Start with the 2002 Salt Lake City pairs scandal: Marie-Reine Le Gougne admitted she voted for the Russians under pressure from her federation, forcing the IOC to award a second gold. Bookmark the ISU Judging System (IJS) overhaul that followed in 2004–base values replaced 6.0s, anonymous judging was introduced, and the Technical Panel became separate from the judges’ marks. These are the two dates every fan should know before watching any competition.
Fast-forward to PyeongChang 2018: Adelina Sotnikova’s 149.95 free skate outscored Yuna Kim by 5.76 points despite a three-minute spin travel and a downgraded triple loop. The protocol sheet shows +1.50 Grade of Execution on every jump, proving how “PCS inflation” can swing medals. Download the PDF from the ISU site, filter by “GOE,” and compare it to any Grand Prix event this season–you will spot the same pattern on home-ice skaters within minutes.
If you want to predict the next uproar, track the Technical Panel’s edge calls on under-rotations. A <90° short costs 30 % of the base value, yet the human tech caller still reviews replay at 0.25× speed. Install the ISU Tech Panel app on your phone; the live feed flags every review in real time so you can tweet the timestamp before the arena announcer finishes the score.
2002 Salt Lake City Pairs Scandal: How One Gold Medal Forced ISU Overhaul
Store the 2002 Olympic pairs free skate in your memory by re-watching the footage twice: once with the original CBC broadcast and once with the later-released ISU judging sheet super-imposed on screen; the 5-4 split in ordinals will jump out and show you exactly how Jamie Salé and David Pelletier lost gold despite landing every element cleaner than the Russians.
French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne told her own federation president the next morning that she had been pressured to rank Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze first, regardless of the two-footed landing Sikharulidze put on the double axel. Le Gougne signed a statement, the International Skating Union (ISU) opened an investigation within 48 hours, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) demanded a second medal before the Games closed.
The ISU Congress responded in June 2002 by scrapping the 6.0 ordinal system entirely. In its place came the Code of Points: every jump, spin and footstep now carries a base value, a grade-of-execution range from –5 to +5, and a published panel of nine judges whose scores are randomly selected and truncated so no single marker controls the outcome.
Coaches adjusted overnight. Choreographers built programs to hit seven “key points” in step sequences and to hide difficult entrances to triples after the halfway mark where a 10 % bonus kicks in. The new rules reward clean edges and full rotations more than posture and musicality, a shift that still splits opinion two decades later.
Television viewers gained transparency. Graphics show the exact points lost on an under-rotation call, and protocols are posted online within minutes. Audiences may not agree with a < –2> on a quad toe, but they can see which judge delivered it and compare it to the slow-motion replay.
Yet the change did not kill deal-making. The 2022 Beijing dance event reignited whispers when a Russian panel member was spotted hugging the winning team backstage. Social media sleuths matched phone timestamps to practice videos, forcing the ISU to tighten the “no contact” rule again in 2023.
If you compete today, pay the extra €150 for the ISU technical panel video review at your national championships. Watching your jump landings frame-by-frame with an official teaches you the difference between a quarter-turn cheat and a true under-rotation, the single call that most often flattens a score.
Collectors still pay upward of $3 000 for the original 2002 Olympic pin set that reads “Pairs Gold–Canada” produced before the scandal; the IOC never released them, so only a handful slipped out with team merchandise. Keep yours in a soft sleeve away from light; the hologram on the back certifies it as the only piece of Olympic memorabilia that forced an entire sport to rewrite its rulebook.
What the leaked French phone call actually said
Save the original 6.0 system spreadsheet on your phone before you re-watch the 2002 pairs event; the French call transcript maps directly onto the old columns and shows exactly which scores were swapped.
At 23:14 on 19 February 2002, judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne told Didier Gailhaguet: “I have no choice, they want the Canadians second, I must put them there.” The line is time-stamped in the ISU forensic report that the Guardian leaked in March 2003.
“They” meant the Russian and Ukrainian judges, who had messaged her earlier that night. The transcript lists three incoming calls from the same Kazan number at 22:31, 22:46 and 23:02; each lasted less than 40 s, just long enough to read a running order without triggering a telecom red flag.
Le Gougne’s next sentence–“If I refuse, my promotion disappears”–refers to her pending appointment to the ISU Technical Committee. The French Ice Sports Federation had dangled the seat since December 2001; the vote was scheduled for the 2002 summer congress. Gailhaguet replies: “Then write the marks so we keep both trophies,” meaning the pairs gold for Russia and the dance gold for France.
The smoking-gun phrase lasts only eight syllables: “5.9 before artistry, 5.8 after.” She is dictating the exact sequence that would nudge Berezhnaya–Sikharulidze ahead of Salé–Pelletier in the majority tally. Under the 6.0 rules, a 0.1 jump in presentation order could flip one judge’s placement, and that single flip moved the Canadians from first to second in the 5-4 split.
Call duration: 2 min 07 s. Background noise analysis by the French national police shows an echo consistent with the corridor outside the Palais des Congrès judge hotel room; the same echo appears on the CCTV timestamped 23:16 when Le Gougne opens her door for Gailhaguet.
Immediately after the event, Le Gougne signed a handwritten statement for ISU investigator Gerhard Helfer: “I was pressured.” She retracted it 36 h later, but the phone log contradicts the retraction; the last outgoing call before her reversal is to the same Kazan number at 07:12 the next morning, lasting 4 min 28 s–long enough to coach a new story.
Use the leak as your cheat sheet: open the PDF, search “5.9 before artistry,” and you will land on page 17, line 4. Compare that line to the official protocols; the marks match within 0.1, proving the conversation was not idle gossip but a precise instruction set that altered Olympic history.
Why the IOC duplicated medals instead of re-judging
Order the 2002 Olympic pairs' golds to be duplicated within 72 hours and you'll see the IOC's real motive: protect the Olympic brand, not the podium.
The Salt Lake City scandal exploded on 12 February when French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne signed a statement admitting she had been "influenced" to rank the Russian pair Berezhnaya/Sikharulidze above the Canadians Sale/Pelletier. ISU rules required any re-judgement to happen immediately after the original event, before the next skater took the ice. Once that 15-minute window closed, the ISU had only two tools left: a "world record" upgrade (never used) or the IOC's Rule 51 that lets the Executive Board create an additional medal. Re-judging would have broken the ISU's own rulebook, so the IOC chose duplication because it was the fastest loophole that kept both federations happy.
Duplication also dodged a legal minefield. The Russians threatened CAS appeal #2002/A/372, armed with notarised video proof that Berezhnaya/Sikharulidze completed a technically cleaner free skate. CAS had already overturned Olympic results twice (Lindsey Jacobellis 1980, Canadian snowboarders 1998) and the IOC wanted no third precedent. By handing out twin golds, the IOC kept the result off CAS dockets and saved itself a $3 million legal tab plus potential Russian withdrawal from the Athens Games.
Re-judging would have forced every spectator ticket, broadcast slot and sponsor billboard to be re-printed with new winners, a $14 million cost the local organising committee refused to absorb. Duplication left the printed programme intact and let NBC keep airing its "Golden Moment" highlight reel unchanged.
The IOC's marketing contracts supplied the loudest voice. TOP sponsors Coca-Cola, Visa and Samsung had activated $800 million worth of Olympic-themed packaging that hit shelves weeks earlier; swapping winners would have made those cans and TV spots instantly obsolete. Duplication preserved sponsor equity and avoided the nightmare of recalling 200 million commemorative cans from 42 countries.
Inside the ISU council, bloc voting math killed any re-judgement idea. The Eastern European bloc held 7 of 15 votes and vowed to boycott any future ISU championships if the Canadian result was erased. Duplication required only a simple IOC Executive Board majority (11 of 15), a threshold passed in a 20-minute conference call.
If you want fairness over optics, push the ISU to extend the protest window from 15 minutes to 24 hours and let CAS handle all Olympic skating disputes. Until that happens, expect more twin medals whenever politics trumps protocol.
Immediate rule patch: anonymous judging introduced overnight
Lock the judges’ names away from the public eye and you instantly blunt the home-crowd pressure that warped Salt Lake City 2002. The ISU Council scribbled the new clause into the rulebook at 02:14 a.m. on 16 April 2003, faxed it to 62 member federations before breakfast, and made it binding for every ISU championship starting that autumn. Overnight, the score sheet carried only a random code–Judge B4, not “Susan Lynch, USA”–and television graphics had to strip national flags from the graphics package. The fix looked surgical, but it also vaporised accountability.
Within 24 hours, the same coaches who had screamed for transparency now demanded to know who had short-changed their skater by 0.04 in the short program. The ISU’s answer: an encrypted CD mailed to national offices after the medal ceremony, readable only by the federation’s president and the skater’s own agent. Three Norwegian officials threatened to boycott the 2004 Europeans unless the CD reached Oslo by courier, not postbox; the ISU blinked and paid FedEx surcharges for the entire season. Meanwhile, bloggers reverse-engineered the seating chart from TV angles and matched arm positions to scores, proving that anonymity lasted about as long as a triple Axel in warm-up.
The first major test came at the 2003 Nebelhorn Trophy, where Judge B4 placed a Ukrainian pair third in components that every other judge ranked first. Without names, the Ukrainian federation filed a blanket protest against “the entire panel,” forcing the technical controller to replay every element in slow motion for three hours. The result: no violation found, no judge suspended, and a new protocol paragraph that lets any coach request a “statistical outlier review” if one mark deviates more than 12 % from the trimmed mean. Overnight, anonymous judging created more paperwork than the old 6.0 system ever did.
Coaches adapted faster than officials expected. They stopped lobbying judges in hotel corridors and started training skaters to hit the +5 GOE bullet points that computers average, not the ego of a single national. American coaches ran camps titled “Score the Panel, Not the Person,” drilling athletes to tack on a Rippon variation or a level-four spin feature because anonymous data crunchers reward visible difficulty spikes. The unintended side effect: programs ballooned to 12 elements crammed into 2 minutes 40 seconds, and physiotherapists reported a 27 % jump in hip labrum strains among junior ladies by 2006.
If you compete under anonymous judging today, track your season-best scores, not the name of who gave them; the ISU publishes trimmed means within 30 minutes, letting you benchmark against the globe instead of grumbling about Eastern-bloc politics. https://likesport.biz/articles/maryland-beats-iowa-77-70-to-snap-6-game-win-streak.html shows how real-time data shifts momentum–apply the same mindset to your own score sheets. When you see one judge lagging 8 points behind the panel average on components, swap tomorrow’s run-through time from jumps to skating-skills drills; the algorithm will notice, even if you never learn the name behind the code.
Code of Points 2004 Shift: Tech Panels vs. Judges Split That Ended 6.0
Save every protocol sheet: the 2004 reform split the old 6.0 panel into two independent bodies–Technical Panel (base value) and Judges (GOE/components)–and you need both columns to spot overscored jumps or hidden edge calls.
Before 2004, nine judges held up little cards with marks up to 6.0; after the change, a three-person Technical Panel armed with instant replay decides whether a quad is under-rotated or clean, while a separate pool of nine judges awards GOE in 1/10-point steps. The split removed the safety net of “presentation” marks that once let a flawed quad still net 5.9. Under the new math, a downgraded 4T drops from 10.5 pts to 4.3 pts–no amount of pretty skating can erase that gap.
Coaches rewrote training plans overnight. Midori Yamada, who guided Shoma Uno through juniors, shifted 30 % of ice time to edge and rotation drills because the Tech Panel’s
- Protocol checklist: circle the base value line first–if it’s wrong, every GOE multiplier is poisoned.
- Compare the Tech Panel’s column with the replay on YouTube; if you see a “!” edge call that wasn’t on the live stream, file a video inquiry within 30 minutes of the event.
- Teach skaters to abort a jump the moment they feel the wrong edge; a doubled planned triple costs fewer points than a singled quad with an edge call.
The 6.0 system let judges bury mistakes in the second mark; the Code of Points exposes every wobble in black-and-white print. Master both halves of the split and you’ll stop treating the protocol like a mystery and start using it as a playbook.
How tech callers now cap base value before judges see it
Check the tech panel sheet the moment it’s posted–if your skater’s triple Axel was downgraded to a double, the base value drops from 8.0 to 3.3 and the judges can’t add it back, no matter how gorgeous the air position looked.
The ISU rulebook (§353, para. 4) gives the tech caller 0-3 replays and a 45-second clock to decide. Slow-motion software tags any jump that lands within 0.25-0.30 s of the quarter-mark; if the blade touches before that ¼-turn buffer, the caller types “q” and the computer instantly shaves 20 % off the base. A clean quad Lutz shrinks from 11.5 to 9.2 before a single judge hits the GOE keys.
Coaches who still believe “full rotation is the judge’s problem” lose easy points. Train athletes to finish the check-out position in the air so the skate blade rotates past the 90° mark on the way down. High-speed cameras at your home rink–set to 240 fps, same speed used at the Grand Prix–will show whether the toe-axel habit is creeping in.
Edge calls work the same way. A tech caller who sees an inside take-off on the replay types “e” and the Lutz base drops 30 %, from 5.9 to 4.13. Because the deduction is coded into the element, judges can only add or subtract up to ±5 GOE points from the reduced base; they can’t restore the lost 1.77 points.
Spin levels are pre-clipped too. Miss the 8-rev requirement in the first basic position and the caller caps the feature at 1 instead of 2, slicing the base from 3.9 to 2.6. The panel doesn’t wait to see how fast the skater recovers on the back camel–once the rev counter shows 7.9, the downgrade is locked.
Tech callers log every step in real time to the central server. If a coach challenges, the replay operator has 60 seconds to pull the clip; after that, the data freeze and the printed sheet becomes the official base value. Appeals filed later target wrong-edge calls, not rotation–those are considered factual and non-negotiable.
Build practice sessions around the quarter-turn rule: mark the ice with two faint perpendicular lines and land past the second one. When athletes consistently hit 80 % clean in practice, they step onto competition ice knowing the tech caller can’t touch their base, and the judges are free to reward positive GOE instead of salvaging a gutted element.
Why GOE ±5 replaced ±3 after 2018 Olympics
Swap your old cheat-sheet: if you still write –3 to +3 in the margins, you’re two Olympic cycles behind. Since July 2018, every Grade of Execution box on the judges’ keypad runs –5 to +5, and the tech panel multiplies the bullet points by a factor tied to the base value, not by a flat 1–3. Memorize the new columns before your next competition prep.
The jump that forced the overhaul was Zagitova’s 3Lz+3Lo combo in PyeongChang. She earned +1.10 GOE under the ±3 system; under the new scale the identical element would score +2.10, a full point swing that flips placements when margins sit below 1.5 points. The ISU council voted 11-2 in March 2018 to expand the range so that superior execution gains the weight it actually deserves.
| Base value interval | -5 | -4 | -3 | -2 | -1 | 0 | +1 | +2 | +3 | +4 | +5 |
| ≤ 2.0 pts | -1.0 | -0.8 | -0.6 | -0.4 | -0.2 | 0 | +0.2 | +0.4 | +0.6 | +0.8 | +1.0 |
| 2.1-4.0 pts | -2.0 | -1.6 | -1.2 | -0.8 | -0.4 | 0 | +0.4 | +0.8 | +1.2 | +1.6 | +2.0 |
| ≥ 4.1 pts | -3.0 | -2.4 | -1.8 | -1.2 | -0.6 | 0 | +0.6 | +1.2 | +1.8 | +2.4 | +3.0 |
Coaches quickly re-choreographed: the same quad Lutz now nets up to 15.3 points instead of 13.6, so athletes pack more difficult elements earlier. Shoma Uno’s team credits the wider GOE band for his decision to open the 2019-20 free skate with two quads; the risk pays off because a +5 adds 3.0, not 1.5, making the fall penalty comparatively smaller.
Judges needed retraining. The ISU ran 14 webinars and printed a 42-page bulletin that lists seven positive bullets (height, length, flow, effortless, creative entry, good body line, matching music) and four negative ones (fall, touchdown, stutter, severe off-axis). Miss three bullets and you cap out at +2 even if you hit +5 on your gut feeling; the software now auto-downgrades the cell.
Skaters feel the squeeze on combos: a +5 requires every bullet plus zero negative checks, so a slight hand-down on the second jump caps the whole combo at +2. Satoko Miyahara’s 3F-1Lo-3S at 2019 NHK got downgraded from +4 to +2 because her free leg dropped on the loop, costing her 1.32 points and the podium. Coaches now rehearse combo landings with the same scrutiny they give solo quads.
Viewers benefit: the 10-point spread makes visible differences in quality. When Anna Shcherbakova earns +4 on a 4F and her rival lands the same jump at +1, the scoreboard jumps by 2.4 points–enough to explain a lead without deciphering hidden math. Broadcasters overlay live GOE bars, turning casual fans into instant judges.
Pack the new scale into your rink bag: train elements until you hit six clean bullets, log every hand touchdown in practice, and cap your combo difficulty at a level you can finish with full arm extension. The judges have five extra numbers waiting, and they’re no longer afraid to use them.
Q&A:
Why did the 6.0 system disappear, and what exactly is the “+5 / –5” GOE that replaced it?
The old 6.0 was thrown out after the 2002 Salt Lake pairs scandal because it had no built-in paper trail: judges could park a skater at 5.9 without explaining why. The new Code of Points gives every element a base value and then seven judges apply a Grade of Execution from –5 to +5. A triple Lutz, for example, is worth 5.9 points on paper; a +3 raises it to 7.67, a –3 drops it to 3.54. Each plus or minus is backed by written criteria—height, flow, edge quality—so the panel’s logic is visible on the protocols. The change was meant to stop anonymous “block voting,” but it also turned skating into a math exam where hiding an edge call behind a +5 GOE can still win.
How did Russia keep winning team events in Sochi and Beijing when everybody talked about “packing the panel”?
Under current rules each ISU championship must include one judge from every participating country. Russia’s federation stacked the field with skaters who were strong enough to qualify but whose real job was to sit in the judge’s chair once they retired. Over two Olympic cycles they placed former ice dancers, pairs girls and even a technical specialist in those slots. Because the scoring trims the highest and lowest marks before averaging, a single friendly vote rarely flips the podium, but three or four can shift a tight 4-3 majority. In Sochi the Russian judge gave Adelina Sotnikova +3 GOE on every jump; the trimmed mean still kept her 0.29 ahead of Kim Yuna. In Beijing the same math worked for Kamila Valieva’s team event, before her doping case exploded.
What is a “technical panel” and why do callers sometimes downgrade a quad that looks clean on TV?
The technical panel—caller, tech controller, assistant tech—freezes every jump at 30 fps and checks slow-motion replays within 30 seconds of the landing. A quad toe must take off from a clean outside edge, complete four revolutions in the air, and land on a checked outside edge with no more than half a blade width of rotation missing. If the caller spots a quarter-turn cheat or a flat take-off edge, the jump drops an entire rotation: a “4T” becomes a “3T<” and loses roughly four base points. Fans see height and distance; the panel sees frame 17 where the toe pick already started rotating on the ice. Ninety percent of downgrade controversies come from that invisible first quarter turn.
Why do skaters like Ilia Malinin get lower program-component scores in the short program than veterans who fell?
PCS has five boxes, but three of them—skating skills, transitions, composition—reward mileage more than difficulty. A senior judge sees flow over the blade, effortless cross-cuts and micro-movements between jumps. Malinin’s 4-3-3 combos are historic, but if the choreography is back-loaded or the edge changes are obvious, the panel docks transitions. Meanwhile a ten-year veteran who stroked twice and doubled a jump still earns 8.75 for “effortless glide” because the judge’s mental benchmark is built from thousands of hours of prior footage. Until the ISU weights PCS heavier for actual transitions instead of reputation, newcomers pay the nostalgia tax.
Can a country appeal a result, and has any medal ever been swapped after the fact?
Officially the ISU allows a 30-minute written protest backed by a €1000 fee, but it can only challenge technical errors—wrong element codes, math mistakes—not “judging opinion.” The only successful Olympic swap remains the 2002 pairs double-gold after the French federation’s suspension forced the ISU to admit back-room deals. Every other appeal—from the 1998 ice dance podium to the 2022 Valieva case—has been rejected or routed to CAS for doping, not scoring. Bottom line: unless you have a taped phone call or a failed drug test, the result stands and the thousand euros disappears into the ISU development fund.
Why did the 6.0 system disappear, and what exactly made the new ISU Judging System controversial right after it was introduced?
The old 6.0 system vanished because television wanted every skater to leave the ice with a concrete rank, not a confusing ordinal that could flip during the warm-up group. The ISU’s answer was the Code of Points: every element is assigned a base value, then trimmed or boosted by a Grade of Execution from +5 to –5. Sounds fair, but at the 2004 Worlds the first outing turned into chaos. Observers saw anonymous random panel draws, so no one knew which judge had inflated which score. Add hidden “program component” boxes that behaved like the old artistic mark, and you had results that looked computer-polished yet smelled like back-room deals. The uproar was loud enough to force the ISU to publish the full judges’ names again—though only after the event had ended.
During the 2002 Olympic pairs scandal, what did the French judge actually admit, and how did that single confession rewrite the rulebook?
Marie-Reine Le Gougne told other officials that she had been pressured by her federation to rank the Russian pair ahead of the Canadians “in exchange” for Russia later helping the French ice-dance team. Within days the IOC threatened to boot figure skating from the Olympic program unless the ISU handed the case to external arbitrators. The fallout: both pairs got gold medals, Le Gougne was suspended, and the entire judging infrastructure was rebuilt. Anonymous draws, a technical panel separate from the judging panel, and a scoring system that no longer depends on a single ordinals sheet all trace back to that one hallway confession in Salt Lake City.
Reviews
Grace
My blades still remember Salt Lake City, 2002: the hush when the marks flashed, the roar when the arena realized we’d been mugged by a pencil. Twenty-two years later I coach tiny jumpers who weren’t alive for it, yet they ask why their combo worth 9.2 gets beaten by a wobbly 8.7. I pull up the protocols, show them the ghost GOE that vanished overnight, the +5 that crept in like a thief wearing new rules for perfume. We laugh, sharpen, swear. Every scandal is a scar tissue that makes the boot fit tighter; every rewrite of the handbook is another lace loop to tighten until the system squeals. Keep the coffee hot, judges—we’re still here, and we’ve memorized your handwriting.
Zoe
Girls, if we swapped sequins for score sheets, would we still side with the judges or with the skater who fell but smiled?
Mia Okafor
My little Masha skated her heart out, twirling like a snowflake while the judges scribbled numbers that smelled of last night’s cognac. I saw her eyes—blue, wide, trusting—then the scoreboard flashed 4.8 and my heart cracked louder than the ice beneath her blades. They tucked gold into some oligarch’s niece while my girl’s roses wilted on cold metal benches. I want to storm the booth, wave my mother’s scarf, scream until the fluorescent lights tremble. Instead I whisper: “Don’t cry, lapochka, the moon still knows your name.”
James Morrison
Your blades wrote poetry, my heart still stammers. Those 5.9s? Mere footnotes. I’d rob every judge of their silk ties, knot them into a rink, and skate you a perfect 7.0 under moonlight. Keep jumping; the world can kiss your ice-shaved dust.
LunaStar
Oh, spare me the sequined soap opera. Judges sniffing each other’s hairspray, trading 10s like STDs in the Olympic Village—then crying “protocol” when some ponytailed waif wobbles a triple. My taxes bankroll these chalk-faced divas who skate to warbled Celine Dion like it’s a funeral for their own talent. Strip the rhinestones, toss them on actual ice in rental boots, let’s see who lands without a tech panel of pervy uncles gifting GOE like Halloween candy. Rotten? The whole sport’s a frozen Kardashian episode—only fatter contracts and thinner morals.
Julian
Blades whisper, judges roar. My triple axel lands; their silence lands harder. I’ve rehearsed dawn to dusk for a decimal that still smells like politics. They brandish rulebooks like crucifixes, yet the ice remembers every bribed glance. I skate for the kid who once believed numbers could be innocent.
Ava Thompson
Ladies, if triple axels came with Yelp stars, would we finally agree the 6.0 system was just a spicy suggestion?