This is an age-old controversy, but while it (and figure skating in general) is entertaining, it is not a sport. It’s ballet on ice, except that ballet has no judges, biased or otherwise. The American team was clearly robbed. I have no problem keeping it in the Olympics, and it’s athletics in the sense that it requires training and practice, but stop pretending that it’s a sport. Sports scores should be objective, not whimsical.
I guess you don’t want boxing, judo, wrestling, diving, water polo, field hockey, basketball, soccer, etc. in the games either. Ice hockey, for that matter would have to be eliminated as well (Soviet referees were notorious for their penalty calls). Let’s face it, there aren’t all that many sports out there where a little thumb on the scale by some official can make all the difference.
In the ordinal based 6.0 judging system, ice dancing wasn’t really a sport. However, when the new element based system was introduced, there was a tremendous incentive to increase the difficulty of the elements. If you look at old ice dancing competitions, they look like modern low level novice skaters in comparison. The skill level of top ice dancing teams now is absolutely astonishing. The new judging system didn’t eliminate fraud, but what it did do was create a detailed trail of evidence that shows exactly how the fraud is committed. Ironically, the perpetrator of this particular fraud is of the same nationality that triggered the demise of the old judging system: France.
Ice dancing is the second most dangerous figure skating discipline skated at the Olympics, and the third most dangerous one that is skated internationally. The most dangerous one is Pairs, and the second most dangerous discipline was invented as a demonstration sport for U of Michigan hockey game intermissions during the late 1950s (synchronized skating). Hasn’t made it to the Olympics, yet.
The robbing of Chock and Bates hit my family particularly hard, as our daughter used to train on the same ice with one of them.
I didn’t say I don’t want them in the games. Don’t they actually keep a score that everyone can understand in basketball and hockey?