Many sports, which judge for creativity, personality, feel and spontaneity, are difficult to determine who is the best in competition. And yet the American People love figure skating and often immortalize the top performers. But how can anyone be sure that the best skaters actually win? Sure they have mandatory maneuvers to do and judges do know the complexity and difficulty of various other tricks and yet so much else is arbitrary.

Often as I watch these performances I totally disagree with the judges and feel that somehow the winners are rigged. In the last 10 years we have seen scandals with judges in major world competitions and so one has to wonder if like the Tour de France that maybe finger skating has lost its legitimacy due to these judging crimes?

Unfortunately in all of this it becomes extremely unfair to the athletes who practice for 6-8 hours a day to perform at that World Class level. There seems to be way too much politics in figure skating and that is a travesty, because it takes talent, strength, nerves of steel and sheer strength to pull off a peak performance like that. Please consider all this in 2006.