Posted on 02/16/2014 11:45:40 PM PST by hoagy62
Sometime after 9 p.m. local time on Monday night in the Sochi suburb of Adler, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir will step on the ice for what will be their final Olympic skate of a memorable career.
What the two spoke about the day before, after a near perfect rendering of their short program, will come back into play at this moment – their moment.
“We sat in the kiss and cry and looked at each other and said, 'It doesn’t matter,' because that [short program skate] was the moment we wanted to have,” said Moir.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter that the fix might have been in to give the gold medal to Meryl Davis and Charlie White, the talented and equally wonderful American world champions, long-time rivals and training partners with the Canadians in Detroit.
It doesn’t matter that many in the media have been asking about a fix for more than a week, after the first story came out in France’s famous L’Equipe sport magazine alleging that there might be a deal in the works between Russian and American judges to trade team event marks for those in ice dance.
It doesn’t matter that the focus has turned away from the skaters to something more sordid.
(Excerpt) Read more at olympics.cbc.ca ...
I know the Sochi Olympics has (for some) turned into a royal fustercluck...but c'mon! This sounds like a MASSIVE case of 'sour grapes' to me.
And from the (mostly) ultra-polite Canadians????
Virtue and Moir were excellent, but Davis and White were damn near perfect. It’s very close, but even I could see that D&W were closer in their holds and just a touch more precise and in unison.
C’mon.
The writer of the article prolly ran out of Molsons - fuggin’ Canucks alway have to bitch about somethin’ ...
It is sour grapes. Meryl Davis and Charlie White gave a performance that will go down in skating history. Much of the scoring comes from the way the skaters cut the ice with their blades. The judges look at things the ignorant do not see. It is easy to sway the public with thinking that does not know the technology.
This type of chatter will cause the judges to really be biased against the Canadian ice dancers, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.
Doesn’t the new scoring system make fixing all but impossible?
Olympic skating scores are rigged?
Who knew? I mean it’s not like it
wasn’t a common occurrence during the
cold war. I mean ALL those eastern
bloc skaters were ALWAYS so much better
than those from the west.
ANY sporting event that relys on judges
to create a score rather than an objective
measurement like time is open to manipulation
error and outright cheating. And anyone who
doesn’t believe it happens on a regular basis....
I’ve got some really really nice ocean front
property east of Reno I can sell to you for
a good price.
A sport determined entirely by “judges” might be “fixed”, you say???
I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
I don’t believe the scores were fixed at all. Davis and White were just about perfection, and deserved their high score and win. Case of sour grapes here, and really nasty to throw out an accusation of score fixing based on no facts at all. Viscious really. They changed the scoring system a while back rendering it very difficult to fix those scores anymore. This article stinks.
I don’t really care. Ice Dancing is to sports what MSNBC is to journalism - vaguely related but not by much.
It seems to me that Figure Skating scores are a matter of “expectations”. Come into the Olympics with a big reputation (World Ranking) and you get the benefit of any doubt. Enter the games as a second-tier competitor and there’s a definite ceiling on the scoring for you.
I thought Davis and White put a bit more into it, with flair and panache and letting it all hang out; while Virtue and Moir were more conservative and took less chances.
Are they pretending that Russia would DO ANYTHING TO HELP AMERICA? Because Putin has so much love and respect for the. Bamster? Bwahahahaha!
This story didn't start with the Canadians.
On February 9, the French sports newspaper L'Équipe broke the story of an alleged judging conspiracy between the USA and Russia to trade high votes on two events (in which the USA and Russia wound up winning gold, with the USA giving high scores to the Russian skaters and the Russians giving high scores to the USA skaters).
The Canadians are particularly sensitive to voting conspiracies in judging Olympics ice skating.
In 2002, the French and Russian judges conspired to swap votes. The results cost the Canadian team a gold medal. The problem was that the Canadians so clearly deserved the gold that an international skating an official was waiting for the French judge at her hotel when she returned from the event.
The IOC became involved, as did the International Skating Union. The Canadian skater's medals were upgraded from silver to gold and for the first time in Olympic history, an awards ceremony was repeated, and both the Russians and Canadians received gold medals.
The longer story includes suspension of two judges and a Russian mobster.
Cheating happens. I'm not saying it did in this case, but a French newspaper said the fix was in over a week ago.
The fix, if it existed, may not have been necessary because the Americans skated so well.
“In 2002, the French and Russian judges conspired to swap votes. The results cost the Canadian team a gold medal. The problem was that the Canadians so clearly deserved the gold that an international skating an official was waiting for the French judge at her hotel when she returned from the event.”
I remember that event and it’s why I generally dislike all the “judged events”. Give me a timed or a man-to-man event any day. Even Olympic boxing can be a joke.
Any sport that relies on judges rather than referees is going to be open to allegations of collusion by judges. Unfortunately, over the years, the collusion has been obvious to the general viewer. The more complicated the judging system, the more likely to be deemed suspect. Ice dancing competitions should be settled with the top two teams facing off with a hockey shootout. That would be fun to watch.
“Sale and her former husband David Pelletier were thrust into the spotlight at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games when a judging controversy erupted and they were belatedly awarded duplicate gold medals in the pairs competition after a French official admitted she had been ordered to mark them down”
you could call it sour grapes and accuse us Canucks as chronic bitcher’s ...thats the American way...shoot from the hip and let the bullshit fly...neither article besmirched the U.S. team who have proven their greatness, merely passing on a rumor from another judge in a sport riddled with past judging scandals.
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