Read more of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage here.
On Wednesday in Milan, French figure-skaters Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron narrowly won gold in their first Olympics as an ice-dancing pair. When the final scores came down, American figure skating fans cried out with one voice: Madison Chock and Evan Bates got screwed!
This hue and cry might seem like predictable patriotic grumbling. Yes, the beloved U.S. duo, who lost out on gold by a measly 1.43 points, skated a scintillating toreador-themed free dance. But Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron were mesmerizing too, with Slate’s Chris Schleicher describing their dance as “frankly magnificent” and “the most aesthetically beautiful” performance of the night.
And yet, there might be something to the thesis that Chock and Bates got robbed. Although the American skaters had a lower total score than their French competitors in the free skate, five of the nine individual judges preferred Chock and Bates to Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron. Of those nine judges, eight gave the American duo a score that exceeded 130 points. The one judge who scored Chock and Bates under the 130-point line? France’s Jézabel Dabois. On the flip side, the French Dabois gave the French duo a dizzying 137.45 points, 7.71 more than she awarded Chock and Bates.
J’accuse!
Well, hold on. Before we decree that this Jézabel should be thrown to the dogs by the wall of Jezreel, it’d help to understand how Olympic figure skating works. In 2004, in the wake of a (coincidentally also French-related) judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, figure skating’s governing bodies adopted a new methodology called the International Judging System. The IJS was meant to bring transparency and specificity to a process that had for too long been rooted in subjective opinion. While the IJS isn’t perfect—if it were, I wouldn’t be writing this article—it’s still much better than the old 6.0 system.
The IJS evaluates skaters across two separate categories: technical elements and program components. On the technical side, each planned element of a skater’s routine—the various jumps and twizzles and such—is assigned a base value that rises or falls based on the element’s difficulty. Then, depending on how well (or how badly) that element is executed, judges can add or subtract points from that base value. The highest and lowest marks for each technical element get tossed out. The remaining scores are then averaged to arrive at a skater’s final technical element score.
The second category, program components, assesses the artistry of the performance. These scores are inherently more subjective, so there are no base values at work here. Instead, judges award total scores across three subcategories, in 0.25-point increments on a 10-point scale. Again, the highest and lowest scores for each program component get tossed, while the remaining values are averaged and multiplied by a set factor—in ice dancing, it’s a factor of 2—to arrive at the final program component score.
In Olympic competition, the judging panel is made up of nine separate judges from nine different countries. I will once again emphasize that in all internationally sanctioned figure skating competitions the highest and lowest scores for each technical element and program component get thrown out before the remaining scores are averaged. These exclusions are meant to ensure that no outlier score can unduly skew the mean. It’s basic statistical hygiene, people!
Now, back to the Chock-Bates contretemps. The French judge in question, Dabouis, scored Chock and Bates at 9.5 in each of the three program-component subcategories, for a cumulative score that was tied for the lowest mark they received from any of the nine judges. (Dabouis is “J1” in the document linked above.) When it came time for her to score Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron, though, Dabouis scored their program components higher than any of the other eight judges. Très mal, non?
But hang on a moment. There was also an American judge on the free dance scoring panel—Janis Engel—and, sure enough, she gave Chock and Bates the highest combined technical/program score of all nine judges. (For what it’s worth, Engel gave Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron their third-lowest combined technical/program score.)
But hang on another moment. The Spanish judge on the panel, Marta Olozagarre, gave the Spanish ice-dance pair of Olivia Smart and Tim Dieck by far the highest cumulative score that they received from the judging panel. And the Italian judge, Isabella Micheli, gave the Italian ice dancers Charlène Guignard and Marco Fabbri by far their highest cumulative score. Same thing with Canadian judge Leslie Keen and the Canadian ice dancers Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier.
In fact, according to the “National Bias-O-Meter” found on the invaluable website Skatingscores.com, every single 2026 Olympic ice dancing judge, except perhaps for the Finnish judge, displayed various degrees of scoring bias in favor of skaters from their home countries. (Way to go, Finland!) Additionally, a statistical analysis of long-term trends in figure-skating scoring published several years ago determined that 92 skating judges “showed statistically significant evidence of nationalistic bias.” Among them were five of the nine judges on Wednesday’s free dance panel—including the Finnish judge. (How dare you, Finland!) And one of the other four judges, China’s Huang Feng, was suspended from for a year by the sport’s governing body after allegedly favoring Chinese skaters at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
An academic research paper on the topic, presented by Vincent Dumoulin and Hugues Mercier at the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, found that nationalistic bias in skating judging “is endemic, and for many judges larger than all the other sources of judging errors.” Even so, it’s not necessarily true that all these figure skating judges are intentionally skewing things. It could be that at least some of them are favoring their compatriots unconsciously.
But even if some judges are actively rooting for the home team, since the highest and lowest technical element and program subcomponent scores get tossed, there’s really no harm, no foul, right? Well, yes and no. Extreme outliers can still end up affecting an entrant’s final score, by ensuring that “regular” low scores that would have otherwise been dropped are still included in the final average.
In the specific case of Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron versus Chock and Bates, the scores were so close that it’s unfair to claim that biased judging pushed the French duo into gold-medal position. But there is a broader point to be made here, which is that the International Skating Union still has a long way to go to ensure the integrity of its judging system.
In their 2020 paper, Dumoulin and Mercier found that “current ISU judge monitoring is utterly inadequate,” which the more recent data on nationalistic bias would seem to confirm. At the very least, it seems obvious that figure-skating judges ought to recuse themselves from judging skaters from their home countries. Even if everyone is well-intentioned, the perception of conflict of interest is overwhelming. When Team USA takes the ice, the judge from the USA should be required to step outside for a smoke break. But what if the American judge doesn’t smoke? Too bad for them! Rules are rules.
There are other changes that could be made, too. Dumoulin and Mercier suggest that the ISU “can solve most of its judging problems with mathematically sound long-term monitoring.” But the ISU could also contemplate other fixes that don’t involve math.
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Perhaps there could be a neutral judge on hand from a country that isn’t represented in the competition, waiting in the wings to step in whenever a given judge must step aside. Perhaps figure skaters could get a set number of “challenges” per season, to be deployed when a given judge’s score seems especially egregious. Or maybe judges should have to deliver their feedback to the skaters in real time, in the manner of the sassy panelists on shows like American Idol or Chopped. And at the very least, if you’ve been suspended by the ISU for alleged nationalistic bias, then maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to be an Olympic judge again.
Or maybe I should just get to pick the winners. After all, I’ve never been accused of nationalistic bias, or even of knowing very much about figure skating. My first act will be to elevate Finnish ice dancers Juulia Turkkila and Matthias Versluis from 12th place to gold-medal position. I just think they deserve it, OK. Now leave me alone—I have an appointment to get my Finnish passport.
Jocelyn Jane Cox
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