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Spokane.net »
Sudoku
 | Friday, October 25, 2002 |
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Sports Judges get to hide behind anonymity John Blanchette
All we ever needed to know about figure skating, Debi Thomas told us way back in 1988. In her resigned trudge to a medal that, inevitably, was not going to be gold at the Calgary Olympics, the one-time world champion distilled the unwieldy spirit of the Sequined Science down to its very essence. "It was great," she said, "having the audience boo my marks." Perfect, yes. The best. It's what all the great ones aspire to, is it not? Barry Bonds -- surely he lusts to hear those boos when Mike Scioscia orders him walked for the 378th time in the post-season. No greater satisfaction can Drew Bledsoe have than the crowd's jeers for the obvious winning touchdown pass ruled no catch by the myopic replay drone upstairs. Not that it got Deb on a Wheaties box. In fact, once the echo of those boos subsided, nobody much remembered who Debi Thomas was in the first place. But, by golly, those judges got booed. This is what we crave in sports. What did you think it was? Clutch performance? Superlative achievement? Grace under pressure or adversity? Not even. Robbery and retribution. It's our metier and potatoes. And now, here in the post-Skategate era, they have robbed us of our retribution. Apparently. Skate America rolled into town this weekend, garbed in not quite the usual glitz since the weepy French judge's mink got caught in the car door and dragged through slush puddles on the way out of Salt Lake City last February. The Olympic scoring slapstick which gave us Mlle. Marie Reine Le Weasel, Russian mobster Boris Badenov and two extra gold medals for Dudley and Nell, the wronged Canadian sweethearts, had shattered whatever brittle dignity skating had managed to cobble together in the post-Tonya era. The sticky question: How do you fix figure skating? The stock answer: You can't. It's already fixed. Sorry. Couldn't resist. Thankfully, the International Skating Union rushed to the rescue with the daring, innovative, hard-line response you'd expect from this traditionally august body. It changed the way scores are displayed. Instead of seeing the skaters' scores listed above the flags of the nationalities of the judges who marked them, a "range" of scores is flashed hastily and anonymously on the Spokane Arena's video board, with the surely unintentional result of making it impossible to tell which thief emptied the cash drawer. Surely. Usurping this dirty little pleasure has resulted in howls from the skating press, and not without reason. Whatever intramural heartache Skategate had engendered, it served a purpose. Now the reform jackals had these sleazewads right where they wanted them, exposed for the charlatans they are and always have been. And then the ISU arranged it so they could all wear brown paper bags over their heads. The absurdity of the new system is apparent on many levels. For one thing, only seven of nine scores, picked randomly by computer, are used to determine the winners. Yet a skater could conceivably receive the majority of first-place votes and still lose if the computer happens to toss two of his No. 1s. And the notion that this will free judges from the pressures of inherently corrupt national federation bosses unravels in the anonymity itself. Now, there is no accountability whatsoever. Reporters snaked through the Arena on Thursday night, polling the patrons who stand to be confused the most over this new don't ask/don't tell scoring system. Nancy Armour of the Associated Press found a particularly livid one in Renee Rico of San Rafael, Calif., who was clutching a homemade sign that said, "No Secret Judging." "If secrecy was the solution," she said, "we wouldn't know how the Supreme Court judges vote on things." Oh, let's not mix toe loops and Roe vs. Wade, OK? "The World Series," Rico went on. "Think about not being able to keep stats. You'd just know who wins at the end of the game." Well, in fact, that's all us Arena-bound skatephiles knew Thursday night, obligated as we were during Game 5 to watch compulsory dance, which sounds like an indignity foisted upon sixth-grade boys in P.E. But we get the point. It's more than unfortunate that the skaters themselves have become an afterthought in all of this, and surely it must gall those who have carried skating's banner as a legitimate sport to have all this attention trained away from the genuine athleticism of the competitors and toward this smelly fen of judging, the aspect that most de-legitimizes it. It's not just the subjectivity, elements of which exist in all sports refereed or officiated, but skating's particularly peculiar kind, in which your costume choice might subtly count against you. And that's the rub. It's skating. For years it's lurched along on outrageous decisions and bloc voting and predetermined outcomes, and alas at least two of those elements it shares with pro rasslin'. As for the skaters, well, there's views pro and there's con, but possibly the most honest assessment of the new way came from Mathew Gates, a 27-year-old ice dancer from England now competing for the United States. "I didn't understand it the old way," he said, "so it doesn't make a difference." All we needed to know.
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