Outcome Leaves No Debate, Thank Quad

A brief history of the quad:

First Quad: Adam and Eve had a couple of sons named Cain and Abel. Lasted until Cain developed the first recorded case of sibling rivalry.

Fab Quad: Lovable mop-tops from Liverpool who took the pop music world by storm in 1964. Lasted until the lads really got to know Yoko.

Fearsome Quad: Famous defensive line for the Los Angeles Rams during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lasted until their quads and their calves and their knees gave out.

Final Quad: The biggest event in American college basketball. Slightly misnamed. Because there’s a Final Quad every year, technically speaking, there will never really be a Final Quad. At least not until the first sighting of the Quad Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Quad Toe Loop: The first quadruple jump landed by a male figure skater in competition. Pioneered by Canadian Kurt Browning in 1988.

Quad Salchow: Another quadruple jump, taken off from the back inside edge of one foot and landed on the back outside edge of the other foot. Pioneered by American Timothy Goebel in 1998.

Quad Sixes: The four perfect scores of 6.0 given Russia’s Alexei Yagudin for his gold-medal winning free skate Thursday night, which were immediately subjected to the Quadruple Guess, also known as the Second Guess Times Two, pioneered by the pairs judges and the international media at the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Ever since the Russian pair scored a controversial victory over the Canadian pair, every move by every figure skating judge in Salt Lake has been double-checked, triple-checked, quadruple-checked. And look at these latest results:

Yagudin and countryman Evgeni Plushenko finished 1-2, the first time Russian men have won the figure skating gold and silver medals at the Olympic Games, despite the fact American Timothy Goebel out-quadded them both. Hmmm.

Yagudin became the first individual skater in the history of the Winter Olympics to receive more than two scores of 6.0, even though he skated more conservatively than Plushenko, taking care to avoid serious error and protect the lead he held coming out of the short program. Hmmm.

Immediately, eyes turned to the scoreboard and the nationalities of the judges doling out the perfect scores. Another case of Eastern bloc voting and bias?

Let’s see. The four 6.0 scores were handed out by the judge from Romania ... and the judge from the Czech Republic ... and the judge from Germany ...

And the judge from the United States.

The same U.S. judge who also ranked Goebel, who hit three quads but lacks the artistic polish of Yagudin and Plushenko, behind both Russians.

For the record, Goebel wasn’t whining, complaining or filing a protest. Just glad to be on the podium, said the very happy 21-year-old. Just glad to have a medal of any color.

Plushenko didn’t look too pleased, but he never does when he steps inside the same area code as Yagudin, his bitter rival. This one had to be tough for the young Russian to take--watching Yagudin hop up and down on the top step of the podium, punching the air in a fit of delight. Watching the scene while he fingered his own silver medal, Plushenko looked like Peter Tork the minute he heard the news the Monkees’ TV show had been canceled.

Also worth noting: There was no French judge on the panel Thursday night. Maybe that’s the way to curb these figure skating judging scandals: Keep the French away from the ice.

On the other hand, maybe we’ve all made too much of the pairs judging controversy. The hometown paper here, the Salt Lake Tribune, is publishing a daily special section on the Olympics.

Thursday’s was 16 pages. Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann was on the cover, followed on the inside pages by stories on giant slalom, snowboarding, Alpine combined skiing, women’s speedskating, men’s speedskating, women’s biathlon, men’s biathlon, cross-country skiing, men’s hockey and women’s hockey.

Finally, on the bottom of Page 11, tucked beneath a story on women’s luge and alongside a story on curling was the first mention of the pairs judging controversy. Hmmm. You can look at this one of two ways: Either the Salt Lake Tribune editors have a better handle on the big picture that the rest of us, or they have an edict to emphasize the positive (i.e., the amazing feats of Olympic champions) over the negative (i.e., unseemly judging scandals) during Games that are so important to Salt Lake’s self-image.

Either way, the Tribune would appear to have an ally in Ivan Lebedev, a Washington correspondent for the Russian news agency Tass. In Thursday’s Washington Post, Lebedev wrote, “The [International Skating Union] said in its statement that it decided to do [an internal] assessment following the reaction of the public and media. I’d like to ask the question, ‘What public? What media?’ As far as I know, the Russian public and the Russian press are not complaining about the results. The comments of the European newspapers were much more balanced than those of the North American press.”

Lebedev also wrote that the pairs medals “have been correctly awarded to the victors.” Imagine that. Tass comes out in support of the Russian pair! Film at 11!

This just in: Tass also agrees with the scoring of the men’s figure skating competition.