It just seems you can never get through an Olympics without at least one judging controversy which draws scrutiny to the results.  The international governing body then takes action and rules get changed.  But despite the ever changing rules, we still get controversy.

Canadians Capture A Questionable Gold

Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko tried to bring a spotlight on judging after his defeat to American Eric Lysacek, but it kind of went on dead ears.  Plushenko was ungracious in receiving the silver medal, calling Lysacek out for not attempting a quad and correlating his routine to ice dancing.

Had Plushenko hit his moves, perhaps his complaints may have resonated, but the guy struggled on every jump in his routine.  Figure skating is about flawless execution of the moves you attempt tied to the difficulty of the moves.  If Plushenko wants risk alone rewarded, he is advised to pick up a snowboard and hit the half pipe as he was trying to create controversy where none existed.

The complaints on figure skating judging needs to placed squarely on the Ice Dancing competition.  While judging changes have leaned towards giving artistry equal weight to jumps in the overall score in the other figure skating disciplines, Ice Dancing has gone the other direction scoring technical more heavily than ever before.  As a result, we were awarded an Ice Dancing champion that struggles to dance and would be more fitting to the pair competition.

Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir took the gold in front of a roaring hometown crowd in Vancouver, snatching away a victory that appeared to be in the grasp of USA’s Meryl Davis and Charlie White.  The Canadian ice dance team posted the highest free dance scores in the world for the season, getting a personal best of 110.42 for a combined score of 221.57, a personal best.  The free skate allowed Virtue and Moir to easily outdistance the Americans who scored a personal best 107.19 in the free skate and a combined 215.74, also a personal best.

Needless to say, the personal best scores were being handed out like complimentary gifts last night.  And the Europeans were none to pleased.

“When you compete in your home country the crowd goes crazy and it can help the skaters,” said Italy’s Massimo Scali, who placed fifth with his partner Federica Faiella. I hope that it does not affect the judges.  I don’t agree with the system. They [Virtue and Moir] are not real dancers. They are very technical and don’t really ‘dance’ on the ice.”

Harsh criticism for the new Olympics champions.

“We skated the best performance and we have a bronze medal,” Russia’s Maxim Shabalin said. “What can you do? We did everything we could.”

So, was it home cooking judging or is this just sour grapes?

It really gets down to what you expect to see from Ice Dancing.  Italy’s Scali really nails it on the head, it is supposed to be about dance interpretation melded with skating technique.  If not, then it is just a pairs competition.  Virtue and Moir’s interpretation of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was substantially weaker than other competitors in the final group.  While their technical capabilities were superior, their skills didn’t mesh with the music as well as other skaters…which is the whole point of Ice Dancing.

Ice Dancing for years has been criticized for choosing its champions years in advance, making the results on the ice just a show for audiences rather than a true competition.  Unfortunately, this didn’t change last night.  It was clear that the judges had made the decision to award North America with medals and to signal an end to Russian dominance.  The judges behavior was at best embarrassing and at worst deplorable.

Take this in.  We saw the two best Ice Dancing performances of the year within the course of 30 minutes.  What was the possibility of such an occurrence?  Pretty good when the judges made their decision before the event started.

It began back at the 2009 Trophee Eric Bompard, when Virtue and Moir demolished the field, coming in first place for all three skates.  The replicated their 2009 Skate Canada International and topped it off with the first ever 10.0 under the new ISU scoring system.  The delivered the same dominating results at 2010 Canadian Figure Skating Championship.

So, in less that a year, a team which couldn’t place first in the compulsories, original or free skate portion of any international event became unbeatable.  Are we really supposed to believe this?

The reality on the ice last night was the Canada’s Virtue and Moir were the fifth best team in the final group.  While they skated admirably in the first two rounds, they didn’t deliver last night and another robbery occurred in Olympics figure skating competition.

While graceful in defeat last night, USA’s Davis and White should take a few pointers from the Russians and Italians about voicing their displeasure of the results.  They put on unquestionably the best performance of the evening, bested the Russians and are headed home with a silver.