A French ice dance pair edged out Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates for Olympic gold by just 1.43 points — a margin that evaporates entirely without the help of one judge: Jezabel Dabouis, who happens to be French.
Dabouis' scorecard in the free dance didn't just favor her countrymen. It screamed favoritism so loudly that fans across social media are calling the result rigged. The French pair of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron finished with a total score of 225.82 to the Americans' 224.39. A hairline fracture of a margin — and one judge's thumb sat heavily on the scale.
According to the Daily Caller, in the free dance, Dabouis awarded the French pair 137.45 points — the second-highest score any of the nine judges gave them. She gave Chock and Bates 129.74. That made her the only judge out of nine who failed to score the Americans above 130.
The gap between her scores for the two pairs was 7.71 points. The largest split of any judge on the panel.
This wasn't a one-off. Earlier in the week, during the rhythm dance, Dabouis scored the French pair 93.34 and the Americans 87.6 — a six-point spread that mirrored the same pattern. Across both segments of the competition, one judge consistently found the French pair far superior to the Americans, while her eight colleagues saw something much closer.
When every other judge clusters in one range and a single outlier drags the result toward her own nation's team, the numbers aren't ambiguous. They're a flashing sign.
SB Nation, citing data from SkatingScores.com, has highlighted previous examples of Dabouis appearing to favor French competitors in her scoring. This wasn't a judge who suddenly discovered a preference under Olympic lights. Multiple media outlets have raised questions about her scoring history — questions that, based on what unfolded in this competition, seem to have been thoroughly justified.
Figure skating has always lived in the uncomfortable space between sport and subjective art. Judging controversies are baked into its DNA. But the sport's governing bodies have a responsibility to ensure that a judge with a documented pattern of national bias doesn't sit on a panel where her own country's athletes are competing for gold. That's not a complex reform. It's common sense — the kind that apparently didn't make it into the room.
Consider the math. The final margin was 1.43 points. Dabouis alone created a 7.71-point gap between the two pairs in the free dance. Remove her outlier scores and replace them with something resembling the consensus of the other eight judges, and the outcome of this competition changes.
That's not speculation. That's arithmetic.
Chock and Bates trained for years, performed at the highest level on the world's biggest stage, and walked away without gold — potentially because one judge from the opposing team's country couldn't keep her thumb off the scale. No formal investigation has been announced. No governing body has issued a statement. Dabouis herself has said nothing publicly.
The silence is its own kind of answer.
Americans are rightly tired of watching institutions that are supposed to be neutral operate with invisible thumbs on invisible scales. Whether it's international sporting bodies, media organizations, or regulatory agencies, the pattern is always the same: the rules exist on paper, the bias lives in practice, and anyone who points it out gets dismissed as a conspiracy theorist — right up until the numbers make denial impossible.
Fans aren't wrong to look at Dabouis' scorecards and see something broken. A competition where a judge from Country A scores Country A's team dramatically higher than every colleague — twice in one week — and that scoring directly determines who takes home gold isn't a controversy manufactured by sore losers. It's a structural failure that the sport's authorities either couldn't see or chose not to address.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates deserved a fair competition. Whether they deserved gold is a question only an uncompromised panel could answer. They didn't get one.