When Michelle Kwan performs a heart-stopping triple Lutz before the Olympic figure skating judges in Turin later this month, will the judges be fair?

Not likely, say UC Davis faculty members James Spriggs, Brian Sala and John Scott, who have scrutinized Olympic figure skating results over the past half century. Even with the new Code of Points judging system, these researchers say the judges may not be able to avoid their political biases.

Unlike ski racing or swimming, where the stopwatch is the arbiter, figure skating provided the three political scientists with the opportunity to look at the influence of politics on the subjective evaluations of the judges, who represent their national figure skating organizations and their nations.

"In our analysis, we find a persistent and consistent 'patriotic' bias shown by judges toward skaters from their own country, both during the Cold War and afterward," the three UC Davis scholars note. "More interestingly, we find bloc biases."

During the 40 years of the Cold War, Olympic figure skating judges from one defense alliance, such as NATO or the Warsaw Pact, tended to show negative bias toward skaters from countries in the opposing defense alliance. But the UC Davis researchers found that the judges from those political alliances have changed their behavior since the Soviet Union crumbled in the late '80s.

"This suggests that the change in ideas and identities with the end of the Cold War may have altered the judges' behavior," the three write.

Spriggs, Sala and Scott calculated that during the Cold War, judges gave better scores to medal contenders from their home country as compared to other judges' scores on those skaters, and, to a lesser extent, to all skaters from their country. This bias amounts, for instance, to judges scoring skaters from their own country about five places better than other judges did. And they punished skaters from "enemy" countries by giving them worse scores.

While the UC Davis political scientists found little evidence of political punishment in the past few Winter Olympics, they did find that the Olympic judges have continued to show bias in favor of skaters from their own country.