MILAN — Every four years, we casual Americans become instant experts in a whole array of winter Olympic sports. We decide we know curling strategy, we debate skiers’ lines down precipitous slopes, we instantly judge snowboarders on moves that would leave us in traction. And man, do we have thoughts on figure skating judges. 

Here’s the thing, though: While the Olympians and aficionados can safely ignore pretty much all of our two weeks’ worth of blather, the opinions on figure skating judging stick.

Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates skated the routine of their lives on Wednesday night in figure skating’s ice dance event … only to watch in horror and heartbreak as judges controversially deemed the routine of France’s  Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron a more worthy one. Chock and Bates ended up with a silver medal — a titanic achievement, of course, but a “bittersweet” one, in Chock’s words, when you think you ought to have won gold. 

On CBS News, Chock called for “transparent judging” to help viewers understand what’s happening. “I think it's also important for the skaters, that the judges be vetted and reviewed to make sure that they are also putting out their best performance,” she added, “because there's a lot on the line for the skaters when they're out there giving it their all, and we deserve to have the judges also giving us their all and for it to be a fair and even playing field.”

The figure skating establishment appears to be shrugging this off as just one of them skating deals, yet another in a long line of what-are-you-gonna-do judging frustrations. It’s not as egregious as the Salt Lake City skating scandal of 2002, when a French judge conceded that she’d been pressured to favor a Russian pairs duo that eventually won gold … right? 

“It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations,” the International Skating Union said in a statement. “The ISU has full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness.”

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But the fire continues to smolder outside of figure skating’s traditional territory, and the casual fans who are getting a close look at this are asking, rightfully: Just what the heck is going on with the judging in figure skating?

Granted, Americans come into this with no small anti-judge bias. Judging as a means of determining a victor just doesn’t sit well with most American viewers, whether it’s gymnastics, figure skating or the Westminster Dog Show. 

At the risk of going full Daytona 500, in America, we don’t care much for ties, and we don’t dig on judged sports. If a tie is like kissing your sister, a judgment loss is like kissing a dog, and not even your dog. We like to settle our sporting events on the court, on the field, on the ice … and we don’t like our sports left in the hands of a faceless cabal passing irrevocable judgment. 

(Yes, we have instant replay. But we don’t decide the entire Super Bowl on it.) 

The issue with judging, of course, is that it’s done by judges — flawed, biased, persuadable, even manipulable human judges. The ISU has attempted a range of fixes in the wake of the 2002 scandal, from eliminating the highly imperfect and inconsistent “6.0” system to making judges’ names public to increase transparency. The ISU Judging System drills down to an element-by-element level, eliminating outliers and averaging scores, 

For the most part, the changes work, but if critics want ammunition, well … it’s there if you look at the numbers. Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron finished with 225.82 to Chock and Bates’ 224.39, a difference of 1.43 points. However, in the free dance program, the French duo totaled 135.64, while the Americans finished with 134.67. Again, extremely close, extremely debatable. But keep digging. 

In scores documented by SkatingScores on Twitter, five of nine judges scored the USA duo higher than the French one in free dance. Eight of nine judges gave Chock and Bates at least 130.97 points. The lowest score for the Americans? A 129.74 … from the French judge. Hmmm. 

Now, consider the French scores. All extremely strong, yes, but the strongest score? A stunning 137.45, again from the French judge. HMMMM. 

Put another way: France’s Jézabel Dabois ranked the United States 7.71 points worse than the French duo. This isn’t quite an Indiana-over-Oregon-level differential, but it’s still pretty substantial. Add to that the fact that Spain actually ranked the United States’ routine third, behind France and bronze medal winner Canada, and you can see why many U.S. fans are saying certain judges are full of merde. 

For another perspective, though, check out this data visualization by Sportico’s Lev Akabas:

The immediate point is that the French judge absolutely jobbed the Americans, yes. This sure looks like sandbagging to bring down the Americans’ overall score and help the French team to the gold. Statistically speaking, even if many of the French judge’s individual element scores were thrown out — and they were — there’s still the potential for an artificial manipulation of the final score. And when you’re talking tenths and hundredths of a point, every score matters. 

But the larger point of this graph is equally relevant — bias is rampant across national borders. So much so that SkatingScores’ “Bias-O-Meter” shows that virtually every judge showed bias toward the skaters from their home countries. (Aside: The fact that a “Bias-O-Meter” even exists, and is statistically valid, shows exactly how gnarled the judging situation in figure skating is.) 

What’s the answer? Perhaps AI can handle this, assuming it doesn’t hallucinate a third skater on the ice. Perhaps a more rigid form of judge recusal — kicking out judges when a skater from their home nation is on the ice, for instance, would be a solid start. Or, hell, just go to a worldwide voting system on the phone. No way that could be manipulated, right? 

The maddening aspect of all of this is that it’s welling up just as skating is enjoying a resurgence in the United States. Between the two-time gold medal-winning team, the Quad God and the Big Three, America’s Olympic figure skating looks as good as it has in decades. This isn’t the time for the sport to get mired in familiar, avoidable controversies. 

Viewers deserve better. Chock and Bates deserved better. And figure skating as a sport deserves better. That’s not a judgment, that’s straight fact.

MILAN — This time last year, the most decorated alpine skier in history was trying to force herself to ski again. Mikaela Shiffrin was attempting to return to the slalom and giant slalom races, and found herself unable to do what she’d been doing all her life.  

“I could barely even finish a run,” she recalled recently, “not because of crashing, but because when I told my body to go, it just wouldn’t.” 

Just a few months before, in November 2024, she was on her second run in Killington, Vermont, and on the cusp of capturing her 100th World Cup victory. No other alpine skier, male or female, has more than 86, and here was Shiffrin, about to break into triple digits. 

But she clipped a gate midway through her run, setting off a crash that sent her pinwheeling into the slope’s netting. She doubled over in agony, unable to ward off the pain radiating through her abdomen. 

“It’s honestly kind of difficult to explain what the pain felt like,” she later wrote in The Players Tribune. “But the closest I can get would probably be, it was like … not only was there a knife stabbing me, but the knife was actually still inside of me.”

She was extricated from the slope by sled, and later examinations revealed she had suffered significant abdominal injury, nearly puncturing her colon. But while her body healed, her mind continued to struggle. The diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder from the crash reverberated for months afterward as she attempted to manage the panic and fear that accompanied her return to the slopes.  

JOSEPH PREZIOSO via Getty Images

“Everybody needs to understand with these struggles that they don't work linearly,” Shiffrin recently said. “They don't work in the way you think they're going to, or expect they're going to. … Time helps. Exposure helps. It doesn’t work to just back away from your fears, but it works to take them on in bite-sized pieces.” 

Killington isn’t the only slope that holds ghosts for Shiffrin. There’s also the Yanqing National Alpine Skiing Centre, host of the alpine events for Beijing’s 2022 Olympics. Shiffrin went into the 2022 Games a two-time gold medalist, victorious both at Sochi (slalom) and Pyeongchang (giant slalom). But at Beijing, she failed to even finish in three of her six events, her best individual finish a 9th in Super G. 

“I don't want Beijing to be the reason that I'm scared of the Olympics. And for the past few years, it has been a little bit,” Shiffrin told Olympics.com last fall. “When Cortina comes along, we’ll just take it day by day, take it as it comes.”

She arrived at the Milan Cortina Games with as much momentum as she’s had in years. She finally managed that 100th World Cup victory in February, and since then she’s added seven more, including a victory in slalom in the Czech Republic just days before the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony. That combined success, that validation of her belief in herself, has given her a new, more optimistic mindset heading into the Games. 

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“Especially after the past two seasons, with battling a couple different pretty serious injuries, I've had two fairly incomplete seasons,” Shiffrin said recently. “So, to be at this point right now … heading into the Olympics, but also from the perspective of just having a really successful World Cup season, I'm really excited about that.”

But then came the team combined ski on Feb. 10 where Shiffrin not only lost the lead Breezy Johnson staked her in the downhill but finished 15th overall in her slalom run — nearly a second behind first place. A mediocre ski from Shiffrin would have notched her and Johnson gold. Instead they dropped all the way off the podium to fourth place.

How will she rebound from the rocky start?

She has a few days, as the giant slalom is Sunday. And she also has the lessons of four years ago to fall back on.

“The one thing you can expect from the Olympics is that things are just not really going to go according to your plan,” Shiffrin said. “So you've got to roll with the punches and have a really good open mind.”

MILAN — Fifty-eight years ago, during their medal ceremony for the 200m race, Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a silent protest, an expression of Black Power support. Incensed, IOC president Avery Brundage kicked the American track medalists out of the Olympic Games and threatened to expel the entire United States delegation. 

Fifty-eight hours ago, give or take, Ukrainian skeleton pilot Vladyslav Heraskevych displayed a helmet bearing the images of more than a dozen athletes and coaches who have died in Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia. IOC president Kirsty Coventry met with Heraskevych, sympathizing with his message and pleading for him not to wear the helmet during the moments of his actual competition. 

By the IOC’s rules, Heraskevych could wear the helmet during practice, he could display it during press conferences, he could even — hypothetically — show it during a medal ceremony. He just couldn’t wear the helmet during competition. When Heraskevych refused to concede that condition, the IOC removed him from his lone event. 

Two protests. Two demonstrations of belief in something bigger than the Olympics. Two removals from the Olympics, yes, but under very different circumstances — one with vengeful anger, one with regret. The International Olympic Committee, one of the world’s most tradition-bound organizations, is changing — glacially, but changing nonetheless — with the times. 

Freedom of expression, in every sense, is coming one day for the Olympics. So why not now? Why not today? 

Andrew Milligan - PA Images via Getty Images

In 1968, the International Olympic Committee spokesman called Smith and Carlos’ silent protest “a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit.” Brundage demanded that Smith and Carlos be removed from the Olympic Village. When the United States Olympic Committee, as it was then known, pushed back against Brundage, he threatened to boot the entire United States delegation — every single American athlete — from the 1968 Olympics. 

On Thursday morning, IOC spokesman Mark Allen told assembled media that “we dearly wanted (Heraskevych) to compete. It would have sent a powerful message. We were happy to provide him with a number of occasions to express his grief.” What a difference six decades makes — by the IOC’s current standards, Smith and Carlos’ protest would have been perfectly acceptable. 

Coventry noted that the IOC did not have a problem with Heraskevych speaking his mind … outside the boundaries of the games themselves. "It's not about the messaging,” she said Thursday, “it's literally about the rules and the regulations. In this case, the field of play, we have to be able to keep a safe environment for everyone, and sadly that means no messaging is allowed."

Thing is, with Russia, the IOC has already done some indisputable messaging of its own. Russia, as a collective nation, has been banned from the Olympics since 2022 because of its invasion of Ukraine. Not to get too simplistic here, but banning an entire nation from the Olympic Games is a political message written in the skies, not just on a helmet. 

The key question, of course, is this: Once you open this door to in-competition messaging, where do you stop? It’s not difficult to imagine how one athlete’s noble protest of a crushing war becomes another athlete’s partisan protest of a political candidate, and before long you have athletes protesting for a whole range of less-than-genocide-level causes. 

The IOC doesn’t often inspire sympathy, but you can at least see the immensity of the problem they’re facing here. Does the IOC restrict protests to certain areas of the body, or certain sizes, like brand logos? How would the IOC determine what causes are “protest-worthy”? If protest is permitted on a helmet, why not a full uniform? And what about the rights of athletes from other countries who might be on the other side of the issue under protest? Shouldn’t they get a say in this, too? 

Allen, the IOC spokesman, noted that the Olympics already offers athletes a method of expressing grief, which is a black armband. But given the fact that, by the IOC’s estimation, there are 130 conflicts ongoing in the world at this moment, where does one draw the line? “If everyone is allowed to express themselves in that way beyond a black armband,” Allen said, “it will create a field of play which becomes a field of expression. And even where one may or may not agree with the sentiments, you can see where that would lead to a chaotic situation.” 

It’s easy to dismiss this entire controversy with a wave of the hand: This is the Olympics! Can’t they put their protests aside for two minutes? But for many athletes, consumed by challenges and fears and trauma most Americans can’t imagine, the protest is the point. The remembrance of those lost, the desire to hold the guilty to account, the dream of a better life … for them, those goals are their true calling, and the Olympics are just their vehicle for making the world hear their cries. 

If there’s a bright side to Heraskevych’s Olympic expulsion, it’s this: His protest now reaches much farther than it ever would have if he’d simply been permitted to compete without incident. It’s a classic case of the Streisand Effect, where the IOC’s attempt to shut down and smother a protest has the effect of magnifying it. His voice and his cause reach much further now than they would have in any other circumstance, even winning a medal. 

The time will come, soon, when athletes will be able to make the statements they wish to make, when they wish to make them. But that time won’t be soon enough for Vladyslav Heraskevych and his Olympic dreams.

MILAN — Tradition holds that when you win an Olympic medal, you get that medal draped over your neck fairly quickly — usually a few minutes, maybe a half-hour at most. Most Olympians generally don’t have to wait two and a half years, and circle half the globe, to finally receive their medals. 

But then again, most Olympians aren’t medal-winning figure skaters competing against the Russians. You combine the inherent drama of figure skating with the corner-cutting, line-blurring and outright cheating of Russian delegations, and you get what happened with Madison Chock, Evan Bates and the rest of the 2022 Olympic figure skating team: a Winter Olympics medal ceremony in the height of the summer. 

Chock and Bates, who began their quest for an individual gold on Monday night, are the only repeat Olympians from a remarkable moment in Team USA figure skating history: a medal celebration at the height of the 2024 Paris Olympics to present medals to winners of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. 

The story revolves, as so much else has over the last few Olympic Games, around Russian doping. Chock, Bates and the rest of the 2022 American team won silver at the Beijing Games, placing second behind Russians skating under the acronym ROC (“Russian Olympic Committee”) due to past doping violations.

However, tests had determined that Russian team member Kamila Valieva had taken a banned substance prior to the 2022 Games. With Valieva’s status — and, thus, that of the entire Russian team — in doubt, the IOC held off on awarding any of the medals, either to the Russian athletes or to the silver medalists of the United States and the bronze medalists of Japan.

The U.S. team left Beijing without a medal of any color, and for nearly two long years afterward, their trophy cabinets remained empty. Finally, in 2024, the International Skating Union rendered its decision: Valieva’s numbers would be stricken from Russia’s total, moving the United States into the gold medal position and Japan into silver. (Russia, not Canada, received the bronze on a technicality, which was a north-of-the-border scandal all its own.) 

So the United States had won gold after all. But the gold medals were now locked up in a vault in Lausanne, Switzerland, where all unclaimed and unallocated medals reside. How would America’s skaters get their rightful medals with the appropriate level of ceremony and respect?

The solution was elegant, if not simple: the IOC awarded the medals at a special ceremony during the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024. “We got on the airplane knowing we were already going to get a gold medal, which was great,” Bates said recently. “We didn’t have to perform or compete.”

“No stress!” Chock joked. 

In a sharp contrast with the austere, zero-audience COVID-era Beijing Olympics, the Paris Games were a celebration of all things Olympics, open to all. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee used that fundamental difference to ensure that the figure skating team got what their 2022 medal-winning colleagues didn’t: a full-on family celebration. 

“The USOPC really did a phenomenal job treating all the athletes really well,” Bates said. “They brought out friends, family, coaches. Everybody was ecstatic.” The ceremony came just a few weeks after Chock and Bates were married. It’s safe to say they had a very good summer.

Under a brilliant blue Paris sky, the team walked into Champions Park, hands held high, smiles on every face as the national anthem played. 

“It was hard to describe how wonderful it was,” Bates said. “It really was magical.” 

“It was also a reunion with our teammates, most of which we hadn't seen in two years since Beijing,” Chock added. “So it was really fun to be reunited with them and share that Olympic spirit again.”

The photos from the ceremony radiate joy as the American and Japanese teams stand before the Eiffel Tower with their medals won in Beijing. The Russian skaters did not show up to receive their bronze medals. 

“After a two-and-a-half year wait, it was as good as it could have possibly been,” Bates said. “And it was just a wonderful way to close off that chapter.”

Now, the duo are on to their next chapter in Milan. They’ve already won another team gold to accompany their Beijing one — and this one didn’t require any waiting. 

For all their team hardware, though, Chock and Bates have not yet won an individual medal. This is their fourth consecutive Olympics together — Bates also competed in Vancouver as part of another pair — but to date, they haven’t ascended the podium as individuals. That streak could well end later this week. They ended the free skate portion of the ice dance event in second place, their score of 89.72 just behind the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron’s 90.18. 

“We felt really strong, we felt like it was even better than a team event,” Chock said afterward. “It's the feeling of accomplishment when you did your best on ice, and the rest isn't necessarily all up to us, so we're really proud of how we skated, and proud of how we controlled what we could.”

Chock and Bates will return to the ice on Wednesday night with hopes of adding a third gold medal to their collection … and with hopes that it won’t take very long to hold in their hands.