It Was a No-Brainer, but Judges Had Mental Bloc

Who would have thought that Michelle Kwan, Irina Slutskaya, Sasha Cohen, Sarah Hughes and Maria Butyrskaya would become bit players in the Winter Olympics’ women’s figure skating competition?

But that’s what happened Thursday night. When the skaters still in contention for medals went onto the ice at 8:43 p.m. MST to warm up for their freestyle programs, the only people who mattered to those who knew what truly was at stake were named Sissy Krick, Tatiana Danilenko, Maria Hrachovcova, Ingelise Blangsted, Paolo Pizzocari, Irina Absaliamova, Pekka Leskinen, Deborah Islam and Joseph Inman.

They were the nine judges who would determine the winners.

And oh so much more.

Since last week’s scandal involving the pairs competition, figure skating judges have been scrutinized like never before by officials, media, the public and even other judges. Judges say they have been afraid to talk among themselves about skating lest anyone accuse them of conspiring to predetermine an event.

The panel for the women’s freestyle competition Thursday night at the Salt Lake Ice Center was under additional pressure after a news conference called a couple of hours earlier by the Russian Olympic Committee.

The Russians, convinced that their relatively low medal count is the result of a post-Cold War conspiracy against them, said they are demanding a review of questionable decisions in figure skating, cross-country skiing and ice hockey by International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge.

If not satisfied, they warned they might withdraw their athletes from the remaining three days of competition, refuse to compete in future Olympics and organize their own Games, a la the Goodwill Games.

Implied was that they would be closely watching the judges in the women’s freestyle program to determine whether Americans Kwan, Cohen and Hughes would be favored over Russians Slutskaya and Butyrskaya.

So the judges were not only deciding medalists in the marquee event of the Winter Olympics.

They were deciding the future of the Olympics, and, considering that the Games play an even larger role than the Miss America pageant in promoting world peace, perhaps the fate of the civilized world.

I thought Thursday night that the world had dodged a bullet, at least for one more night.

Cynics might suggest that the Russians, with their shoe-pounding act, were merely attempting to influence the judges to favor their skaters, but it appeared as if Sarah Hughes, the 16-year-old from Great Neck, N.Y., had made that impossible.

Skating second among the serious medal contenders, she became the first woman to perform two triple-triple combinations in the Olympics and exhibited artistry far beyond her norm.

She still had to have help to win the gold medal because she was fourth after Tuesday night’s technical program. She got it when the three skaters who were ahead of her, Cohen, Kwan and Slutskaya, faltered.

The only difficult decision for the judges should have been whether to place Kwan or Slutskaya second in the freestyle program. If the majority had gone with Kwan, she would have won the gold medal by virtue of her first-place finish in the technical program. Instead, Slutskaya finished second.

Amazingly, however, four of the nine judges had Slutskaya first in the freestyle program, ahead of Hughes. Not so amazing, one was the Russian judge. The others were from Slovakia, Denmark and Belarus. The five judges who favored Hughes were from Germany, Italy, Finland, Canada and the United States.

So it appears as if the bloc voting is still alive and well.

In my opinion, it is indefensible for a judge to have voted Slutskaya first. But the Russians might not see it like that.

Look out. Here comes still another bullet.

All the talk of “Miracle on Ice II” has made the Russians nervous. They could sense that they were being set up as soon as the Americans named Herb Brooks as coach, a feeling that was reinforced when Mike Eruzione and his 1980 teammates emerged to light the caldron during the opening ceremony.

That led to suspicions among the Russians that the fix might be in if they had to face the Americans in today’s semifinals. But during Wednesday’s quarterfinal game against the Czech Republic, they began to wonder if the fix might be in to prevent them from playing the Americans.

Perhaps never before has a team protested a game that it won, but the Russians were outraged by referee Stephen Walkom, a Canadian native who lives in Pennsylvania. From the final three minutes of the first period until the middle of the third period, six consecutive penalties were called against the Russians. Three within three minutes in the first period left them two men down.

They prevailed, 1-0, but only because of the superior goaltending of Nikolai Khabibulin.

Vitaly Smirnov, an IOC vice president from Russia, said that he saw “malicious intent” in the referee’s calls and suggested that the Americans would rather play the Czechs in the semifinals because a loss to them would be easier to explain to the remaining cold warriors in the United States.

Smirnov, one of two IOC members who didn’t vote for the compromise--he abstained--that awarded a second gold medal to the Canadian pairs team, complained Thursday about that decision.

So did the president of Russia’s Olympic Committee, Leonid Tyagachev, who suggested that the IOC give the Russian cross-country skiers disqualified Thursday after a failed drug test a second gold medal because they would have won the race.

We are now peering into the Pandora’s box opened by the IOC with its politically expedient but shortsighted decision in the pairs controversy. It will reverberate throughout the future of the Olympic movement, however long or short that might be.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.