The Ice Storm

When figure skater Sasha Cohen decided to buy her first house, she picked an idyllic abode in Laguna Beach, Calif. With views of the Pacific Ocean on one side and rolling canyons on the other, it was the perfect location for the élite-level skater to repair to as she prepared for her second Olympic Games. There was only one problem. When the rains came, Cohen learned that the beauty and charm of the house hid a major flaw: it had been built on a shaky foundation and was in danger of sliding away.

Her new house wasn't the only thing in Cohen's life teetering on the brink. Figure skating, the sport by which she defines herself, was losing considerable ground after a judging scandal in the pairs competition in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games exposed the cronyism and rigged voting on which the sport was resting. It wasn't just established competitors like Cohen who were affected. The exposé threatened to alienate skating's future champions, including rising stars like Kimmie Meissner, who last year became only the second American woman to land a triple Axel in competition. Those youngsters were busy pushing the sport to new levels of excellence, but would they continue to bother if the results were fixed? Embarrassed and under pressure from the International Olympic Committee to reform, the International Skating Union (I.S.U.) decided to raze and rebuild.

In Torino all eyes will again be on the judges' table, but this time the I.S.U. welcomes the attention. Its new scoring system, inaugurated in the 2004 season, will be used in an Olympic competition for the first time. Designed to force judges to back up their subjective scores in a more quantitative way, the revised system is not perfect, but support is growing. "It empowers the skater to participate in the result in a way she never has before," says 1984 Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton. "It is a step in the right direction."

For the skaters, the new rules mean rethinking every edge they carve on the ice to impress the judges. Gone is the punitive 6.0 system, in which the athletes start with the maximum score of perfection and lose points for mistakes and poorly executed skills or because the French judge doesn't like magenta. In its place is a cumulative system in which skaters begin with a blank slate and accumulate points, depending on the elements they complete (see box).

Perhaps the biggest change is that the new rules don't reward those circus-leap triple Axels to the exclusion of other skills. That benefits skaters like Meissner who have the big tricks but are more analytical and calculating enough to maximize their point totals with the minimum amount of exhausting big tricks. Under the new code of points (COP), as it's called, there is no hiding a weak spin, sloppy footwork or poor basics. It's a far more demanding and exacting measure of an athlete.

COP draws a line between the intuitive skaters of yesterday and the more technical, all-around stars of tomorrow. And you need look no further than the trio of American women headed to Torino--Cohen, Meissner and Michelle Kwan--to know that this changing of the guard is well under way.