Kim Yuna. 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012 International Skating Championships winner, 2010 Vancouver Gold Medalist, the Queen, and Olympics score world record setter, is being considered the victim of a scandal after she only received a silver medal in the 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia for Single Figure skating. Because of this, there is much protest against the judges who gave her this score all over the world especially in South Korea, U.S.A., and Canada. While Adelina Sotnikova, the Gold winner, did have a decent performance, the fact that she stumbled twice in her final performance and stumbled in her first performance which is something that usually disqualifies a person from being in the final rounds of figure skating Olympics, let alone a medal winning performance. There is also much debate about her skill because of the fact that she stumbled but also because few Russians knew about her before the Olympics.Also, many of the judges are in question. For example, 2 of the 14 judges were already suspended for taking bribes, 4 are Russians, and one is the wife of the President of the Russian Olympics Organizer and is a person with little knowledge of figure skating. BBC, arguably the most neutral news source, was quoted "The Russians are giving their own players an unusually high amount of generous points.". Americans are outraged and many former Olympic skaters are claiming that Kim Yuna was "robbed". Another interesting fact one should recognize is that Sotnikova, who had a decent but not medal deserving performance, beat her personal record by 18 points which is unheard of. One should also could the fact that Sotnikova said herself that this was somewhat unbelievable and may prove that something happened. This controversy also caused the fastest signed petition on Change.org due to such outrage against this event. There are to be more updates in this post.
I believe that in the Olympics, there will always be prejudice for athletes form the hosting country. There is just no way around this, and there's npo way to be completely impartial, especially in a sport that is more subjective as opposed to something like a race, where there is a clear and identifiable winner.
This happens a lot in sports and I think it is very unfair because a lot of time the judges do not pick the person who usually wins because they want a new winner, but I think it should not matter the best skater should win, and they need judges who have no connections with the skaters.
I do think that since most of the judges are Russians, they're naturally going to want to give a girl from their home country the gold, so to avoid something like this from happening, i think they should have more judges from different countries judge the performances.
It's pretty obvious that the results were rigged, especially when one of the judges was the wife of the chairman of the Russian Skating Federation, and two of the other judges were actually banned in the past due to bribery, and they just HAPPENED to be reinstated for these Olympics. The problem with figure skating in general is that the scoring system is relative, even though it was revamped after the 2002 Salt Lake scandal. Adelina Sotnikova technically had a more difficult program, but the fact remains that Kim Yuna performed her program flawlessly. Saying that Sotnikova deserved a better score is like saying that getting an F in an AP class is better than getting an A in a regular class. Sure, Sotnikova's program might've been more difficult, but shouldn't we reward quality of performance over quantity of tricks? This is really unfortunate, and I hope that Yuna gets the recognition and gold that she deserves, perhaps by doing the same thing that was done at Salt Lake, and giving out two gold medals instead of one. At the same time though, I still congratulate Sotnikova for her great performance, and I think that she is definitely a quality skater, but she isn't of the same caliber as Queen Yuna.
I think there is no prejudice here. She Stumbled a little bit but the rest of routine was very complicated and flawless causing her to gain more points than the others. While the other competitors routines may have seemed flawless were not as complicated as the gold medalist. The athletes are just upset about their own routines and are making excuses.
