© James Lang/Imagn
While the 2026 Winter Olympics had plenty of controversy, perhaps the biggest of all came in the pairs ice dancing competition, where the United States of America duo of Evan Bates and Madison Chock controversially took silver behind French pair Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry.
The judging of the competition came under severe scrutiny from figure skating fans across the world. Particularly, French judge Jézabel Dabois faced scrutiny for her questionable scoring. But the International Skating Union claimed that the judges did nothing wrong.
“It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations,” the ISU said via the Associated Press, noting it has “full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness.”
However, now it appears that the ISU may not have been entirely truthful.
Data Shows Winter Olympics Figure Skating Scoring Was Heavily Biased
Thanks to Lev Akabas of Sportico, we now know that not only was Dabois’ score biased in favor of the French team, but that nearly every judge in all of the figure skating competitions at the 2026 Winter Olympics was biased in favor of their home country.
Olympic Figure Skating Has a Judging Bias Problem
49 of the 59 judges who scored skaters from their own country judged them more favorably than skaters from other countries, per data from @SkatingScores
🧵 1/4 pic.twitter.com/XuJbUIXtOH
— Lev Akabas (@LevAkabas) February 23, 2026
Akabas, using data from the X account @SkatingScores, determined that 49 of the 59 total judges who scored skaters from their own country gave them a higher score than skaters from other countries relative to their overall judging.
Specifically, in the highly controversial ice dancing competition, 14 of the 15 teams with a judge from their country received a higher-than-average score from that judge.
In total, 100 skaters or skating pairs had their programs scored by a judge sharing their nationality. Of those 100 routines, 27 of them received their best score from their “home judge.” Meanwhile, only two times did a skater or pair receive their worst score from their home judge.
Ultimately, the simple “fix” is to just drop the highest and lowest scores from competition totals. But, of course, that also opens up new complications.
How figure skating goes about fixing the issue is unknown. But one thing is clear: it does, in fact, have a problem.