The credibility of figure skating's judging system was firmly under the microscope on Friday as experts tried to fathom exactly what Adelina Sotnikova had brought to the ice that enabled her to dethrone South Korean Kim Yuna as Olympic champion. While the hosts of the Sochi Games rejoiced in hailing the teenager who had finally ended the motherland's long search for a women's champion, there was confusion, bewilderment and outrage outside Russia about a result that seemed steeped in bias. “How the hell were Yuna and Sotnikova so close in the components, I just don't get it?” exclaimed Canadian great Kurt Browning. “Yuna Kim outskated her, full stop. I'm shocked. What, suddenly, she just became a better skater overnight?.” If a four-times world champion could not work out how or why Sotnikova managed a major upset, neither could anyone else. What was even more incomprehensible was how did Sotnikova smash her own personal best by more than 18 points in just a month? Her mark of 149.95 was just 0.11 of a point shy of Kim's world record score of 150.06 - which she earned for a blinding performance at the 2010 Olympics. In layman's terms, Sotnikova's performance was the equivalent of a little-known sprinter improving his best time from 10.5 seconds to 9.6 in just four weeks to beat Usain Bolt over 100 metres. To compound matters, Sotnikova was the only one of the leading trio whose free programme contained an obvious mistake — a two-footed landing from a double loop — but as far as the nine-member judging panel were concerned, she was superior to the more graceful Kim and bronze medallist Carolina Kostner. While Sotnikova's camp were eager to point out that she performed one more triple than Kim, hence the 5.76 point margin, that did not explain why the Russia was 7.34 points ahead of Kostner who also performed seven clean triples. Scrutiny on judges Within seconds of the decision being announced on Thursday, Twitter went into overdrive with people divided over who should have won while loyalties and past records of those on the nine-member judging panel were scrutinised. One judge was identified as having served a one-year suspension for trying to fix an event at the 1998 Olympics, while another, Alla Shekhovtseva, is the wife of the general director of the Russian figure skating federation. Russian dynamo Julia Lipnitskaya's coach Eteri Tutberidze was quick to justify Shekhovtseva's presence on the panel. “Alla Shekhovtseva has been an international judge for many years and there has never been any allegations,” Tutberidze said. The accumulative scoring system that was introduced post 2002 Olympics as a replacement for the 6.0 system, that was open to corruption and vote swapping, was supposed have made things more transparent.But it is a scoring system that even the skaters struggle to understand and to make matters worse, the judges are able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity as no one knows which score was given by which official. With Russia united in the belief that Sotnikova won the gold fair and square, with the teenager even declaring she was relieved to have “skated cleanly”, it seemed as if nothing put a dampener on the celebrations. “Maybe there is speculation overseas (that Adelina was not the deserving winner) but we don't feel it here,” said Russian team's choreographer Peter Tchernyshev, who represented the United States at the 2002 Olympics. “We're very pleased with the result and we were following the rules . and we won this game.”
