Olympic gold medals are for sale now in Salt Lake City. All you have to do to buy one is to perform a “technically harder program” and not perform it perfectly.
The Russian pairs figure skating couple of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were awarded the gold medal after skating a program that was deemed “technically harder” than the Canadian pair of David Pelletier and Jamie Sale, but by all accounts, imperfect.
Pelletier and Sale’s performance had all of the required elements for an award-winning show, but they also had something else the Russians didn’t, a flawless performance. They landed every jump and managed to nail every trick.
Why then, didn’t they receive the gold? If judging also is on technical difficulty, then shouldn’t the technical difficulty be also judged on actually performing those stunts without flaw?
The French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, did admit to being pressured to vote for the Russians by her own skating federation. Following intense media pressure, the International Skating Union, the governing body of figure skating, recommended and the International Olympic Committee decided Friday to award the Canadians a gold medal in addition to the Russians.
So, what is the point of a gold medal?
The only fair way to handle this situation is to award the silver medal to the Russians. Their performance was Olympic quality, but not gold status.
Simply switch the medals and the places would be accurate, and the crooked judge would not be there to screw up the process again.
There is no value in a gold medal that can be given out after the fact and given to two teams.
If this is the case, we could award gold medals to everyone who competes.
This is the Olympics of the 21st century. We don’t have losers, we only have all gold medal winners.
Even funnier, is the so-called tarnishing of figure skating. Figure skaing will forever be marred by Tonya Harding, who hired a thug to smash the leg of fellow American skater Nancy Kerrigan a couple of years ago.
Like that scandal, this one made media headlines.
Every media outlet in North America jumped on the bandwagon demanding the gold medal be awarded to the Canadians. Now a second gold medal has been awarded. Without even realizing it, the media has forced the Olympics into setting a precedent. Anyone can have a gold, just as long as they have the powerhouse of the news behind them.
The media has changed, perhaps forever, the outcome of the Olympics.
However, through the quagmire of politics and television, no one has stopped and looked at the actual skaters’ responses.
Canadians Sale and Pelletier have said they do not want to take away from the Russians. There’s sportsmanship for you.
The Russian skaters, Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze, also have taken this madness in stride. All were gracious during the second medal ceremony.
But still the controversy continues, thanks to endless coverage and headlines.
Now that possible new judging rules have been suggested, these too will be picked apart, just to relive Skategate.
As long as the media finds the story juicy enough, it doesn’t matter what values are lost, just as long as we can keep people’s attention.