Contact:
Susan Lewis
940-565-3510
[email protected]
DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Twirling skirts, flashing sequins and dramatic moves serve to make figure skating seem more like entertainment than sport.
But when a gold medal is on the line, every 10th of a point given by a judge can mean the difference between celebrated fame and certain obscurity. As a result, the subjective scoring in sports like figure skating becomes the subject of serious debate when judges are perceived to give their fellow countrymen higher scores than they deserve.
Guess what? Judges are a bit biased, according to research done at the University of North Texas. However, the scoring system currently used in international competitions balances out any bias after the final calculations are made to determine ranking,
"That result surprised us," said Dr. Randall S. Guttery, assistant professor of finance and real estate at UNT. Guttery worked with Dr. James Sfiridis, associate professor of finance at Central Connecticut State University, to determine if judging bias exists in figure skating.
By the time all the judges' scores were added together, there was no real bias, said Guttery. "The most surprising was the lack of negative bias between Russians and Americans and the positive bias we found for smaller countries [Germany, France, etc.]."
Most judges' individual rankings did not deviate greatly from skaters' respective outcomes. Because the judges are residents of nine different countries, the likelihood of judging bias is diminished.
The researchers looked at five Winter Olympic and World Championships competitions from 1982-1994. Those contests were chosen in part for their timing relative to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
"We were curious to see if bias dropped off after the Cold War ended," Guttery said. "It pretty much disappears after 1988. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so that drop off was as we expected."
The study compared results in 10 categories, separating skaters and judges into three groups
-- United States, Russia and Other. The Other category was further split to differentiate between a judge/skater pair from the same country (i.e. both from France) and a pair from different countries (i.e. skater from France, judge from Germany). The scores given by an Other judge/skater pair from different countries was used as the control group because there was the least reason for bias for those judges.
Among the findings were the following:
-- A U.S. athlete being scored by a U.S. judge had a 76 percent probability of being judged higher than his/her overall placement.
-- A Russian athlete had a 75 percent chance of a higher score with a Russian judge.
-- An Other athlete scored by a judge from the same country had an 86 percent chance of scoring higher.
-- There is no evidence that U.S. judges ranked athletes from other countries systematically lower than final rankings.
-- There was a tendency in the early '80s for Russian judges to mark U.S. athletes significantly lower, but no bias showed up after the 1984 competition.
-- While Other judges showed rather mixed bias against U.S. skaters during the 1984, 1988 and 1992 competitions, aggregate results showed no bias.
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