Statistical Sleuthing by Leveraging Human Nature: A Study of Olympic Figure Skating

Analysis of figure skating scoring is notoriously difficult under the new Code of Points (CoP) scoring system, created following the judging scandal of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. The CoP involves the selection of a random subpanel of judges; scores from other judges are reported but not used. An attempt to repeat the methods of previous studies establishing the presence of nationalistic bias in CoP scoring failed to recreate the competition scores from the raw scoring sheets. This raised the concern that different subpanels of judges were being selected for each skater (breaking ISU rules). However, it is also possible that the ISU was attempting to further reduce transparency in the system by permuting, separately for each skater, the order of the presentation of scores from the judging panel. Intuition suggests that it is impossible to tell the difference between accidental randomization and intentional permutation of the judges’ scores. Although the recent changes do successfully prevent the study of nationalistic bias, this article provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that a separate random subpanel is chosen for each competitor. It addresses the problem by applying Gleser’s extension of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov goodness-of-fit test. This article has supplementary material online.