International Skating Union officials gathered at their biennial congress in Stockholm, Sweden, last month to discuss and amend the rules governing figure skating. While many proposals were approved, it appears the congress went through its motions for the sake of appearing to be busy rather than acting in the sport's best interest..

The ISU's new scoring system heads the list of poorly conceived proposals coming out of the congress.

The fuss over the scoring system began at the 1997 European Championships. In the men's competition, scoring of

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the event's final skater, Andrejs Vlascenko, broke an effective tie between Viacheslav Zagorodniuk and Philippe Candelo, who had already skated, and reversed their previous temporary placements in the medal standings. Candeloro took the silver and Zagorodniuk the bronze.

THERE WAS NOTHING MYSTERIOUS about the situation to those who realized a tie-breaker was involved. But many people who were not paying close attention to the scoring -- or who did not understand the way scores were combined to produce overall results -- were dumbfounded by the final standings.

Adding to the confusion, it seemed ISU officials did not even understand their own scoring system when asked to explain the final standings to the public. An embarrassed ISU president, Ottavio Cinquanta, immediately decreed that the scoring system must be changed. The adoption of the new system at last month's congress is the end result.

The problem is that in attempting to replace a scoring system perceived as overly complex and responsible for unjustified flip-flops in the standings, the ISU has adopted a new system that is even more complex, does not solve the flip-flop problem, and is more easily influenced by an individual judge's errors or deliberate attempts to manipulate results.

Is this progress?

The new scoring system -- known as the One-By-One (OBO) system -- requires each skater's marks to be compared pairwise to those of all other competitors. This system's shortcomings were well known to fans and others in the skating community for months before the ISU Congress. Results of numerous simulations of the new system had been widely distributed and discussed on the Internet -- and several problems were evident.

MEANWHILE, THE ISU'S OWN TECHNICAL committees performed only one test of the new system at a minor international competition last summer. Problems uncovered by that experiment were simply ignored when Cinquanta and the ISU council directed that OBO be placed on the ballot for this year's Congress over any and all objections by the technical committees.

Even now, after the system has been adopted, Cinquanta has been quoted as denying that flip-flops in the standings can occur under OBO.

"This existed for 50 years. It will exist no more," Cinquanta said. "If you are in front of me, you remain in front of me."

But even before the meeting in Stockholm, critics of OBO had already demonstrated how flip-flops can happen under the new system, so Cinquanta had no basis for his claim. Either Cinquanta has as little understanding of the new scoring system as he did of the old one or he is willfully ignoring the facts of the matter.

The OBO-related actions of the United States Figure Skating Association's delegation to the ISU congress are equally inexplicable. At the USFSA's annual meeting in May, the accountants -- the officials responsible for tabulating competition results -- presented their own strongly negative evaluation of OBO, and the Governing Council approved a recommendation that the U.S. representatives at the ISU congress "lobby against and vote against" OBO.

HOWEVER, AT THE MEETING IN Stockholm, the U.S. delegation did neither of these things.

Asked to explain why the USFSA's delegation at the ISU congress acted in direct opposition to the recommendation of its own officials and membership, past USFSA president Morry Stillwell, the de facto head of the U.S. delegation, claimed: "No one asked us to campaign against the issue. We did follow the instructions of the governing council."

Whatever the reasons for its adoption, the new scoring system can only be considered a bad thing for the sport of figure skating. It is inevitable that, at some future competition, the new scoring system will produce results that generate the kind of flip-flop in the standings this system was supposed to prevent.

How will Cinquanta and the ISU explain this away -- after all the show they have made of "fixing" the problem? The credibility of figure skating as a legitimate sport has already suffered because of charges of fixed judging in ice dance at the Olympic Games, and any further controversy involving the scoring system will only increase the public perception of corruption and incompetence among ISU officials and leadership.

OBO'S EXCESSIVE COMPLEXITY is also problematical. At skating competitions where the old scoring rules have been used, it has been fairly common to see spectators working out the results by hand and coming up with answers long before the official results are posted. But the new scoring system involves such lengthy calculations that hand computation is completely impractical.

When the outcome of a competition depends on obscure scoring procedures that cannot be readily explained or quickly verified by hand calculation, the credibility of the sport as a whole is bound to suffer.

Among those who follow figure skating closely, there is already a sense that the best interests of the sport are being betrayed by its leadership. The hope is that increased news coverage and a more educated body of fans will eventually force the ISU to clean up its act in the governance of the sport in much the same way that increased television coverage in the 1970s helped reduce the incidence of "dirty judging".