Zitzewitz, a professor of economics and the author of two papers about bias in figure skating judging, says, “Both ski jumping and figure skating have nationalistic judging biases, where judges give higher scores to athletes from their countries. But the sports take very different approaches to dealing with this. Ski jumping has its international federation select the judges for competitions like the Olympics, and I find that they select the least biased judges. Figure skating lets its national federations select the judges, and my research showed that they select the most biased judges.”
Read the full opinion piece, published 2/12/14 by The Washington Post.
