It is the biggest controversy in Olympic figure skating since the unique and still largely mystifying disturbance of the force at the Salt Lake City Winter Games 20 years ago - an occurrence that was also of pressing importance to Russia.

Valieva's case relates to a doping infraction - under challenge tomorrow will be the decision of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) to lift Valieva's provisional doping suspension on February 9, the day after it was imposed following analysis of a sample provided by her on December 25 at the Russian Figure Skating Championships.

In contrast, the Great Salt Lake Perturbation had to do with the judging of the pairs competition.

Uniquely, the furore ended with a second gold medal being awarded to the Canadian pairing of Jamie Salé and David Pelletier after they had taken silver behind Russia's Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

Exactly why this happened is still not clear and is likely never to be so. But at least the sequence of events on the ice is not disputed…

The Russian pair arrived for the deciding long programme in marginal first place after Salé and Pelletier had concluded a smooth short-programme performance with a slip that sent them both down to the ice in the last seconds of their showing, after they had arrived in their final pose.

There was further drama before the long programme, commanding the majority of the marks, got underway when a collision with Sikharulidze during the warm-up knocked Salé down and left her dazed for almost a minute.

The Russians skated beautifully within a painstakingly choreographed routine to Méditation from Thaïs, but there were one or two technical flaws, including Sikharulidze failing to land a double Axel.

Marks for technical merit were duly diminished, but their marks for artistic presentation were excellent, with seven of the nine judges giving them 5.9 out of a possible 6.00.

The Canadians then performed almost flawlessly in an eye-catching routine entitled Love Story which told the tale of two college students falling in love and then suffering tragedy, provoking rapturous applause from the almost-home crowd, some of whom began chanting: "Six! Six! Six!"

The feeling in the arena, at least, was that the Russians' long run of success in this event, which no pair outside the Soviet Union, Unified Team and later Russia had won since 1960, had come to an end.

But the cheers turned to boos and catcalls when the scores showed the Russian pair had earned gold on a 5-4 verdict, with Salé and Pelletier earning only four 5.9s for their presentation.

Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze gained the nod from representatives of their own nation, China, Poland, Ukraine and France; judges from the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan gave the event to the Canadians.

It was a split along political and geographical lines that was not unexpected - but with France, in some people’s eyes, effectively deciding the contest.

Canadian officials immediately demanded that the International Skating Union (ISU) should launch an investigation over the "unfair" judging.

Rumours beginning to circulate that there had been some kind of agreement between the Russian and French judges whereby the Russians would reciprocate by voting for the French pair in the ice dance.

Another theory spun in the immediate aftermath of the pairs competition was that the French judge involved, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, may have inclined towards the Russian pairing in order to garner support in her bid to join the ISU’s influential Technical Committee in the forthcoming elections.

Le Gougne had won the French junior title before turning to judging events at the age of 20, becoming an international officiator in 1987 and establishing herself as a respected, ambitious figure in the sport. Shortly before competition got underway in Salt Lake City she had described the skating world as being corrupt and in need of a major overhaul.

While the irate Canadians pressed their case, the ISU President Ottavio Cinquanta, who had been first elected in 1994, tried to minimise the controversy. "I have an allegation and a denial," he said. "Of course I am embarrassed. But I can tell you that I do not think to be in the presence of scandal."

Soon, however, Cinquanta had to think again.

After being questioned when she returned to the officials' hotel by Britain’s chair of the ISU Technical Committee, Sally Stapleford, Le Gougne reportedly had an emotional breakdown.

She alleged she had been pressured to vote for the Russian pair as part of an arrangement to help French couple Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat in the subsequent ice dance competition - which they went on to win, with Russia taking the silver.

Le Gougne reportedly repeated this at a post-event judges' meeting the next day.

But Le Gougne told the French press that she was not, as was originally reported, pressured by her own federation into voting for the Russians. She alleged that Stapleford had criticised her for giving her vote to the Russians and had told her to blame her own federation for influencing her vote.

In response, Stapleford denied she had said any such thing.

"What she has said is totally unfounded," the Briton said. "These allegations hurt, but the woman is obviously emotionally distressed. She changes her story every day so I think most people know what to make of it. She is living in a fantasy world."

Forty-eight hours after the final, Didier Gailhaguet, head of the French Ice Skating Federation and also of the Olympic delegation, acknowledged that Le Gougne had been "somewhat manipulated", adding: "Some people close to the judge have acted badly and have put someone who is honest and upright but emotionally fragile under pressure… What is true is that Marie-Reine has been put under pressure, which pushed her to act in a certain way."

In a later signed statement, however, Le Gougne denied taking part in any deal and added that she believed the Russian pair deserved their win and that the Canadians had pressurised her to make her initial claim.

The ISU did initiate an investigation - but only into the actions of Le Gougne and Gailhuguet, both of whom were subsequently suspended from the sport for three years despite no proof ever emerging of wrongdoing.

In the midst of this confusion, Cinquanta produced a performance at a press conference that has gone down in Olympic history for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps the key quote from the President whose background was in speed skating rather than figure skating was this: "I don’t know figure skating so well."

He then disclosed that the event referee, Ronald Pfenning, had filed an official complaint about the judging.

The Italian's performance in response to the question of whether the gold would go to the Canadians if cheating were shown to have taken place also failed to cover him in glory. Cinquanta's first response was to say no. Then he said, "It's almost unheard of that this would be done." And, finally: "In the ISU regulations, it's not printed that a result cannot be changed."

The outcry continued, however. And two days after he had ruled out the idea of re-awarding the gold Cinquanta sat alongside the newly-elected and seriously perturbed International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge at a press conference in order to make a unique and arresting announcement.

Salé and Pelletier’s medals would be upgraded to gold, with the Russians keeping theirs as there was no evidence of them having done anything wrong and four of the other eight judges on the panel had marked them ahead.

It was one of the most extraordinary press conferences that those of us who were present had ever attended.

"We are happy that justice was done, and it doesn't take anything away from Anton and Elena," Pelletier said.

Cinquanta explained that the ISU Council had judged that Le Gougne had acted "in a way that was not adequate to guarantee both pairs equal conditions". But he refused to comment on whether she had come under pressure to favour the Russian pair.

Rogge, presiding over his first Olympics, confirmed that the ISU's proposal to enact a suspension of the French officials and to award an extra gold had been approved at an IOC Executive Council meeting by a vote of seven to one, with one abstention.

"This was based absolutely on the Charter and the regulations of the IOC," Rogge said. "This is not the first time the IOC has taken a similar decision.

"I don’t think this has damaged the Movement. We have acted swiftly on behalf of justice and fairness to the athletes and this is definitely a closed matter."

But it definitely wasn't. The Russians were furious.

The head of the Russian Figure Skating Federation, Valentin Piseyev, commented: "This is an unprecedented decision that turned out to be a result of pressure by the North American press, and turned out in favour of the fanatically loyal [North American] fans."

Russian Olympic Committee member Rudolf Nezvegsky added: "By doing this, they just struck a huge blow not only to the Olympic spirit of competition, but also to the whole nature of sport."

While Rogge claimed that the action taken was not unprecedented his position did not appear to be matched by the facts. Although Olympic medals had been re-awarded on three previous occasions, all involved miscalculations or mistakes.

The most recent example had occurred at Barcelona 1992 Barcelona, where an additional gold was belatedly awarded to a Canadian synchronised swimmer who had been given silver because of a mistake made by one of the judges in inputting their result. The IOC double award was thus, in truth, an uneasy precedent.

The mystery deepened later in the year. On July 31, a Russian organised crime boss was arrested by Italian authorities in Venice on US charges that he had masterminded fixing of the figure skating results in Salt Lake, but he was released from custody without being charged as preparations were being made to have him extradited to the US.

Meanwhile the French were left with a keen sense that they had conveniently shouldered the blame for something of wider involvement. As one insider later observed, enigmatically: "We were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

In 2003, Le Gougne’s warning about the nature of the skating world appeared to have been borne out as a group of top skating officials, including Stapleford and Pfenning, expressed dissatisfaction with the way the ISU was being run and announced the formation of the World Skating Federation as a rival organisation.

The move was strongly resisted by the ISU, which warned skaters not to associate with the new organisation, and those behind the breakaway were subsequently banished from the sport.

In the meantime, the ISU were accelerating a process they had been considering before the 2002 scandal, namely a revision of the judging system which involved a greater emphasis on technical correctness and, critically, did not show how the votes had gone.

This switch to" secret voting" was championed by Cinquanta as freeing judges from potential pressure. The opposing argument was made at the time that this could also have the reverse effect, preventing the public and media from being able to identify any suspicious judging marks.

Secret voting - known as the International Judging System or Code of Points, was first employed at the 2003 World Championships in Washington, DC, during which Cinquanta was relentlessly booed for his unpopular new system and the way in which he had handled the previous year's scandal.

Judging of figure skating has always been a strange and complex business. Politics and implicit understandings, geopolitical loyalties have been intrinsic to it. And ultimately it is a flawed concept in that it is always measuring apples against oranges - technical excellence and artistic impression.

As David Wallechinsky points out in The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics, the weeks preceding the Salt Lake City Games had seen the Russian and Canadian pairs tweaking their routines in the endlessly tantalising process of trying to figure out what the figure skating judges really wanted.

The Russians had tried to jazz things up - the Canadians had tried to get a bit more classical. In the end, as has happened so often in Olympic figure skating, the judges were faced with two pairs offering excellent expositions of different approaches.

On the day of the second medal ceremony the New York Times published a report analysing the judging of the pairs competition showing that the now-banned Le Gougne had been more consistent in her marking than the rest of the judging panel.

Under a system that compared judges' marks with the overall result, the French judge scored better than any other, with the Canadian and American judges performing worse than all except the representative from Japan.

After receiving their belated golds, the Canadian pair had presented their Russian counterparts with gifts of blown glass hearts wrapped in gold. "The case is solved for us," said Pelletier. "The case is not solved for skating."