Figure Skating’s Farce Should Cost It Olympics

Before anyone sends the padded wagon, let me preface what I’m about to say by acknowledging it will never happen. But I’m going to set this down on paper anyway, perhaps wrap a fish in it tomorrow, and file my notes away in some folder called, “Ideas Whose Time Have Not Come.”

Because this needs to be said.

Figure skating should be kicked out of the Olympics.

If the International Skating Union’s farcical two-day hearings in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Monday and Tuesday proved anything, it’s that the figure skating racket--it’s too corrupt to be called a sport--is incapable or uninterested in policing itself.

Apparently the ISU learned nothing from Sarah Hughes’ legitimate victory in the Olympic women’s competition and the acclaim that followed because the judges finally did the right thing--rewarding the best skater that night with the biggest prize on the sport’s most important night of the year.

On Tuesday, the now-infamous French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne and her federation chief, Didier Gailhaguet, were suspended by the ISU’s executive council for three years for trying to fix the pairs skating competition at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in February. The International Skating Union’s executive council considered testimony from no fewer than 13 people, and found the evidence persuasive.

Which begs an obvious question: Why weren’t Le Gougne and Gailhauget banned for life?

They should have been. Result-fixing is among the worst sins in sports.

Now, something figure skating used to be able to claim--that its events were authentic competition among athletes who also excel at being artists--has been shattered.

Figure skaters are athletes, all right. Don’t let anyone tell you they’re not.

But if you rig results without regard to skaters’ efforts or abilities, then what they do is performance. It’s not sport. The essence of sport is authentic competition.

Without it, figure skating is an exhibition, something no better or different than pro wrestling. But at least the World Wresting Federation admits its shows are scripted.

Figure skating can’t guarantee that its are not.

Some of the same testimony the ISU used to punish Le Gougne and Gailhaguet on Tuesday has illuminated how corrupt figure skating is. In the course of the investigation, more spinoff stories have sprung up about more vote-fixing or score-manipulating at other major events dating back years. The demonstrated lack of concern among ISU officials not only is appalling but crosses all national borders.

Almost lost this week in all the words written about the punishment to Le Gougne or Gailhaguet, or their overheated threats to fight their sanctions, was an Associated Press report detailing how two Americans, Olympic pairs referee Ron Pfenning and Jon Jackson, a skating judge who testified that he witnessed a confession of vote-fixing by Le Gougne, asked the ISU council to bar U.S. member Claire Ferguson from the French duo’s hearing this week.

According to Pfenning and Jackson, Ferguson believed that Le Gougne and Gailhaguet should not be punished or should receive only light penalties. They said Ferguson told them last month at the world championships in Japan that although she had not yet seen evidence gathered by ISU investigators, she believed Gailhaguet acted the same way dozens of other federation chiefs have in the past.

Lovely.

Rather than treat this like a cancer that needs to be cut out, the ISU keeps treating it like a public-relations crisis that it wants to go away. So the ISU seems to have decided that a containment policy is the best strategy. They’ve chosen to spank one judge and one crooked official, then wash their hands and declare, “Well, that was annoying. How ‘bout we all move on?”

But it won’t work, if only because what we’re left with now is the cheaters--Le Gougne and Gailhaguet--threatening to sing until they spill every nefarious story they know. Which is just further proof how badly the ISU blew it. By failing to go far enough with its investigation, the ISU has left it to the cheaters to position themselves as the conscience of the sport.

“If you want to kill a dog, you say it has rabies,” Gailhaguet said. “But watch out, the dog can turn into a wolf. I will not be done in by Anglo-Saxon lobbying. ... What happened at the Olympic Games has left me with a thirst for revenge.”

In the interim, why should the rest of the Olympics let figure skating drag them down?

Stop the music. Send ‘em all slinking off to the kiss-and-cry area. Kick them out.