Alert: 'Sinister' Olympic Score Rigging Allegations Explode as French Judge's Shocking Marks Flip Gold from US to French Team
If there’s one thing world history class taught me, it’s this: Give the French 20 years or so and they’ll prove they haven’t learned a thing.
This is apparently true in matters big (German perfidy, the Maginot Line, etc.) and small (suspect figure-skating judging at the Olympics). Because, 24 years after a French judging scandal led to an unprecedented second gold medal being awarded at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, it appears the Gauls are at it again in Italy.
According to the New York Post, French judge Jezabel Dabouis is the one under scrutiny this time after her scoring led to a controversial French duo scoring a win over an American duo in the ice dancing competition at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.
Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron won the competition with 225.82 points, 1.43 points over Madison Chock and Evan Bates at 224.39.
However, Dabouis’ scoring is under severe scrutiny after she scored Beaudry and Cizeron 7.71 points higher in the free dance event despite the fact that the French pair “failed to nail their synchronised twizzles.”
For most of us, reading that sentence is kind of funny, but considering the fact that she scored her fellow countrymen at 137.45 and the Americans at 129.74 — the only judge who didn’t give them over 130 points despite a general consensus they nailed their routine — that begins to look a lot more suspect.
For those of you wondering, this is what a “synchronized twizzle” is supposed to look like:
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TWIZZLES IN THE WORLD !!!!!!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/oXkEpy5l2l
— olympics era 🕊️ (@1644vms) February 7, 2026
And here’s what the Gauls managed:
are we really being gaslit to believe that Fournier-Beaudry/Cizeron deserved gold when this was their mess of a serpentine step sequence? They both lost their balances on their twizzles here, but 5 judges gave them +4 GOE. 🤡 pic.twitter.com/xtT39OSYBz
— prince (@hbsofst) February 11, 2026
And here’s the internet reaction from the ice-skating corner of social media, which I suppose is a thing:
The French guy made a CLEAR mistake on his twizzle but apparently he and his partner had “better artistry”??? pic.twitter.com/RWQxrWLerg
— Leigh Giangreco (@LeighGiangreco) February 12, 2026
And here’s a handy chart showing the differential in scoring:
The 2026 Winter Olympics figure skating ⛸️ free dance was scored by 9 judges
The French judge gave Beaudry & Cizeron 🇫🇷 a 137.45 but only gave Chock & Bates 🇺🇸 a 129.74
All other judges were relatively close in their two scores 🤔
Judge No. 4 was just in a bad mood overall pic.twitter.com/1HkDHY5vuo
— Lev Akabas (@LevAkabas) February 12, 2026
Nor was this the only suspect decision Dabouis made during the ice dancing competition.
“In the rhythm dance earlier in the week, there was another wide margin in Dabouis’ scoring between the Americans and the French pair, resulting in a near six-point difference, with France scoring 93.34 and the United States at 87.6,” the Post noted.
Generally speaking, any judged competition like this with subjectivity in the mix is going to come under scrutiny but fail to produce any sort of meaningful change in the results.
In fact, normally, the only time we’d care about an ice-skating scandal is if it involves a truncheon to the knee of Nancy Kerrigan and a suspect whose name Dave Letterman can endlessly joke about. (Yes, “Top Ten Ways to Mispronounce Jeff Gillooly” was once really a thing on “Late Night.”)
However, it’s worth remembering that more recently than that, there was another ice-skating judging scandal involving the French, this time at our own scandal-plagued 2002 Salt Lake City Games. As Vanity Fair notes in a quick summation:
According to the Netflix documentary Bad Sport … French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne said that Didier Gailhaguet, then president of the French skating federation, had instructed her to rank the Russians first.
Almost immediately afterwards, she recanted the statement. Gailhaguet denied the accusation, defending himself on the grounds that there wasn’t a French couple that could benefit from him fixing the scores. Which was true—at least, in the pairs competition.
Advertisement - story continues belowThe very legitimacy of the Olympics was at stake, and an international investigation was launched. The Italian authorities turned over a wiretapped recording of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a man said to have ties to the Russian mob.
James Comey, who was then US attorney for the Southern District of New York, gave a press conference in which he alleged “a quid pro quo” had been arranged.
In exchange for the French ranking the Russians first in pairs, the Russian judge would allegedly ensure the French won gold in ice dancing.
Tokhtakhounov was arrested in Italy on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bribery, but fought his extradition to the US and was released by the Italian courts. The [International Skating Union] banned both Le Gougne and Gailhaguet for three years. (Le Gougne never judged again.)
Advertisement - story continues belowFour days after the pairs’ finals, the unthinkable happened: The ISU announced Le Gougne’s scores would be voided, and a second gold medal would be awarded to the Canadian couple at a joint ceremony. All four athletes stood together, smiling for photos through an undeniably awkward situation.
This time, it doesn’t really look like that’s going to happen.
“It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations. The ISU has full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness,” an ISU spokesperson said Thursday, according to NBC.
However, it does intensify the controversy that was already around the French pair. From the Post:
Beaudry has been under the microscope after her former skating partner and longtime boyfriend, Nikolaj Sørensen, was received a minimum six-year ban in 2024 after he was accused of sexually assaulting an American figure skating coach and former skater in 2012.
The suspension was overturned in June last year due to a technicality, and Beaudry has defended Sørensen on multiple occasions and even lamented the fact that it impacted his career in a Netflix docuseries, ‘Glitter & Gold’. …
Cizeron was also accused of being controlling and demanding in a memoir published by his former on-ice partner Gabriella Papadakis, who wrote that she did not want to be alone with him.
He has denied the claims, labelling them a smear campaign, and said he is planning on taking legal action.
So in other words, they’re basically French.
However, pretty much everyone else not in the ISU was busy savaging the judge.
“Turns out, even a missed twizzle won’t stop you from winning Olympic gold,” wrote French-Estonian skater Solene Mazingue on social media. “When sport stops being about performance and starts becomes bout politics.”
“That French judge was clearly trying to give the French pair the win,” said American sports journalist Rodger Sherman.
“If that’s possible, the whole system is broken. You can try to make the system as objective as you’d like, but when you look under the hood, it’s still just biased humans plugging in numbers about what they liked — and perhaps who they liked.”
The American duo tried to take it in stride.
“I feel like life is sometimes you can feel like you do everything right and it doesn’t go your way, and that’s life and that’s sport,” Bates said after winning silver. “And it’s a subjective sport. It’s a judged sport.”
Chock, meanwhile, described coming in second as a “bittersweet” occasion, according to Newsweek.
“We really gave it our all, and I wouldn’t change anything about how we approached each performance, what we delivered in each performance,” Chock said. “We really gave it our best.”
Well, if history is any guide to how the French behave, perhaps they will end up with a gold after all.
And meanwhile, for everyone coming back to this article after the inevitable France-centric ice-skating scandal at the 2050 Winter Olympics, co-hosted by the U.S. states of Canada and Greenland, yes, I called it, all right. You’re welcome, future people.
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