So although this is pretty late, I would still like to share my outrage over the figure skating results in the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
Yuna Kim, the South Korean figure skater performed flawlessly in both the long and short program, however she was only awarded the silver medal. While Adelina Sotnikova, the Russian figure skater, also performed very well, most viewers knew that Kim was better, especially with Sotnikova stumbling a little on one of her jumps. Although this is my opinion, let's take a look at the statistics.
On her triple Lutz-triple toe combination she made a minor error (stumbling) for which she should have been awarded 3-1 or 2 points. However one judge awarded her a perfect three which is out of the line considering the maximum number of points she could have gotten was 2. Also she got 33 +3's while Yuna Kim only got 13 +3's. The drastic difference between the numbers should already tell you something is not right, since Yuna Kim was long the gold standard.
Sotnikova won the gold by 5.76 points and she did one extra jump than Kim did which was worth 5.3 points. But the rest of the difference is where the uproar began. Four of the nine judges were Eastern European; however this proves nothing since the scores are randomized.
A petition was begun on change.org for a rescoring of figure skating with more than 1 million signatures. However, the traffic on the website soon exceeded the normal amount and the website crashed. This petition wouldn't have done anything though, since most of the traffic was from South Korea, homeland of Yuna Kim.
Hopefully the practice of randomized scoring will be changed in the future, so judges can be held more accountable for these major results. But for now, we can only mourn the loss of a gold for Yuna Kim.
Yuna Kim, the South Korean figure skater performed flawlessly in both the long and short program, however she was only awarded the silver medal. While Adelina Sotnikova, the Russian figure skater, also performed very well, most viewers knew that Kim was better, especially with Sotnikova stumbling a little on one of her jumps. Although this is my opinion, let's take a look at the statistics.
Sotnikova won the gold by 5.76 points and she did one extra jump than Kim did which was worth 5.3 points. But the rest of the difference is where the uproar began. Four of the nine judges were Eastern European; however this proves nothing since the scores are randomized.
A petition was begun on change.org for a rescoring of figure skating with more than 1 million signatures. However, the traffic on the website soon exceeded the normal amount and the website crashed. This petition wouldn't have done anything though, since most of the traffic was from South Korea, homeland of Yuna Kim.
Hopefully the practice of randomized scoring will be changed in the future, so judges can be held more accountable for these major results. But for now, we can only mourn the loss of a gold for Yuna Kim.
I agree since Kim Yuna had a flawless skate and although Adelina Sotnikova had an extra jump, she did have a faulty landing one of the jumps and another jump might have been under rotated. I'm not saying that Kim Yuna should've won (she can't win everything), but the fact that Adelina had a huge 5 point lead despite Kim Yuna skating flawlessly and Adelina having one faulty landing seems a bit weird to me.
ReplyDeleteI know, the entire world thinks so too XD In my opinion it might be biased, however that cannot be proved so :(
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