Aside from hosting sixteen disciplines among eight distinct sports, this year’s Winter Olympics, held in Milan-Cortina, Italy, yielded great controversy.
On Wednesday, February 11, France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron secured the Olympic gold medal in ice dance, narrowly defeating the adored USA husband-and-wife duo of Madison Chock and Evan Bates by a margin of 1.43 points.
Beaudry and Cizeron earned the highest score in the rhythm dance segment, which sparked debate over judges’ potential bias due to obvious synchronization issues on their twizzles—a multi-rotational one-foot turn that skaters perform while moving across the ice—as well as other elements. The pair’s performance again featured visible errors with their twizzles during the free dance segment, while Chock and Bates exhibited a near-flawless execution in their performance.
Ultimately, the French judge, Jezabel Dabouis, raised the greatest public controversy regarding bias and nationalism. Dabouis scored Chock and Bates’ free dance the lowest out of all nine judges, over five points below the judges’ panel average score. She did, however, award Beaudry and Cizeron a score nearly three points higher than the average. Five out of the nine judges favored the American team. Furthering the tension, many viewed Beaudry and Cizeron’s victory as especially unbelievable because the pair were in their first season together. People pointed out that the novelty of their partnership produced an unusual level of success.
Following the ice dance scandal, on February 12, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) disqualified Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych after he insisted on wearing a controversial helmet.
On February 9, during official men’s skeleton training heats, Heraskevych wore a helmet featuring images of Ukrainian athletes killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The IOC informed Heraskevych that his helmet was not compliant with the IOC’s Guidelines on Athlete Expression and that wearing it would prohibit him from participating in the Olympic event. According to Rule 50 of the IOC, “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” In the end, Heraskevych indicated that he would continue to use the helmet in competition to mourn the loss of his fellow athletes; therefore, he reiterated his position and became disqualified.
With many rules, regulations, subjectivities, and opinions involved, the 2026 Winter Olympics became grounds for great controversy among the public and athletes themselves.
