During the men’s portion of the team figure skating event, Adam Rippon of the United States skated a clean program. OAR’s Mikhail Kolyada and Canada’s Patrick Chan both fell, but scored better than Rippon. My timeline on Twitter went nuts with conspiracy theories and complaints that Rippon was robbed.

Sorry, it’s not that nefarious. It’s actually by design from skating powers that be.

To understand it all, we have to take a trip back to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, when American Evan Lysacek won gold. The scoring at that time valued clean skating over innovation. Lysacek and his coach Frank Carroll worked the score sheet, taking advantage of 10 percent bonus given to jumps in the second half of the skate. What Lysacek didn’t do was try a quad.

Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko, who performed a quad toe in combination but whose skate wasn’t as clean, was livid. He won the silver medal, but complained that an Olympic champion should do a quad.

The skating world agreed that innovation was needed, and changes were made to the scoring system to reward skaters who tried different and new things. This gets us to today.

If a skater falls on a quad, technical judges take a close look. Did he land it before he fell? They also look closely at what a skater’s foot is doing on landings to make sure it is fully rotated when it lands. The reason quads are such a big deal is because they take so much time to perfect.

Falls are still penalized a point, and the grade of execution — a multiplier adding or subtracting based on how well an element is done — is still applied based on how a jump is done.

For right now, skating prizes innovation, and it’s been rewarded by an arms race of quadruple jumps. But after every Olympics, the International Skating Union will look at scoring and how it awards points. Who knows how we’ll be talking about scoring in 2022?