Welcome to the WWF's Figure Skating Program! You thought that only
professional wrestling was obviously fixed, and that the noble Olympics
were far above that sort of thing - and how wrong you were! Or perhaps
you thought that the old system of political block voting was a thing of
the Cold War past - wrong again!
Everyone in the stadium thought that Canada's Jamie Sale and David
Pelletier had won the Olympic gold medal in pairs figure skating on
Monday night after their Russian competition committed some obvious
mistakes - but everyone was wrong! Although it appeared that normal
scoring procedures would clearly favor the Canadian team, judges from
Russia, China, Poland, the Ukraine, and France picked the Russian team,
while judges from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Japan placed
the Canadians in first place.
Allegations were rife that the French judge, Marie Reine Le Gougne, had
made a deal with the Russian judges to trade votes in the ice-dancing
competition. Outraged commentators from around the globe, a number of
them former professional ice-skaters, confirmed that there was a long
tradition of vote trading in the figure skating events.
The Chinese judge who favored the Russian team in the tiebreaker
withdrew from judging last night's men's short program "due to illness".
