A Chinese ice skating judge banned for his 'obvious' pro-China bias at the last Winter Olympics is helping with judging at Beijing 2022

• Chinese ice skating judge Huang Feng was banned for one year after Pyeongchang 2018.
• He was found guilty of "obvious and systematic bias" towards Chinese skaters.

A Chinese ice skating judge who was previously banned for unfairly favoring his own country's athletes is currently serving on a technical judging panel at the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Huang Feng was one of two Chinese judges who were suspended by the International Skating Union (ISU) after being found guilty of bias during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018.

While his countryman Chen Weiguang was handed a two-year ban and excluded from judging at Beijing 2022, Huang was given just a one-year suspension and allowed to return for the 2022 games.

At the Beijing Games, Huang is working as a technical controller, an official who supervises technical specialists who decide the difficulty of skating moves and how they should be scored.

Though he does not directly provide scores, he can propose corrections regarding the level of difficulty identified for a given element.

So far in Beijing, he has served as the technical controller for the men's single skating event and for part of the team event.

China did not compete in the men's single skating event, which was won by the United States' Nathan Chen, while it finished fifth in the team event, which was won by the Russian Olympic Committee.

In Pyeongchang, Huang was found to have shown "obvious and systematic bias" at the pairs figure skating event.

In that event, Chinese duo Sui Wenjing and Han Cong won the silver medal, with Feng playing a major part in their success, giving them excessively high scores while lowering the scores of their competitors.

An investigation by the ISU showed that Huang awarded the Chinese pairs team a score of plus three in seven different elements, which none of the other judges did. At the same time, he gave the team's rivals, the German couple of Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot, the lowest score of all the judges.

"The alleged offender [Huang] has committed one of the most serious ethical offences a judge can be accused of," said the ISU in its verdict.

"The seriousness of his misconduct is aggravated by the fact that it was committed at the Olympic Winter Games, the doubtlessly most important and prestigious competition that exists in Figure Skating."

Canadian pairs skaters Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford were among those effected by Huang's bias as they finished third behind the Chinese pair.

Duhamel hit out at Huang's inclusion in Beijing.

"You should not be allowed to be suspended, and your reward is working the next Olympics," Duhamel, who retired after Pyeongchang, told Reuters in January.

"We as a sport have been trying to clear those people out, not welcome them back in."