Sample Page Title

MOSCOW, January 22, Andrey Simonenko. 1984 Olympic champion in pair skating , Honored Coach of Russia Oleg Vasilyev said in an interview that he proposed to the International Skating Union (ISU) to create a pool of professional referees who would help improve the situation with refereeing bias in figure skating. Since June 2020, Vasilyev has been the head coach of the Belarusian national figure skating team. During the European Championships, held on January 12-15 in Tallinn, Vasiliev expressed disagreement with judging in the short program in women's single skating, where Russian Anna Shcherbakova, with a fall on a jump cascade, bypassed a number of figure skaters who performed the program cleanly, including Belarusian Victoria Safonova. «I proposed to create a certain pool of professional referees who would be hired by the ISU. These people would receive a salary at the ISU, doing only refereeing and no other business. There could be about 30-40 such judges, they would judge the main starts — Grand -when, world championships, European, four continents and Olympic Games. They would not be engaged by federations, would not seek to please certain athletes, coaches or someone else. They would do their job professionally and get paid for it. It would be less bias, more professionalism, and the federations would have no influence on the final result,» Vasiliev said. «In my opinion, this should work. But for some reason, the ISU did not seriously consider my proposal. Apparently, they believe that this is not the way to develop refereeing in figure skating. But we will try to move the swing in this direction, because, in my opinion, the lack of engagement of the judges is the only way out of this situation,» the specialist added. Read the full interview with Oleg Vasilyev on the website rsport.ria.ru.