WICHITA, Kansas. As the U.S. Figure Skating Championships wound down last night with the identical twins pairs competition, officials breathed a sigh of relief that the proceedings had not been marred by a scoring controversy.
“It was high time that the world of skating emerged from the dank, dark cave of subjective scoring, to the bright sunlight of an objective system we could all be proud of,” said television commentator Johnny Weir. “Future generations will thank us for creating a new world order where decisions by corrupt French judges do not touch off international incidents.”
“You call this a teddy bear?”
And indeed, the championships closed without controversy of the sort that has rocked other skating competitions due to the shift from a scoring system based on each judge’s discretion to one based solely on the number and size of teddy bears thrown on the ice following a skater’s performance.
“It’s a very straighforward analysis,” says Tami Lefebvre, owner of Tami’s Skating Supplies in Natick, Mass. “You take the number of bears, multiply by the total weight, then divide by pi,” she says as she taps at a Radio Shack calculator. “Add 6.25% sales tax in Massachusetts, and you should get the number of molecules in a mole–no wait, that’s Avogadro’s Number.”
Avogadro casts a gimlet eye on a poorly-executed Salchow.
Ice-skating enthusiasts have traditionally showered the ice with stuffed animals following a performance by their favorites, but international skating bodies have been reluctant to link scoring to the fickle whims of fans. “We have standards, unlike American Idol,” sniffs Jean-Luc du Charme, editor of Les Cahiers du Figure-Skatant, a French skating magazine. “I am not at liberty to say what those standards are, unless you are prepared to give me trop plus beaucoup Euros.”
The teddy bear scoring system will be used in U.S. Olympic trials, but its adoption for the 2026 Winter Games in Milan is uncertain. “We checked, and there may be a problem,” says Armand de Gustave of the International Olympic Committee. “There are only two teddy bears in Italy, and one of them is missing an ear.”