By Chris Cosci

Last winter, controversy hit the usually carefree world of figure skating when, in the Olympic pairs competition, the audience favorites from Canada lost the gold medal to the Russian competitors. Sequins were flying as results were posted, prompting many fans of the Canadians to shout out a resounding, "eh?"

In the following weeks, a scandal broke out involving bribed judges and fixed results. Eventually, both pairs were awarded gold medals and their names were in every headline. Now, most people vaguely remember them as "the Canadians and the Russians." Such is the fickle world of fame.

Still, the controversy foretold major problems with the ISU (International Skating Union - not to be confused with the International Stereoscopic Union). In June 2002, the ISU held a Congress in Kyoto, Japan to discuss making changes to the ISU Constitution. And in case it isn't strange enough that figure skating actually requires a constitution, the ISU Congress met to discuss roughly five hundred proposals for changes to the constitution. Even more amazing is that the Congress came to a close after just five days - just as efficient as the U.S. Congress, if by "five days" you mean "a hundred years."

The changes made in Japan included adding a clause that reads "the dress of ladies in Figure Skating and Ice Dancing must not give the effect of excessive nudity inappropriate for an athletic sport." And suddenly, 95% of figure skating's male audience just changed the channel.

But the most prominent changes involved the selection of judges and the scoring system. The new system uses a very strict, scientific method called "random selection." It starts by having 20 judges attend tournaments. At the tournament, a computer randomly selects 14 judges to actually perform the judging. Then, during the tournament, nine of those judges' scores are randomly selected for the final score. And the time it took for this system's flaws to surface? One week. It's chaos theory meets Murphy's law.

It happened at a recent tournament, when skater Sasha Cohen received higher total marks from all judges than competitor Viktoria Volchkova. But, thanks to the miracle of random selection, the computer chose Volchkova's higher marks and Cohen's lower marks, and Volchkova won the competition. And nobody at the ISU saw this coming?

But the ineffective scoring system is the least of the ISU's problems. Fans and skaters are revolting (in the mutiny sense, not the repulsive sense). The ISU is now facing competition from a new group that many are calling (seriously) a "renegade" skating union. They make it sound like the Jets and the Sharks duking it out on ice in spandex.

The new group is called the World Skating Federation, and the president is former ISU member Ron Pfenning. Over the past couple of weeks, the WSF has garnered a lot of support from some of figure skating's most prominent individuals, including Scott Hamilton, Katarina Witt, and Jamie Sale and David Pelletier ("The Canadians").

These rebels are throwing around a lot of harsh words, with many supporters portraying the ISU as the grumpy old grandfather who refuses to accept the changing times ("in my day, you never saw women looking excessively nude in this athletic sport"). Pfenning sees the WSF as the catalyst for a new era in figure skating, calling its introduction "the first day in the rebirth of our sport."

The WSF has come up with new ideas to improve the sport and, in the upcoming months, will make a serious effort to get the International Olympic Committee to accept them as the lead skating union.

As for the ISU, they will try restarting their pacemaker by holding yet another Congress in 2004. Maybe this time they'll do something about that loud music those kids skate to.