, but even if that were to apply only to the finalists,
we’d still be wiping out the input of the dozen or so nations who best
understand the sport. It would be
possible, presumably, to disallow a judge to vote on someone from their own
country. There could be ten judges, with
one of them as an “alternate” who would vote only if one of the other nine was
from the same country as a competitor.
Or maybe disallowing the top and bottom two votes instead of one. Or…
The problem is that unless something is done, the appearance of impropriety will always overshadow honest disagreements. The events Curmie considers trash sports aren’t going anywhere: they’re too popular amongst people who aren’t really sports fans and just want to watch some flashy showmanship every four years. Looked at as an exhibition of prowess, a variation on Cirque du Soleil (or the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies), this is great stuff. But if ice dancing in particular wants to be regarded as anything even resembling an honest competition, it needs to get its house in order. Soon.
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