ARLES (France), Aug 5: French Olympic ice dance champion Marina Anissina acknowledged on Monday she knew the alleged mob figure at the centre of the Salt Lake City figure skating fixing claims.

But she said she had never discussed her Olympic victory with him and described the whole affair as “cooked up.”

French skating federation head Didier Gailhaguet also flatly denied an alleged deal to assure Anissina and partner Gwendal Peizerat ice dance victory in exchange for gold for a Russian couple in the pairs.

The pairs judging caused a furore that engulfed the Games in February after Russians Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, despite a flawed performance, were awarded gold ahead of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier of Canada.

The Canadian runners-up were then also given gold and the outcry resulted in three-year bans for French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne and for Gailhaguet.

Anissina, a Russian-born French citizen, said that she knew Uzbek-born Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, 53, who is now in jail in Venice after Italian police arrested him following U.S. charges that he schemed to fix the pairs and ice dance competitions.

“We spoke on the telephone now and then, but never about anything related to our Olympic victory,” she told a news conference in this southern French town.

“This affair is ridiculous,” she said. “I’m sure this has all been cooked up.”

Tokhtakhounov has denied all knowledge of any vote rigging, his lawyer said on Friday.

Gailhaguet said the fact that the Russian judge in the ice dancing competition voted against Anissina and Peizerat proved there was no quid pro quo involved.

“Where is the deal? How efficient was the ‘little Taiwanese’ Tokhtakhounov?” he asked derisively, using a nickname for the man described by Italian police as “the senior member of a money-laundering group”.

“There is no Franco-Russian axis, as some imbeciles say or write,” said Gailhaguet, who expressly asked journalists to quote him saying that.

The International Olympic Committee’s disciplinary chief Thomas Bach was quoted on Friday as saying sanctions could include wiping out the 2002 results.

Sikharulidze and Berezhnaya, who were present at the Arles news conference, threatened last Friday to sue U.S. television networks after their photographs were used in reports on Russian organised crime and Olympic fixing.

The Russian vice-president of the IOC, Vitaly Smirnov, said the evidence presented so far was too weak to prove any involvement by organised crime in skating at Salt Lake City.

Italian police arrested Tokhtakhounov at his seaside home last Wednesday. They said they had had him under surveillance for other reasons when discussion of the Olympics came up.

They say they have recordings of conversations between Tokhtakhounov and unidentified people in connection with his alleged part in a vote rigging scheme.

Copies of the recordings have been sent to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Meanwhile in Italy, Barbara Fusar Poli, who won the bronze medal at Salt Lake with partner Maurizio Margaglio, told Reuters by telephone: “My medal is clean. We did our event and I would be upset if they annulled it.—Reuters