2002 Winter Olympics figure skating scandal

At the 2002 Winter Olympics held in Salt Lake City, allegations arose that the pairs' figure skating competition had been fixed. The controversy led to two pairs teams receiving gold medals: the original winners Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze of Russia and original silver-medalists Jamie Salé and David Pelletier of Canada. The scandal was one of the causes for the revamp of scoring in figure skating to the new ISU Judging System.

In the figure skating pairs competition, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze of Russia won the short program over Jamie Salé and David Pelletier of Canada. During the short program, Salé and Pelletier had tripped and fallen on their closing pose. Because the fall was not on an element, it did not receive a deduction, but it marred the program enough to land the pair in second place behind Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze.

In the free skate, Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze made a minor, yet obvious, technical error when Sikharulidze stepped out of a double axel. Meanwhile, Salé and Pelletier opted to skate to "Love Story", a free skate program they had used in previous seasons and that had been well received at the Grand Prix Final before the Olympics. They skated a flawless program, albeit one that some experts considered to be of lesser difficulty than the Russians'. Salé and Pelletier received 5.9s and 5.8s for technical merit, while the Russians received mostly 5.8s and 5.7s. However, the Canadians received only four 5.9s for presentation versus the Russians' seven. Presentation was weighted more heavily than technical merit, so the Canadians had needed at least five 5.9s in presentation to overtake the Russians for first. Since they did not receive that many, Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze took the gold and the Canadians won silver.

During the live broadcast, both the American (NBC Sports' Tom Hammond, Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic) and Canadian (CBC Sports' Paul Martini and Barbara Underhill) commentators proclaimed that Salé and Pelletier won as they finished and expressed outrage when the judges' marks were announced.

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