I have mixed feelings about this. After much consideration, I disagree with Canadaâs premise.
For those of you who have forgotten Canadaâs situation:
Each short program is scored and the top-scoring country in each category (dance, pairs, menâs, and womenâs) gets 10 points, second place country gets 9 points, etc., down to 1 point for the last place team.
The top 5 teams go on to skate their long programs earning a ranking of 10, 9, 8, 7, or 6 in each event.
Top score wins. Then thereâs tiebreakers.
As originally posted, after the short program the rankings were:
- ROC: 36
- USA: 34
- Japan: 29
- Canada: 24
- China: 22 +tiebreaker over Georgia
- Georgia: 22
- Italy: 20
[3 more countries that were under 20]
So ROC, USA, Japan, Canada, and China advanced and everyone else was done.
After the long program the scores were:
- ROC: 74
- USA: 65
- Japan: 63
- Canada: 53
- China: 50
THEN they decided that ROCâs woman, Kamila Valieva (who skated both the short and the long program⌠they are allowed to switch skaters, but they didnât), was DQâd. She was the top woman skater in both events, earning two scores of 10.
What the IOC decided to do was to erase Valievaâs two 10âs, thus decreasing ROCâs score from 74 to 54, putting them in bronze medal position, with Valieva ineligible for a medal. (Itâs crazy that they were SO dominant that even scoring two 0âs they still medaled.)
So:
- USA: 65
- Japan: 63
- ROC: 54
- Canada: 53
- China: 50
Now if Canada had argued that ROC went forth with an ineligible competitor (whom they absolutely should have known was ineligible) and therefore the whole team should be disqualified⌠I think theyâd have a point. Especially because we are NOT talking about Russia⌠weâre talking about ROC. Why ROC and not Russia? Oh, because theyâve been caught cheating too many times before the 2022 Olympics. It might be reasonable to say that if you canât even compete as a country because of past doping scandals then youâre on an extra short leash.
If a member of ROCâs hockey team used a banned substance I think that knocks out the entire team. But figure skating is not ice hockey and it IS possible to segregate the results, so at that point itâs a question of how much you want to punish the whole team for one ineligible player. Reasonable people can disagree here whether the whole team should be DQâd or just the one skater. I tend to think they should crack down on doping and DQing the whole team (from the team event) for one ineligible skater sends a stronger message. I actually think they shouldnât have even been allowed to compete at the Tokyo Olympics at all.
But that wasnât Canadaâs argument (and they may well have lost it if it were). Canadaâs actual argument was that after turning Valievaâs two 10s into 0s⌠they should have ALSO bumped up the scores of all of the other finalist teams two more points (since every woman finished behind ROC⌠twice. Each would have earned one more point for her country had Valieva simply not skated and no other athlete skated in her place.)
Thus following Canadian logic weâd have:
- USA: 67
- Japan: 65
- Canada: 55
- ROC: 54
- China 52
Canada would get the bronze in this scenario, ahead of ROC.
But I think at this point you have to start thinking about what this re-ranking would hypothetically mean were the math slightly different.
This line of argument essentially says âweâre going to pretend the ineligible skater didnât skateâ.
Well in this particular case ROC still would have scored 26 after the short program and Georgia still wouldnât have been eligible to skate the long program. But with slightly different placements, such an argument easily could have meant that Georgia would have qualified for the long program (and a chance to medal). What about them? You canât really go back in time and have their teams skate a long program two years after the fact.
If instead of ROCâs woman, it had been any of Chinaâs skaters that were subsequently DQâd, that would have pushed Georgia into qualifying for the long program.
I just donât think that thereâs a way to retrospectively follow that argument to a logical conclusion. 
So in the end, I think itâs a travesty that 1) ROC was even allowed to participate in the first place and 2) didnât have their whole figure skating team wiped from the team event once Valievaâs doping surfaced. But once the decision was made to keep them in the team competition⌠I think they were rightly placed in 3rd, not 4th.