To arrive fourth at the Olympics is a bit, a lot, unfortunately, to be the first of the last. This rank of the chocolate medal becomes even more painful in “judge sports” such as figure skating or ski jumping, which carry their share of disputes for excess of subjectivity and partiality.
When Frenchman Benjamin Cavet took 4and place in mogul skiing on February 5 at the Beijing Olympics, he found himself saying that the judges had applied a little too much ointment to the performance of the Japanese Ikuma Horishima, who came third, behind the Quebecer Mikaël Kingsbury (medalist silver) and Sweden’s Walter Wallberg (gold medalist). Less than 2 points separated the Japanese and the French.
“Ben Cavet has a medal stolen by the judges. The Japanese must not even be in the top 5, ”summarized a tweeter … French. To which another replied that “these are surely the same judges who officiate on boxing at the Summer Olympics”.
After such an astonishing score from snowboarder Ayumu Hirano finally won gold at the halfpipe, an NBC commentator also fired into the pile of evaluators. “The judges just blew their credibility,” he said.
Corruption and evaluation
Are accusations of partiality justified in general and not in these particular cases? Do judged sports deserve this bad reputation?
A European university research allows to decide, at least a little, on the question. After examining the evaluation of 15,355 ski jumps from men’s competitions held from 2010 to 2017, the conclusion of this survey announces that the nationalist bias of the judges is found to be “modest but widespread”. The calculated average bias is an additional 0.1 point, with nearly half of performance reviewers favoring compatriots in a so-called “statistically significant” way.
By cross-referencing the observations with the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of the countries of the organization Transparency International, the study shows that the judges of Russia (a country with a bad ethical reputation with its 136and rank out of 180) favored more than 0.2 points on average for data from 2012 to 2017.
The Norwegian evaluators, who come from a model country from the point of view of the CPI, do not favor their compatriot in any way. This small Nordic nation is also the world champion in performance in winter sports and at the Olympic Games in particular…
“We have concluded that nationalistic in-group favoritism exists for a large proportion of ski jumping judges and appears to be a strong characteristic of human behavior, especially in countries with a high CPI,” explains the Homework Professor Felix Otto of the Institute of Sports Science at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Professor Otto worked with Tim Pawlowski from his university and Alexandre Krumer from Molde University in Norway. Their survey entitled “Nationalistic bias among international experts” was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
The favoritism of certain members of the juries seems to have little influence on the final result because the bias counts for relatively little in the scoring and because of the elimination of the highest and the lowest mark awarded refocuses the results. The Magazine’s Data Journalists The Economist carried out this scholarly work by establishing that without the patriotic distortions, the scores would have changed only 14 medals in 203 competitions, i.e. in 2.3% of the cases.
Human, too human
There were, however, blatant cases of grade cheating. The Canadian couple Salé-Pelletier saw the gold medal at the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 escape them after a controversial decision by a French judge which had tilted the vote in favor of Russian rivals. A Franco-Russian scheme was then uncovered and Salé-Pelletier was finally crowned. “The overhaul of the scoring system after Salt Lake City led to a reform that made it more difficult to introduce bias,” says Any-Claude Dion, General Manager of Patinage Québec. The system developed over the past twenty years is very complex, with a special panel for the technical aspect and access to video replays. In short, from a scoring point of view, the Beijing Olympics are going well. »
The alleged doping of the young Russian skater Kamila Valieva poses a serious problem, but of a different nature. Still, despite all the improvements and beacons introduced, here as elsewhere, the ideal would be to further reduce the bias of judges.
Technique can help. In tennis, an infallible and impartial optical system replaces human linesmen, all too human.
In judging the controversies that still taint certain events in Beijing, sports columnist Sabrina Maddeaux from National Post cried out loud and clear for radical changes. “Any judgment that can be replaced or improved by computer systems and artificial intelligence should be,” she proposed.
We must not fall into the technicist ideology either. Professor Simon Lacoste-Julien, holder of a chair in artificial intelligence at the University of Montreal, says it well: his field will be able to support training and judgment, but he does not see anytime soon how it could replace some of them. aspects.
“Artificial intelligence can for example already help to annotate videos of a performance to establish the height of a jump or the alignment of the body, he says. Sport relies on canonical adherence to the rules and there is an advantage in automating judgmental adherence to the rules to remove objective aspects or corruption. But when we talk about aesthetic or artistic judgement, it’s something else. I think we are very, very far from that. »
Should we even let the machines judge everything in the even distant future, as some dream of seeing artist machines develop? “At the end of the day, humans evaluate a performance with their feelings,” replies Mme Dio. This is also what makes the beauty of the sports judged, this ability of the athlete to seek out the public and the jury by focusing on the emotional aspect of his performance. »