One of the reasons I enjoy the Summer Olympics far more than the Winter Games is the subjectivity inherent in so many of the most popular winter sports.
Figure skating, for example, is a sport in which judges determine the winner.
I’m far less interested in this sport because of this.
The same holds for many freestyle skiing and snowboarding competitions.
Even ski jumping includes a judge’s score, which makes no sense to me. Can’t we just judge who jumped the farthest and call them the winner?
A friend argued that the judging is so precise that the winners really do turn out to be the best performances in their given sport.
Then along came this:
The new, more complex figure skating scoring system implemented by the International Skating Union has not appeared to eliminate a judge’s bias toward skaters from their own country.
An analysis of the scoring from the 2026 Winter Olympics found a statistically significant bias toward judges’ own compatriots.
Of the 15 teams competing in the Free Dance, for instance, all but one got an above-average score from their country compared to the other eight judges.
In the short programs, of the 36 judges overall, 30 scored their nation’s skaters more favorably. In fact, a skater could expect, on average, a score 1.93 points higher from a judge from their own country than from another.
In the long program, they could expect an additional 3.34 points.
Subjectivity is deeply at play in the Winter Olympics.
As someone who competes in storytelling competitions, I understand how subjective judging can sometimes be wildly inaccurate. A storyteller who clearly outperformed the competition can lose to a lesser story because of the story’s topic, the audience’s composition on a given night, and the storyteller themselves.
I was once beaten in a StorySLAM by someone whose story was poorly crafted and genuinely confusing at times because the storyteller was 94 years old and had never spoken in front of an audience in his life.
He told this audience this before he began speaking.
I knew that unless the man was telling a story about tossing a bag of kittens into a river, I was already dead.
I’m still annoyed more than a decade later, but I was also happy for the guy that night. He later told me that it was a dream come true to stand before an audience and be appreciated and validated like he was that night.
I once lost a StorySLAM because one of the judging teams didn’t think my story had anything to do with the evening’s theme. Later, they came and told me that they thought I told the best story of the night, but unfortunately, they deducted significant points because it was off-theme.
When I explained how the story fit the theme perfectly, one of the women said, “Oh, you’re right. That never even occurred to us. You definitely should’ve won. Sorry about that.”
Thanks a lot.
Recency bias plays a huge role in subjective competitions. Having competed in 116 StorySLAMs over the past 15 years, I have a lot of data on winning and losing and can assure you that it’s much more difficult to win a Moth StorySLAM if your name is drawn in the first half of the show than after intermission.
In fact, in my 15 years of competing and attending more than 250 Moth StorySLAMs, I’ve only seen one person win from first position.
It was me. I’ve done it three times. I’ve never seen anyone else ever do it.
Recency bias is a huge factor.
It plays a role in the Olympics, too. Known as the “serial position effect,” multiple academic studies analyzing international competitions (including Olympic-level events) find that skaters who perform later receive higher scores—even when order is randomized.
This is why top contenders in figure skating and skiing always perform last. As the best of the best, they are given the privilege (and advantage) of performing last and benefiting from recency bias.
The rich, it would seem, keep getting richer.
There are enough objective sports in the Winter Olympics that keep me coming back. Curling is huge in our home, thanks mostly to Charlie, and I’ve been known to enjoy an hour or two of speed skating or biathalon.
I love watching the snowboarders, too, but I think of it more as an exposition of talent than a real competition.
I also keep returning to The Moth, year after year, even though my chances of winning are influenced by many factors beyond my ability to craft and perform.
Still, one of the three best stories almost always wins.
Even though I’ve lost when I was sure I should’ve won, I’ve won more than half of the StorySLAMs in which I’ve competed, so that random collection of judges who determine the winner of a Moth StorySLAM seems to do a good job in the long run, even when they sometimes fail on any given night.
Also, it’s a night of storytelling, which I love.
In the same way I enjoy watching those snowboarders fly through the air, I love listening to stories so much.
I also love defeating them and taking home the glory of first place, but even when that’s not possible. Either because my name wasn’t drawn from the bag or a better story genuinely beat me, or other factors like recency bias came into play, it’s hard to ruin an evening of storytelling.
It’s also hard to ruin the Winter Olympics, even when some sports involve more bias than many might believe.
