With an overall score of 224.59 points, seventeen-year-old
Adelina Sotnikova became one of the youngest figure-skating Olympic champions, edging out silver-medalist and defending-champion
Yuna Kim and bronze-medalist
Carolina Kostner. After the short program, Kim was in first place, .28 points ahead of Sotnikova. spurred in part by the composition of the judging panel, which included judges from four former Soviet bloc nations, including Russia. The Russian judge,
Alla Shekhovtsova, was one of several people Sotnikova embraced prior to the flower ceremony. That petition attracted a million signatures faster than any previous Change.org petition; at one point, it was attracting 100,000 new signatures every 15 minutes, with 90% of signatures coming from inside Korea. Four-time men's champion
Kurt Browning said that "Yuna Kim outskated [Sotnikova], but it's not just a skating competition anymore—it's math." And
Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic champion, said that, while Sotnikova's skating was not as aesthetically pleasing as Kim's, her athletic style "check[ed] off every box" and "d[id] everything the judges are looking for." Two-time bronze medalist
Michael Weiss attributed Sotnikova's scores to "home-field inflation." But three-time world champion and two-time Olympic silver medalist
Elvis Stojko said that the result "was totally fair," as "Kim didn't have enough technical ammunition."
Official responses On 21 February 2014, the
International Skating Union (ISU) issued a statement which asserted all rules and procedures were applied during the competition and declared confidence "in the high quality and integrity of the ISU judging system", noting "judges were selected by random drawing from a pool of 13 potential judges" and that all nine judges on the free skating panel were from different nations. On 10 April, the
Korean Olympic Committee (KOC) and the Korean Skating Union (KSU) filed an official complaint with the ISU Disciplinary Commission (DC) concerning judging. The complaint was regarding "the wrongful constitution of the panel of judges and the unjust outcome of the competition". It requested that the DC conduct a thorough investigation, "take appropriate disciplinary actions against the concerned individuals", and institute corrective actions. On 14 April, the DC ruled the complaint inadmissible because a general request for investigation is not within DC's jurisdiction and the complaint was not addressed at an individual or federation as required. On 30 April, the KOC and KSU filed a second official complaint with the DC. This time the complaint was against Russian judge
Alla Shekhovtsova and the
Figure Skating Federation of Russia (FSFR), specifically citing a hug Shekhovtsova shared with Sotnikova and Shekhovtsova's marriage to the current Director General of the FSFR. On 30 May, the DC dismissed the complaint. It ruled Shekhovtsova "is not responsible for the judging panel's composition", her marriage did not create a conflict of interest, and, since Sotnikova initiated the hug, Shekhovtsova did not break any rules by responding. ==Records==