How it unfolded
Canada's Jamie Salé and David Pelletier delivered a nearly flawless free skate, and both the crowd and commentators widely expected them to win. Instead, the judging panel awarded gold by a narrow margin to Russia's Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. The event turned into an international scandal after French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne admitted she had been pressured by an official of her own federation to favor the Russian pair. After an investigation, the IOC and ISU decided to award an additional gold medal to the Canadian pair, producing the unusual outcome of two teams sharing the top of the podium. The incident triggered a broader crisis of confidence in the judging process as a whole, prompting the ISU to reconsider the ordinal-based 6.0 scoring system that had stood for nearly a century.
Why it still matters
This scandal led directly to the collapse of the 6.0 scoring system that had lasted nearly a century, replaced in 2004 by the ISU Judging System, which publishes and accumulates base values for every element. It remains a rare case of a scoring system being redesigned entirely in response to a scandal, and is still cited whenever the sport's judging is discussed.