By Steve Dominey
Canada’s first female national figure skating judge says while ice dancing’s inept judging puts the sport on thin ice, it should not be waltzed out of the Olympics.
Pierrette Devine, now retired and living in Luskville Que., believes ice dancing scores were questionable when she first judged the national championships in 1952, but says judges are even worse today.
“It’s a shame. The International Skating Union and Skate Canada have to find a way to make sure the judges judge what they see and not base their decisions of who wins competitions on reputation,” says Devine.
There has always been judging complaints in the ice dancing world, but the latest fuss comes as a result of statements made by Dick Pound.
The chairman of an IOC commission to study ways to cut the size and cost of the Olympics, publicly said last month that ice dancing should be dropped as an Olympic sport because of its persistent problems with crooked judging.
However, Devine says judges’ tendencies to negate great performances and give event favourites the best scores, does not come from crookedness, but rather from incompetence.
“Most judges, I’d say about 95 per cent of them, have never skated before,” she says. “They have never been there, so they have to rely on what they hear.”
Devine points to the 1976 Canadian Championships, an event she judged, as her example. She says one competitor started his program with three triple toe loops. While she was astonished and has yet to see the feat since, she says two judges beside her leaned over and whispered “Were those triples or doubles?” While that specific example doesn’t concern ice dancing, she says the sports’ reliance on artistic expression makes it subjective and much harder to judge.
“To learn all ice dancing’s complexities out of a book is horrendous,” says Devine. “I look at these judges who have never skated and think oh my goodness, how can they remember all that?”
Janet Balkwill, chairman of the Eastern Ontario branch of Skate Canada, says her organization has taken steps to fix that problem.
She says in the past year, Skate Canada has only been training former skaters to become judges.
However, this initiative has a grandfather clause, so current judges without a skating background can continue to judge.
Balkwill does not see this as a problem. “It takes hard work and learning every step of the way to becoming a judge,” she says. It doesn’t happen very quickly.”
She adds that judges’ lives have been made easier since the last Olympics with the introduction of new ISU ice dancing guidelines. The dancers now have to meet required elements in their program or lose marks. There’s also required deductions, where points must be taken off if the dancer falls.
“I think judging will get better, but it will take time,” she says. “There’s been a lot of changes over the last few years to make the sport less subjective and I think it can be continued to be worked on.”
Juan Carlos Noria, a former Junior National ice dancing champion, thinks the sport has had enough chances to clean up its act and should be eliminated from the Olympics.
The 34-year-old Centretown resident says he’s still bitter at judging that may have cost him his chance at the Olympics. Noria and his partner Penny Mann missed winning the Canadian Dance Championships and a spot in the Olympics by mere fractions of a point in 1993.
“There are a lot of decisions made by ludicrous people. Skating is kind of evil in that way,” says Noria. “I adore it, but if I could do it again I’d choose speed skating because it would be just me and the clock and my blades. I wouldn’t have to deal with some uneducated judge deciding my future.”
Don Jackson, executive director of the Minto Skating Club and a former world champion figure skater, says if judges don’t improve and ice dancing is cancelled from the Olympics, the affect on the sport in Canada will be marginal.
“We had good dancers before ice dancing was in the Olympics, we’ll have good ones after,” says Jackson. “It just means, unfortunately, these good skaters won’t be Olympic champions.”