Tonight on ice, you are the judge

Jenni Meno liked her view of the Olympics this year. She and her husband, Todd Sand, sat among the rest of the spectators in Salt Lake City's Delta Center and watched the pairs skating competition.

There was no pressure, no racing heartbeats, no worries. Most of all, the three-time U.S. pairs skating champions didn't have to fret about pleasing a panel of judges.

Meno, of Westlake, and Sand joined the pro ranks shortly after the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan. These days, they enjoy skating on their terms in the national Target Stars on Ice tour, which stops tonight in Gund Arena. Their only judges now are themselves and the audience.

"Skating in the Olympics in your own country has to be really amazing," said Meno, who competed in three Winter Games - twice with Sand.

"Yeah," said Sand, "but we're glad we're not out there now."

The way things turned out in the pairs competition this year made Meno and Sand even happier that they are no longer competing at the Olympic level. They watched in dismay as the judges awarded Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze the gold medal over Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, even though the Canadians skated a flawless program.

"After Anton and Elena skated, we thought, Well, that might've been the gold-medal performance,' " Meno said. "Then Jamie and David per formed, and it was just magical. The marks came up, and we were as shocked as everybody else. It was one of the most blatant times I've seen something like that."

"We were sitting with some [corporate sponsors], and they were surprised, too. They kept asking us, Why did that happen?' And we said, Don't ask us, we don't know, either.' "

Ultimately, after a French judge admitted she was under pressure to give high marks to the Russian pair, the International Olympic Committee made the highly rare move of awarding gold medals to both the Russians and the Canadians. The move was extremely popular with the crowd in Salt Lake as well as the American television audience.

"That was the only solution - to give Jamie and David a gold medal," Meno said. "You can't skate the event over."

The subjectivity of the sport is nothing new, and anyone who has reached the elite level has come to understand that all too well. In skating, there are two scores, one for technical merit and another for artistic presentation. Oftentimes, it's the artistic mark that is scrutinized because it is much more open to personal taste.

The artistic scores affected Meno and Sand at the 1996 world championships in Birmingham, England. There, the judges awarded the silver medal to the German team of Mandy Wotzel and Ingo Steuer and gave the bronze to Meno and Sand, who performed a clean program.

"It wasn't their fault, but the German team apologized to us before we stepped on the medal stand," Meno said.

Still, Meno and Sand said they have never witnessed anything "as bad" as what happened to Sale and Pelletier.

Even though Meno and Sand no longer compete at the Olympic level, they hope the sport will look into the judging and try to make changes in the future. Meno suggested having a different judging panel for the short and long programs. She likes the concept of randomly drawing the judges on the night of the event, something the International Skating Union is considering.

"We just hope some good will come out of this," Meno said. "We don't want to see young skaters discouraged, and we hope that young skaters watching this will keep doing it because they love the sport. This is something they can't control."

Figure skating, known for its human dramas, became immensely popular after the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan scandal in 1994. This latest scandal has put the world's focus on the sport once again.

Although Sale and Pelletier initially were slighted, they probably will become even more popular now than had they won the gold medal in the first place. Their story became the story of the Olympics.

"Now they're a household name," Meno said. "Just winning the gold medal wouldn't have been as big. And they've been very gracious throughout all of this, too."