[Dakota]

I wasn't talking (mostly)about judges cheating. I was talking (mostly) about the normal state of affairs in these exhibitions.

Figure skaters are penalized for being "too athletic" or for being "too avant guard" or for whatever.

The problem with these exhibitions is that the entire - all - every last little bit - of the "score" is somebody's opinion. If this was not true, why would that have 7 (or how ever many) judges (instead of 1), why would they drop the high and the low if not for the fact that judges are merely expressing their opinion.

A proposal for repairing the disaster in figure staking was to go to 15 judges.

Why don't they just give everyone in the audience an electronc scoring tablet and be done with it.

These athletes (and they are athletes, no question) don't play offense (i.e. try to score points or run the fastest), they don't play defense (i.e. try to stop their opponent from scoring points or passing), they just try to read the tea leaves of what "the judges are looking for" and then try to impress them.

Whether or not you agree that it is not a sport, you must agree that it is seriously broken.

I would also say again that fretting endlessly over the 0.1 point lost to Yang because of an objective error, given the vastly greater content of the subjective opinion and bias contained in the rest of his and Hamm's score, is just plain silly.

And, as can be clarly seen by the reactions of the Russians, they, too, recognize that everything is now open to protest.