Judging but Who Is to Guard the Guards Themselves?
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Chapter 1: Judging But who is to guard the guards themselves? Decimus Junius Juvenalis The performance ended. The audience was ecstatic and all but brought the house down. Everyone awaited the results impatiently; they had been watching for three hours. After two or three minutes, the scores were posted. The spectators went wild—with rage. The performance they had witnessed was obviously different from the one officials apparently saw. Something had to be wrong—tragically wrong. It was an affront to the competition itself and a complete travesty to the athletes who had competed. When the medals were announced, Canadians Salé and Pelletier were awarded silver medals and the Russian pair got gold. That was one of the scandals of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. It opened up a Pandora’s box. * * * * This is, unfortunately, all too common in sports events. Even at the Olympic Games. It is hard to imagine any competitive sport that does not require at least some element of judging by independent officials. Of course, some sports are easier to judge than others. In a race, it is generally fairly simple to determine who arrives at the finish line first. In a throwing event, it is pretty easy to see who threw the shot, the discus, the javelin the furthest. But when you get to sports like diving, gymnastics or figure skating, the problems become more acute. Judging “artistic merit” inevitably involves some element of subjective opinion. In contact or semi-contact sports, there can be a mixture of pure result and application of rules, such as offsides or interference. Athletes and their performances are the main focus of sport. The outcome of a sporting contest should be determined by the rules agreed upon for each sport, the observance of those rules by the athletes in the competition and the neutral application of those rules by the officials at the competition. Sports officials are bound by duty to act fairly, and there are inherent dangers that flow from their failure to do so. First and foremost, sports officials need to have the knowledge and experience to be able to apply the rules. Most sports have a hierarchy of officials, based on their exposure to the sport at increasingly higher levels of competition. Many have regularly organized educational sessions, where officials can learn the finer points of the rules. Some have developed classification systems for officials, so that they can have a panel of qualified officials for competitions as required. So, there can be officials authorized to act at local competitions, school sports, state or provincial events, national championships, world championships and Olympic Games. Professionally organized sports, such as ice hockey, basketball, soccer and football have the same arrangements. Assuming the underlying knowledge and experience exist, now comes the most important part: sports officials must act in a completely disinterested (in the sense of having no stake in the outcome of the event) fashion and be free of any actual or perceived conflict of interest. There can be nothing more fundamental to the conduct of a sports event than the impartiality of the officials. The players and the public must be confident that the judging is fair and reasonable. The rules generally provide officials with all of the authority they need to enforce them and to discipline those participating. They can be penalized for rule infractions and ejected for serious breaches, including a refusal to accept the final authority of the presiding officials. Power, however, is one thing; respect for the officials who exercise the power is quite another. The one is conferred; the other must be earned. Decisions by officials in the course of an event are often decisive of the eventual outcome and are made, in many cases, under difficult conditions that require split-second judgment in a rapidly unfolding series of actions. There is no question that there will be the occasional error, and most athletes accept and understand that this is one of the random factors inherent in sport. They, too, make errors of judgment during the course of the competition and can accept, with relative equanimity, the same failings of officials. The officials may have had a bad angle on the play or have had their vision blocked. Or the play may have been so close to compliance or infraction that it would have been anyone’s good-faith call. The notorious “Hand of God” goal scored by Argentina’s Diego Maradonna in football’s 1986 World Cup in Mexico is an example. The official could not see that the goal had been scored off Maradonna’s hand, rather than as a header, and could not, therefore, disallow the goal. It brings into question, of course, the ethical standards of Maradonna, who certainly knew what had happened, but who refused to acknowledge it at the time and later shrugged his shoulders and pronounced it a miracle of sorts. Other decisions are more deliberate, and officials have time to consider before rendering them. In sports such as synchronized swimming, diving, figure skating and weightlifting, officials rarely have to make split-second decisions under pressure. Although not faced with the time, speed and visual constraints affecting officials in other sports, they have their own judgmental challenges of evaluating performances against defined performance criteria. Their goldfish bowls are even clearer, since the spectators have seen exactly what the officials saw and, chauvinism aside, many spectators are very knowledgeable about both performance and rules. The Olympic Games are the most important international sports event in the world. They bring together the best athletes from around the globe every four years. Billions watch the Games. Almost everyone in the world is fascinated by the performances of these remarkable individuals. Results are often measured in milliseconds or millimetres and hundredths of a point. The Olympics should have officials whose abilities match the performances they are judging and, above all, because of the international character of the competitions, whose ability to act impartially is beyond question. A fact that often goes unnoticed with respect to Olympic officials is that they are selected by the international sports federations (IFs), which govern each sport. Thus, ice hockey officials are chosen by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), gymnastics officials by the Fédération Internationale des Gymnastes (FIG), diving by the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), figure skating by the International Skating Union (ISU), and so on. No officials, even for Olympic competitions, are selected by the IOC. This is a matter of tradition in the organization of the Games. The IFs are responsible for all of the technical aspects of each sport, including the rules of play, equipment and officiating. It is also a matter of practicality, since each IF knows the most about its own sport and is responsible for the organization of events for the three years, eleven months and two weeks out of every four years between the Olympics. It is especially important during the Olympics that the best officials be selected and that they behave in accordance with the highest ethical standards of the Olympics. If they fail to do so, this, unfortunately, reflects badly on the Olympics, not on the IF that selected the officials. If there are obvious officiating failures, people will think the Olympics are “crooked.” They do not make the distinction between the IF officials who are responsible for the failures and the Olympics, which they are watching. [B] Skating Scandal at Salt Lake A recent example that illustrates this problem arose during the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games in the pairs figure skating event. First, a bit of background. Artistic figure skating is an archetypal judgment sport. Skaters are required to perform a series of figures and movements. There used to be three segments of a singles figure skating competition: compulsory figures (such as figure 8s and other prescribed shapes, in which the skaters had to reproduce the figures as exactly as possible), a short program with specified elements; and a long program that permitted more flexibility, but which nevertheless contained a certain number of movements and jumps that were determined in advance. There were no compulsory figures for pairs. The compulsory figures were boring beyond belief—to athletes, spectators and officials alike, and the last competitions that used this portion of the program occurred in 1990. In each of the two remaining segments, competitors (or pairs) come out, one after the other, and perform their routines. They are marked by the judges on a six-point scale and, in addition, each judge maintains what is referred to as an “ordinal” ranking, which is the relative position of each competitor in the event. So, if a judge has awarded 5.6 to two athletes, he or she also determines which of the 5.6s was the better of the two. It should have been painfully obvious that a six-point scale was not sufficient to allow for the nuances, but the ISU persisted with its “tradition.” This was the way it had always been marked. The compulsory figures accounted for 30% of the marks, the short program for 20% and the long, or freestyle, program for 50%. Marks were always on a six-point scale, but each judge also ranked the skaters from best to worst, in what are called ordinal rankings. The marks only served to break a tie in the ordinal rankings or where no majority of such rankings was given to a particular athlete. Judges are nominated by the national skating federations, so, countries in the competition nominate judges and referees. Panels of judges are appointed for each competition.