South Korea protesting women's figure skating result

Adding another chapter to figure skating's long history of controversy, the South Korean Olympic Committee says it is protesting the results of the women's free skate, accusing the judges of bias towards Russian gold medalist Adelina Sotnikova.

2010 gold medalist Yuna Kim appeared on track for a second Olympic victory, but finished with a silver medal behind Sotnikova, who earned surprisingly high artistic marks and nearly perfect technical scores despite stumbling during her routine.

The International Skating Union has yet to receive South Korea's letter of protest, and rules require protests to be filed immediately following events. IOC spokesman Mark Adams says the matter is up to the ISU.

"They have their processes and regulations," Adams said. "From what I understand the letter wouldn't trigger any investigation."

The ISU issued a boilerplate statement on Friday defending the integrity of its judging system, but according to former Olympic figure skating champion Scott Hamilton, the problem lies with how judges are selected internally:

"What happened in Salt Lake City resulted in this scoring system not treating the issue. Every sport out there has an affiliated association of officials. They are separate from the federation, and figure skating is hesitant to do that. It is a fundamental issue that leads to people having a hard time taking the results as the results."