Some Ruminations on Sport, Individualism and the Subjectivity of Esthetic Judgment

Figure skating judging is in the news again. An article from the British newspaper, the Globe and Mail reported that ''[j]udges were booed off the stand at the European Figure Skating Championships in Lyon, France, as spectators condemned the results of the dance event'' (23 January 2006). It seems the crowd disagreed with the judgment that the flawed performance of the Russian team of Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostomarov was good enough to merit a gold medal.*

This is an Olympic year, or, more correctly it is a Winter Olympic year, so we can expect more of this sort of controversy. The National Figure Skating Championships have just concluded and, with a few exceptions, these championships determined who would be on the U.S. Olympic team. There are a few skaters, however, who one might argue, should be on that team, but who are not. Christine Brennan asserts in her controversial Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey into the Secret World of Figure Skating (Anchor, 1996) that judges routinely award marks based on skaters' reputations rather than on the quality of the performance in question. This appears particularly true in ice dancing. Canada's Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kratz, she asserts, received low marks in the 1995 Worlds for the simple reason that they ''had not been around long enough.'' Bourne and Kratz had been together, at that point, for only a year.

Two of the top five couples in the ice dancing event at the U.S. nationals, Melissa Gregory and Denis Petukhov, and Morgan Mathews and Maxim Zavozin, are considered by everyone who follows ice dancing to be extraordinarily talented. They did not skate well, however, in the final free-dance portion of the competition. Both made obvious mistakes. Gregory stumbled badly and Mathews suffered actual crashing-to-the-ice falls in both the original dance and the free dance.

On the other hand, Kimberly Navarro and Brent Bommentre, who have been together for less than a year, skated what many in the audience—which gave them a partial standing ovation—clearly thought was one of the best programs in the competition. Navarro and Bommentre skated a flawless program full of intricate and beautiful footwork. Moreover, they were one of the few teams whose makeup, costumes and footwork did not combine to create the impression of a Vegas show girl whose clothes were in the process of being torn off by her drug-crazed boyfriend.

Navarro and Bommentre were, as ESPN commentator and former U.S. ice dancing champion Susie Wynne put it, ''different.'' Their program did not merely highlight their technical prowess–it was beautiful. The team, arguably, deserved better than the fifth-place marks they received.

There have long been complaints that figure skating judging was arbitrary. This is a different issue, actually, from that of whether it is corrupt. We learned at the last Olympics that it is, at least occasionally, corrupt. Corrupt judging is harder to spot and thus also harder to stop in a sport like figure skating than it is in sports such as hockey or downhill racing where it is clear, even to those uninitiated into the finer points of the sport, who has won. The problem with figure skating is that there is an unavoidably subjective dimension to the judging. It's not just what skaters do, it's also how they do it that figures into their scores.

The French skater Surya Bonaly could tell you about that. She's a world-class tumbler in addition to being France's national figure skating champion from 1988-1996 and the European champion from 1991-1995. She was never world champion though. The closest she came was a silver medal in 1995. She had all the moves. It's just that the judges, and many others in the skating community, didn't like the way she did them. She didn't look very graceful. How do you judge a skater who lands a jump, but who, according to your standards, looks awkward doing it, relative to another, supremely graceful skater who fails to land the same jump? How much credit should a skater be given simply for staying upright and how much for being graceful? Other factors, factors that have nothing to do with physical skill, such as choice of music and costume, enter into the overall impression a particular skater creates and thus affect the skater's scores. Tastes vary and that means that even the most conscientious judge cannot help but have his or her assessment of a given skater's performance influenced by factors that many would argue should not figure into the judging of a sport.

This is perhaps why ice dancing wasn't an Olympic sport until 1976. It's not that it doesn't require much physical skill. It requires extraordinary physical skill. It demands much more precision of movement than free-style skating. It's that the judging cannot help but be substantially subjective. There are no jumps in ice dancing so mistakes as conspicuous as falls are rare. That makes judging more difficult. Ice dancing is all about esthetics. Sure, the dancers are great athletes, but athletic skill is not really what they are judged on at the elite level.

Two of the most talented ice dancers in the world today are the Bulgarian team of Albena Denkova and Maxim Staviski. Their technical abilities are unsurpassed and they have the most interesting and innovative programs of any of the elite dance teams. They have yet to win a world championship, though, and are not among those favored to take gold at the Olympics. Their problem, I was informed by a former national ice dancing champion, is that Staviski is too short. Denkova and Staviski do not have the ''nice line'' of their taller rivals Navka and Kostomarov. It's not that Staviski has failed to master the required moves. It's that he's too short while he's doing them.

What kind of sport requires for competitive success things unrelated to physical skill? Can you imagine anyone detracting from Allen Iverson's performance in a basketball game by pointing out that while he did indeed sink basket after basket, he was short while he was doing it? It's ridiculous.

Ok, you say, but basketball is a sport where there are clear winners and losers, a sport where esthetics don't enter into the equation. Of course, there is an esthetic dimension to basketball as there is, I believe, to almost every sport. Even the argument that it is a different kind of esthetic will not rescue the judging of ice dancing from the charge that the emphasis on a skater's height is completely arbitrary. A dancer does not have to be tall to be graceful.

The prevailing feeling in the ice dancing community is that if the male member of a team is not tall, he must at least be taller than his partner. This is not, however, because any of the moves require such a height differential. It's because the feeling is that it creates a better impression. It's interesting that no one at MGM thought of this when they paired Gene Kelly with Cyd Charisse, first in ''Singing in the Rain'' (1952) and then again in ''Brigadoon'' (1954). The 5'9'' Charisse was at least an inch, if not two, taller than Kelly (whose official height was 5'9'', but who friends and family say was closer to 5'7'') and yet that pairing was one of the most magical in all of film history.

Ice dancing, experts argue, is really ''about sex.'' The increasingly lurid costumes and lifts certainly support this view. Nothing conveys sexual tension so effectively, however, as the pairing of a shorter man with a taller woman. How, the unconscious asks, can this shorter man attract and hold the attentions of such a woman? The answer is obvious–animal magnetism, sexual prowess. The mind automatically leaps to this answer, which is why many short men like to be seen with taller women on their arm. It's an electric combination. This is undoubtedly part of the reason that Eric Taub describedthe pairing of Julio Bocca and the substantially taller Wendy Whelan in the New York City Ballet's production of ''Todo Buenos Aires'' as ''the hottest pairing I've seen on the ballet stage''
(http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_06/jan06/et_rev_nycb_0106.htm).

Who says a team has to be tall? Or that the man has to be taller than the woman? Why can't there be a Gene Kelly and a Cyd Charrise, or a Julio Bocca and a Wendy Whelan on ice? The combination is gold—or should be. The problem is that skaters are risk averse. Judging inclines them to be conservative. Esthetic judgments are notoriously subjective. How does a team know what the judges will like? When you know you are going to be judged on impression and that as little as a tenth of a point could make the difference between a gold and a silver, or between medaling and not medaling at all, you are going to play it as safe as possible. Convention says that the man should be taller, so you are going to go with that.

What if allowance were made, however, for the subjective dimension of esthetic judgments? What if a team had to win by more than a tenth of a point? What if a team had to win by a full point, or even two or three, in order to be declared ''the winner'' so that if you had two teams whose final scores were only a point or two apart, you simply declare them both the gold, or silver, or bronze medalists. So long as a team's skills were in order, they could be confident they'd get a certain number of points for technical prowess and they could reasonably assume that at least some of the judges would look favorably on any esthetic innovations they might introduce into the programs. The required point spread would mean that an esthetically adventurous team would still have a chance to win, even if some of the judges didn't like their innovations. Such a scoring system would certainly be more fair than the present system. It would tend to encourage teams to be ''different,'' to challenge existing esthetic conventions, to push the envelope, so to speak. And that would not simply be more fair to the skaters. It would be good for the sport as a whole. In fact, while it might be an unusual scoring system in a sport, to the extent that it mitigates the influence of taste, it would make ice dancing more like the ''sport'' its proponents argued it was when they made a case for its inclusion in the Olympics.

Such a scoring system would benefit singles and pair skating as well because judging of these disciplines is also, though to a lesser extent than ice dancing, subjective. Such a scoring system would be a boon to skaters and to the sport. That makes me think it is only a matter of time before it is implemented. It would be nice to see it arrive in time to help teams such as Denkova and Staviski. Teams that for reasons that have nothing to do with athletic prowess are not getting the recognition they deserve in their chosen ''sport.''

It might be difficult for some people to accept that there could be more than one gold-medal team. Ours is a fiercely individualistic society. There is a lot to be said for individualism. No matter how comforting it might be though to think that there is always some individual or some team that is ''the best,'' it is an obviously false belief, even in sports such as basketball. There might occasionally be one person or one team that is clearly better than the others. More often than not though such determinations are impossible to make and not because the discrimination of judgment required to determine the fact in question is so fine, but because there is no such fact. More often than not ''the best'' is a whole community of people rather than just one or two. If it is a disquieting thought, it is so only because it is unfamiliar. It should, after all, be comforting to realize that there is more room at the top than one thought.

* ''The Europeans,'' as they are known in the skating community, will be rebroadcast on ESPN2 on March 16th. Check out the dance portion of competition yourself and see whether you agree with the judges or with the crowd.

M.G. Piety is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Drexel University where she teaches, among other things, the philosophy of sport.