THE ONLY SOLUTION: DUAL GOLD MEDALS.

Byline: PAUL OBERJUERGE

SALT LAKE CITY - This story was like a frayed sweater. Well, an ugly frayed sweater. There was one thread hanging loose from that sartorial eyesore, and when someone gave it a tug ... the whole thing fell apart.

What two nights before looked like a controversial decision, perhaps defensible within the odd value system of figure skating, by late Wednesday had morphed into a full-blown scandal, one that preoccupied the media here and threatened to overwhelm the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Games.

What were rumors of wrongdoing in the judging of the pairs competition in ice skating ... turned into a confirmation late Wednesday by the president of the French ice sports federation.

Didier Gailhaguet said judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne felt pressured to vote for the Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze in the pairs competition. And it turned out that hers was the decisive vote in a 5-4 breakdown among the nine-judge panel, touching off a firestorm of criticism that the Canadian pair of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier didn't get the gold. As they should have, it now is clear.

That, friends, is a disaster of Olympian dimensions, and one big black eye for the sport of ice skating, the most popular discipline in the Winter Games - but also the one most susceptible to corruption and back-room deals.

By Tuesday night, the pairs voting was being called Skategate, and the way the story played out was like Watergate on fast-forward.

Early Wednesday, International Skating Union president Ottavio Cinquanta was conceding he couldn't guarantee the pairs voting was on the up and up but doubted any wrongdoing by his judges.

He was on the defensive throughout an 80-minute news conference, during which he was practically verbally lynched by reporters. But it didn't seem to shake him. Basically, Cinquanta played the bureaucrat card: He and the ISU would look into it, next Monday, and it was the ISU's business and no one else's.

The Canadians, meanwhile, were doing some Olympic news-conference- watching on television (the sport of choice Wednesday), and they saw red, and not just their team color. After Cinquanta finished, they got a delegation of officials together and called their own news conference.

Canadian Olympic Association president Michael Chambers reiterated Canada's call for an independent investigation of ISU judging, and Skate Canada said it would appeal the pairs outcome. And they were ticked; as ticked as Canadians get, that is.

At this point, everyone knew whom everyone was talking about: Marie- Reine Le Gougne, whose vote was under suspicion from the start via the prodigious skate-world rumor mill.

But no one would name her, because at mid-day Wednesday it was still a ``he said, she said'' situation. According to Cinquanta, who used no names, Le Gougne denied saying what American referee Ron Pfenning said she told him: That she felt as if she had to vote for the Russians.

There it sat. For a few hours. Until Jacques Rogge, new president of the International Olympic Committee, got tired of seeing and hearing about nothing but the pairs skating story.

Sometime in late afternoon, Rogge went to Cinquanta, and the boss was not happy. He told Cinquanta the ISU couldn't wait until Monday to deal with the situation; it had to deal with it now. And Rogge apparently really got Cinquanta's attention by suggesting the ice-dancing competition, scheduled to begin Friday, be postponed until the ISU got to the bottom of the pairs fiasco.

A bit later came the French team owning up to its judge doing the wrong thing, but suggesting she is emotionally fragile. (The basis of an insanity plea, perhaps?)

So where are we, as we go to press Wednesday night? We have a judge who violated her oath to judge fairly, but we don't know why. In return for future favors from the Russians, perhaps, in ice dancing? In annoyance at the Canadians for voting against the French in the past?

We have allegations that outside individuals pressured Le Gougne to vote for the Russians, but we don't yet know who those outside individuals might be. Or whether they exist.

What we do know is this: Canada's pairs team should have won a gold medal, and that needs to be fixed, pronto.

We would expect an IOC news conference today declaring two gold-medalist teams in the pairs competition. The Russians should be able to keep their gold; there is no evidence they had anything to do with Le Gougne's vote, and it would be cruel to make them hand back a gold medal they believe they deserve.

Sale and Pelletier, however, need their silvers replaced by gold. Then the long-overdue investigation of judging in the sport of figure skating can commence.