Olympics: British judge rejects French accusation

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Sally Stapleford, Britain's leading ice skating official, reacted indignantly yesterday to allegations that she had intimidated the French judge who was suspended following the pairs event, which erupted into controversy when the Russians were awarded gold ahead of the Canadians.

Marie-Reine Le Gougne told the French press that she was not, as originally reported, pressured by her own federation into voting for the Russians in exchange for Russian support in the ice dance judging. She said that she had been criticised for giving the Russians her vote by Stapleford, who is head of the International Skating Union's technical committee, and added that the British official had told her to blame her own federation for influencing her vote.

Stapleford denied that she had said any such thing to Le Gougne, whom she accused of "living in a fantasy world".

Stapleford, who has been an international judge since 1972 and chair of the ISU technical committee for the last 10 years, is considering taking legal action over the comments of Le Gougne, who is said to have harboured ambitions to join the technical committee.

"What she has said is totally unfounded," Stapleford said. "These allegations hurt, but the woman is obviously emotionally distressed. She changes her story every day so I think most people know what to make of it. She is living in a fantasy world."

The latest row occurred a few hours after sweeping changes to the skating judging system had been proposed by the ISU president, Ottavio Cinquanta.

To address the possibility of vote rigging, Cinquanta's proposals – to be considered at the ISU council meeting in June – call for the nine judges currently operating to be replaced by a panel of 14. Each judge would score an event, but a computer would randomly select seven scores and give them as an overall average, discarding any marks at either extreme.

"This system will reduce to a minimum the possibility of block judging," Cinquanta said, adding that no one would be able to know which judge's marks were included.

The current system whereby skaters start with 6.0 marks in each category and are marked down according to how they perform would be replaced by a system in which they started from zero and could gain set marks for technical elements such as jumps and spins. Judges would award points for the overall execution of the programme similar to the current "presentation" marks.