The New ISU Code Speak Secrecy and Cheating Judges Still on Display as Skating Season Debuts in North America

Washington, D.C. The International Skating Union's first North American tests of the new Code of Points judging system will occur at the upcoming Skate America event in Reading, PA and Skate Canada in Mississauga, Ontario. These tests will continue to demonstrate that the ISU is still imposing a judging system characterized by secrecy, lack of accountability and top-down directives, according to SkateFans for Accountability and ISU Reform (SkateFAIR). SkateFAIR, founded on the Internet in January 2002, is the first international skating fan organization to protest the ISU secret judging system, and staged the first-ever skating fan protest at last year's World Championships in Washington, D.C.

Over the summer, the ISU introduced two new Codes: a Code of Points marking system that will be used for the Grand Prix competition series and a couple of other competitions, and a Code of Ethics, published in June.

Code of Points: Same Ol Secrecy

The new Code of Points system was introduced by the ISU last year in a process that did not conform to the ISU's own constitution and regulations. Introduced as a project to be studied, the new system, the most radical change to the sport's scoring in decades, has now been implemented for the first international competition of the 2003-04 season. Amazingly, the ISU did not seem to learn the lessons of last season's controversial introduction of the interim judging system:

• The secrecy and anonymity of last year's interim system continues to contaminate the scoring system and the entire sport. Under COP, judges mark each element after the element is described and determined by a Technical Specialist or caller, who is handpicked by Ottavio Cinquanta, the ISU's controversial president. The system provides the individual scores from each judge for each element, but just as in the interim system there is no way to discover which judge is awarding which score. In fact, the fans in the arena will no longer see any individual judge's score of any skater, just the combined scores of all the judges
• ·Judging is not just secret, it is random, and under COP only five judges are determining the results of major international competitions. While the ISU has made statements that the new system is impossible to cheat, the only rationale for a random, secret judging system is that they still fear that some judges are cheating. In fact one of the first judges trained in the new system was Yuri Balkov, who was suspended by the ISU for conspiring to fix the results of the 1998 Olympic ice dance event. In some events this season, 5 of 14 judges' scores will count, and even if only one judge is cheating, the skaters and the reputation of the sport will continue to suffer.
• The COP system was rushed into place without proper testing, and without widespread education of skaters, choreographers and coaches about the system standards. The ISU had to issue new instructions following the Nebelhorn Cup last month after it became clear that there were many differences in how judges were scoring skaters, and because the CoP was not in sync with other required ISU rules. In essence the ISU is running a live test with skaters as guinea pigs in its rush to ram the system through before the 2006 Olympic Games in Ottavio Cinquanta's home country, Italy.

The ISU Code of Ethics: a Fig Leaf Covering

The ISU Code of ethics, which was published with great fanfare in June, was declared "comprehensive" by the ISU. SkateFAIR has conducted its own analysis of the Code, which is available on the SkateFAIR website. We discovered a document that seems primarily intended to improve the ISU's tarnished image and reads more as a loyalty oath than a Code of Ethics.

• The ISU failed to address the hard work of creating new shared values upon which to write a Code, in favor of looking good. Rather than have a public airing of the real ethics issues occurring within the ISU, the ISU Council instead took the road of publishing a document that quotes the ISU constitution and rules as the shared value points. If this were truly so, there would not have been the scandal in Salt Lake City in 2002. The organization is clearly at a crossroads, and this document has chosen to ignore those realities.
• The Code of Ethics is a document without a process for enforcement. The ISU has simply issued a document that has no accompanying structure to implement it until the next ISU Congress. In the meantime, the ISU Council is the investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury. A real structure would, at a minimum, include:
  • the creation of an office to handle claimed or suspected violations,
  • training of responders,
  • translation of the document and dissemination to the parties who are being asked to comply with this Code, which must be borne by the national governing bodies
  • education on the meaning of the document. Without discussion of what the responsibilities are for those who assume the various roles involved, the document cannot be considered to have been implemented.
• The Code does not require violations to be reported, nor does it address issues of conflicts between the Code and applicable civil laws. Of all the omissions in this document, this is the one that is most troubling to SkateFAIR, which is dedicated to fairness and accountability in skating. Given that several ISU officials may have failed to appear at last year's World Championships in Washington, due to concerns regarding possible interviews by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, these are not hypothetical issues.

For further analysis and information: www.skatefair.org

SkateFAIR, as an organization, will keep an open mind about the Code of Points. In our view, any judging system - whether based on the traditional 6.0 or the cumulative totals of various elements is suspect if the marks and conduct of the individual judges are not accessible to the skaters, coaches, media and fans. In our view, the ISU remains autocratic and beholden to no-one except the interests of a small coterie of insiders, insiders who panicked two years ago in Salt Lake City, and who have devised everything from new software to shallow ethics codes to prevent confrontation with the real issues. Those issues, which comprise corrupt judging, national bias, deal making and the refusal to overhaul a failed system of governance, will not go away no matter how many complex formulas are produced to rate a camel spin or quad salchow. And, since those issues have not gone away, neither will SkateFAIR.

We look forward to discussing these issues with other fans, with the media and with representatives of the ISU and USFSA at Skate America and Skate Canada.