Cheating can be applied to many circumstances, but in all cases, cheating hurts people.

Cheating on a test hurts cheaters because they’re cheating themselves out of an education as well as hurting the rest of the students. Cheating on a significant other has its obvious repercussions. And cheating on scoring an athletic event also hurts more than one individual.

In the case of Skategate, as the controversy over originally awarding the figure skating pairs Olympic gold medal to Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze over Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier is being called, the athletes were hurt, the judge hurt her reputation and the image of skating in general was hurt.

The French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne admitted to being under pressure to judge a certain way in the figure skating pairs competition. As the allegations go, she placed the Russian pair first, so later the French would win the gold in the ice dancing competition.

The story is fuzzy and changes every now and then, and investigations are still ongoing, looking into competitions as far back as November.

The newest twist is Le Gougne claims she was pressured to vote for the Canadians but couldn’t do that. In a sense, she fought the pressure and called it as she saw it, awarding the Russians the gold over the Canadians fair and square.

Give me a break!

It’s nice to think if someone was expected to cheat, that individual would realize the wrongness of cheating before doing it and would therefore do the right thing instead. In this situation, however, that’s a little hard to believe.

The competition was close, and it could be possible the French judge really thought the Russians earned the gold. Four other judges did. But her actions are questionable.

If another judge had been in her place, the result would have been different. Ten judges make up the judging panel in figure skating, but only nine of the scores are announced to the public and are counted.

The pairs gold medal was decided based on a 5-4 victory for the Russians. While the French judge in question gave first to the Russians, the substitute judge, Jarmila Portova of the Czech Republic, placed Sale and Pelletier above Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze.

Do the right thing. It’s something everyone has heard a million times, and it seems so simple. But people make choices all the time that go against this so-called principle.

If any judge favors a competitor, that person is doing something wrong. If federations or a country pressured a judge to place competitors a certain way, they were doing something worng.

Controversy isn’t new to figure skating. Ideas of radically changing the scoring system have been floating around – ideas of using cumulative system instead of the traditional 6.0 or lower marks, of adding points for successful jumps and having more judges but not counting all of the judges’ marks.

Maybe skating scoring does need to be re-evaluated, and some of these ideas really couldwork better than the scoring system now, but would any solution really solve the problem? The real problem is ethics. The real problem is people don’t always chose right over wrong.

In an ideal world, people wouldn’t cheat and controversy wouldn’t exist. In an ideal world, Sale and Pelletier might have been awarded the gold medal six days before they did.

But also, cheaters never prosper. The International Skating Union said Le Gougne was suspended indefinitely for misconduct after she acknowledged she was pressured to vote for Russian pair.

And sometimes things do work out for the best. Sale and Pelletier got their gold medal and won the affection of all who saw them skate.

It’s just sad they had to go through the scandal, and it’s sad for figure skating. Skategate gave skating more of a negative image. If it happens once, it could happen again, and it may not end happily then.

As Pelletier was quoted as saying in Monday’s edition of the USA Today, “The case is solved for us. The case is not solved for skating.”