On Wednesday in Milan, French figure skaters Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron narrowly won gold in their first Olympic Games as an ice dance couple. When the final results came in, American figure skating fans shouted in unison: Madison Chock and Evan Bates got fucked!
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This uproar might seem like a predictable patriotic complaint. Yes, the beloved American duo, who missed the gold by just 1.43 points, skated brilliantly. bullfighter-thematic free dance. But Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron were also fascinating, with Slate’s Chris Schleicher describing their dancing as “frankly magnificent” and “the most aesthetically beautiful performance” of the night.
And yet, there might be something to the thesis that Chock and Bates were robbed. Although the American skaters had a lower total score than their French competitors in the free skate, five of the nine individual judges preferred Chock and Bates over Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron. Of those nine judges, eight gave the American duo a score that exceeded 130 points. The only judge to score Chock and Bates below the 130-point line? Jézebel Dabois from France. On the other hand, Frenchman Dabois gave the French duo a dizzying 137.45 points. 7.71 more than he awarded to Chock and Bates.
I accuse!
Well, wait. Before decreeing that Jezebel be thrown to the dogs over the wall of Jezreel, it would be helpful to understand how Olympic figure skating works. In 2004, following a (coincidentally) also (related to France) At the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, figure skating’s governing bodies adopted a new methodology called the International Judge System. The IJS was intended to bring transparency and specificity to a process that for too long had been rooted in subjective opinions. While IJS is not perfect (if it was, I wouldn’t be writing this article), it is still much better than the old 6.0 system.
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The IJS evaluates skaters in two separate categories: technical elements and program components. On the technical side, each planned element of a skater’s routine (the various jumps, spins, and so on) is assigned a base value that increases or decreases depending on the difficulty of the element. Then, depending on how well (or poorly) that element is executed, judges can add or subtract points from that base value. The highest and lowest scores for each technical element are discarded. The remaining scores are then averaged to arrive at the skater’s final technical element score.
The second category, program components, evaluates the art of acting. These scores are inherently more subjective, so there are no base values at play here. Instead, judges award total scores in three subcategories, in 0.25-point increments on a 10-point scale. Again, the highest and lowest scores for each program component are discarded, while the remaining values are averaged and multiplied by a set factor (in ice dance, it is a factor of 2) to arrive at the final program component score.
In the Olympic competition, the judging panel is made up of nine different judges from nine different countries. Once again I will emphasize that in all In internationally sanctioned figure skating competitions, the highest and lowest scores for each technical element and program component are discarded before the remaining scores are averaged. These exclusions are intended to ensure that no outlier scores can unduly bias the mean. It’s basic statistical hygiene, people!
Now, back to the Chock-Bates mishaps. The French judge in question, Dabouis, rated Chock and Bates a 9.5 in each of the three subcategories of the program’s components, for a cumulative score that tied the lowest rating they received from any of the nine judges. (Dabouis is “J1” in the document linked above.) However, when it came time to rate Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron, Dabouis rated the components of their program higher than any of the other eight judges. Très mal, right?
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But wait a moment. There was also an American judge on the free dance scoring panel, Janis Engel, and sure enough, she gave Chock and Bates the higher Combined technical/programmatic scores from all nine judges. (For what it’s worth, Engel gave Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron his third lowest combined technical/program score.)
But wait other moment. The Spanish judge of the jury, Marta Olozagarre, handed over the Spanish ice dance couple formed by Olivia Smart and Tim Dieck far the highest cumulative score they received from the panel of judges. And Italian judge Isabella Micheli awarded Italian ice dancers Charlène Guignard and Marco Fabbri their highest cumulative score by far. The same goes for Canadian judge Leslie Keen and Canadian ice dancers Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier.
In fact, according to the “National Bias-O-Meter” found on the valuable Skatingscores.com website, all ice dance judges at the 2026 Olympics, except perhaps the Finnish judge, showed varying degrees of bias in scores in favor of skaters from their home countries. (Way to go, Finland!) Additionally, a statistical analysis of long-term trends in figure skating scoring published several years ago determined that 92 skating judges “showed statistically significant evidence of nationalistic bias.” Among them were five of the nine judges on Wednesday’s free dance panel, including the Finnish judge. (How dare you, Finland!) And one of the other four judges, China’s Huang Feng, was suspended for a year by the sport’s governing body after allegedly favoring Chinese skaters at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
An academic research paper on the topic, presented by Vincent Dumoulin and Hugues Mercier at the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, found that nationalistic bias in skating judging “is endemic and, for many judges, greater than all other sources of judging error.” Still, it’s not necessarily true that all these figure skating judges are intentionally distorting things. It could be that at least some of them are unconsciously favoring their compatriots.
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But even if some judges are By actively supporting the home team, since the highest and lowest scores of the technical elements and subcomponents of the program are discarded, there really is no harm, no foul, right? Well, yes and no. Extreme outliers can still end up affecting a participant’s final score, by ensuring that “regular” low scores that would have otherwise been removed are still included in the final average.
In the specific case of Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron versus Chock and Bates, the scores were so close that it is unfair to claim that biased judging pushed the French duo into gold medal position. But there is a broader point to make here, and that is that the International Skating Union still has a long way to go to ensure the integrity of its judging system.
In their 2020 paper, Dumoulin and Mercier found that “the current monitoring of ISU judges is completely inadequate,” which the most recent data on nationalist bias seems to confirm. At the very least, it seems obvious that figure skating judges should refrain from judging skaters from their home countries. Even if everyone means well, the perception of conflict of interest is overwhelming. When the US team takes the ice, the US judge should be asked to come out for a cigarette. But what if the American judge doesn’t smoke? What a pity for them! Rules are rules.
Other changes could also be made. Dumoulin and Mercier suggest that the ISU “can solve most of its evaluation problems with mathematically sound long-term monitoring.” But the DAA could also consider other solutions that No They involve mathematics.
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Perhaps there could be a neutral judge available from a country not represented at the competition, waiting in the wings to step in when a given judge needs to step aside. Perhaps figure skaters could have a set number of “challenges” per season, to be implemented when a given judge’s score seems especially egregious. Or maybe the judges should have to deliver their feedback to the skaters in real time, a la the sassy panelists on shows like american idol either Chopped. And at the very least, if the ISU has suspended you for alleged nationalist bias, then perhaps you should not be allowed to be an Olympic judge again.
Or maybe I should pick the winners. After all, I’ve never been accused of nationalist bias, or even of knowing much about figure skating. My first act will be to lift the Finnish ice dancers Juulia Turkkila and Matthias Versluis from the 12thth place to the gold medal position. I just think they deserve it, okay. Now leave me alone: I have an appointment to get my Finnish passport.