A day after a suspected Russian mobster was charged with fixing two figure skating events at Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Games, Italian police are saying their investigation shows the stain of corruption might be growing to involve a multiplicity of judges.
Meanwhile, International Olympic Committee members say they believe this latest scandal should not affect the legacy of the Salt Lake Games.
"The legacy of the Games was magnificent and won't be tainted by that," French IOC member Jean-Claude Killy said.
Anita DeFrantz, the ranking member of the IOC from the United States, agreed. "This is an outside force that was doing something absolutely unethical, if the charges turn out to be true," she said. "We're going to find out what it is over time. But the Games forever will be a great success."
Tokhtakhounov was arrested Wednesday at his resort home in Venice, Italy. He faces conspiracy charges in connection with the pairs figure skating and ice dancing events at the 2002 Winter Games.
The arrest came nearly six months to the day after the scandal first captured the spotlight at the Games. While national and world skating organizations expressed their horror at the allegations, insiders applauded in the hopes that the latest drama would put an end to judging corruption once and for all.
Canadian IOC member Dick Pound said the Games' ice skating scandal is a problem that must be fixed by the International Skating Union, which governs the sport. "I think the whole sport is being put in jeopardy," he said.
U.S. prosecutors allege Tokhtakhounov persuaded a French judge to vote for the Russian pairs team and a Russian judge to vote in turn for the French ice dancing team, according to a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. Both teams won gold at the Olympics.
In exchange for fixing the events, the reputed mobster wanted a visa to return to France, where he once lived, U.S. prosecutors said.
Thursday, an Italian organized crime unit revealed its investigation shows Tokhtakhounov might have been in cahoots with as many as six judges at the Salt Lake Games. The identities of the judges were not known, Italian police said.
"We have recorded a conversation in which the suspect indicates that six judges may have been involved," police Col. Giovanni Mainolfi said. "However, we have no specific evidence against these judges at this time."
The International Olympic Committee, U.S. Olympic Committee, U.S. Figure Skating Association and Skate Canada responded within hours, expressing shock and dismay at the allegations.
"American athletes and the competitors from all nations must be assured that they compete on a level playing field and that they can aspire to win an Olympic medal in a completely open and honest competition," said Lloyd Ward, USOC chief executive officer. "This goes to the heart and soul of the Olympic ideals that our athletes practice every day."
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said, "This kind of alleged activity has no place in the Olympic movement."
U.S. and Canadian skating federations called the events "surprising," and "unbelievable."
"The possibility of additional influence of outside pressures on judging at the the recent Olympics during the ice dancing competition is unbelievable," said Skate Canada president Marilyn Chidlow. "These new developments point to the immediate importance of changing the current judging system to build in protection for honest judges."
Wiretaps used in an organized crime investigation captured a series of telephone calls between Tokhtakhounov in Italy and unnamed conspirators during the Games. Those calls "lay out a pattern of conduct that connects those two events," U.S. Attorney James Comey said.
The suspect "arranged a classic quid pro quo: 'You'll line up support for the Russian pair, we'll line up support for the French pair and everybody will go away with the gold, and perhaps there'll be a little gold for me,' " Comey said.
Ida Tateoka, a World and Olympic level judge who makes her home in Utah, said such shenanigans were known to happen, though she was "shocked" to find them at the Olympic level.
"I'm pretty naive about all that goes on," Tateoka said. "I can certainly believe that it happened, but it was a shock that it would go to that extent, to the top level of skaters. But you hear of these things off an on. You learn to be cautious and keep your eyes and ears open."
Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze won the pairs gold medal by the slimmest of margins, defeating Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier in the first skating competition of the Games. But French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne said the next day she'd been pressured to vote for the Russians, who slipped during their routine while the Canadians were flawless.
Le Gougne later recanted but still was suspended, as was Didier Gailhaguet, the head of the French skating federation. Le Gougne's Salt Lake City-based lawyer, Erik Christiansen, said she "has no involvement and no knowledge of this person or these allegations."
A duplicate set of gold medals was eventually awarded to the Canadian pairs team.
A week after the pairs competition, the ice dancing team of Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat won France's first gold in figure skating since 1932.
Tateoka said she wondered about the veracity of the results, though she wasn't necessarily surprised once she saw the voting split, which was drawn neatly down geo-political lines.
"Certainly, I wondered," she said. "It was a 5-4 split (in the pairs event). That's exactly what I would have thought would happen. And that's too bad."
Subjectivity is part of the sport, and part of judging, Tateoka said. Bloc judging shouldn't be. But, Tateoka said, it isn't at all uncommon, especially among European judges.
"When I go to Europe, I stay away from the European judges. They stick together and they talk a lot. They're friends from long ago, so I guess they can talk. But I thought, I don't want to get into any problems, so I stayed away.
"What they see is . . . " Tateoka paused, "sometimes a little bit different. For me, I just don't want to be influenced by anything. You judge it the way you see it."
The sport needs a system that better ensures judging fairness, Tateoka said. Not just to restore confidence in the sport, but also for the athletes.
"I don't know if this will hurt the sport," she said. "It might, for a while. But skating is such a popular sport, still. So these things have not killed it. But in fairness to the skaters, you want to make sure it's corrected. You want the best to be recognized as the best."
Sale and Pelletier agreed, though they said no system will be perfect.
"Anything that has subjective judging is always going to be like that," Sale said Thursday on NBC's "Today" show.
"When you race against time, what's involved is doping, so every sport has something," Pelletier said.
International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said: "While we knew from previous investigations that the judgment in the pairs figure skating was not correct, we are shocked to learn of the alleged involvement of organized crime."
But Russian Olympic Committee spokesman Gennady Shvets said the Russian pair won fairly and suggested the new allegations were part of an effort to justify the decision to award a second gold. "Now this funny fantasy appears," he said.
"It is more like a cinematic subject, a synopsis of a film script," he added.
U.S. investigators said Wednesday that they had obtained recorded telephone conversations between Tokhtakhounov and a French ice dancer in which the suspect brags about being able to influence the outcome of competitions.
The U.S. complaint said wiretaps caught the defendant talking to a female ice dancer's mother. After the Olympics, the female ice dancer called Tokhtakhounov to discuss the outcome, the complaint said.
It was unclear exactly when the suspect might be extradited to the United States, but the process can last more than a month and could be delayed by the judiciary's summer recess.
Mainolfi said Italian authorities came upon the Olympic case by accident. They were investigating other activities involving the suspect when they came across the conversations.
"The investigation began more than a year ago," he said. "We are still investigating about 50 other suspects."
Contributing: Deseret News staff writer Lisa Riley Roche
E-MAIL: jnii@desnews.com