Feb. 14, 2006 - Michelle Kwan's departure from Torino marked a sorrowful end to her Olympic dream and a huge disappointment for her legion fans. But it was also a metaphorical break with an era, the Kwan Dynasty. Kwan was unrivalled under the old figure skating scoring scheme, having tallied more perfect 6.0s than any skater in history.

But now the sport moves on—without Michelle and with a complex new scoring formula that will baffle those who are just tuning in for their quadrennial figs fix.

The discarding of the old system has been gradual—the 2005 world championships were the first competed under the new system—but the change was a result of the sport's embarrassing judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. In truth, that scandal wasn't really a byproduct of the system, but the result of an out-and-out fix—a pledge by the French judge to favor the Russians over the Canadians in the pairs competition in return for favorable treatment of the French ice dancer by a Russian judge.

It might never have been discovered had the Canadians not skated flawlessly and the French lady judge succumbed to a paroxysm of guilt. After all, figure skating thrived on controversial decisions; at the 1994 Lillehammer Games, many observers felt all four silver medalists deserved to win gold, including Nancy Kerrigan over Oksana Baiul and Elvis Stoyko over Alexei Urmanov. But it was always easy to attribute such matters to judgment calls. Scoring was so impressionistic, so undefined, that it was hard to prove that a performance merited a 5.9 rather than a 5.8. And when Eastern bloc skaters seemed to get the benefit of the doubt more often, well that was attributed to a bias in taste, a preference for a classical Soviet style rather than the skaters of any nation.

Still, casual fans will miss the old system because at least they thought they understood it. Trust me, they didn't. Few did. You saw all those 5.7s, 5.8s, 5.9s and 6.0s pop up on the screen. But nobody actually added those scores up. They were just television props to guide fans. The final results were determined by a complex formula that took into account placement rather than actual scores. If judge A gave Michelle Kwan first place with a 5.4 and Irina Slutskaya second with 5.3 while judge B gave Kwan first place with a 6.0 and Slutskaya second with a 5.3, those two judgments were functionally identical. Score meant nothing, only placement. Go figure!

But really, don't bother. The most important effect of the old system was that it brought life-and-death drama (only in the sports sense) to the short program. If a skater didn't finish among the top three in the short, he or she had almost no chance to win the gold. Of course, there was one notable exception—Sarah Hughes, who leaped to gold from fourth place. But it required a very lucky parlay of judging decisions. If the American judge had scored Kwan, who skated poorly, ahead of Slutskaya, who also skated poorly, Hughes' great effort would have gone for naught, or at least for silver. And Kwan would have won an Olympic gold. Who knows what might have happened had the competition not followed in the wake of the pairs scandal. Kwan didn't deserve the gold that day. But she might also have been the first skater to lose a gold because her country's judge was all of a sudden reluctant to show bias.

There's an irony for the ages.

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