New York ? From the start of the Olympic figure skating scandal, the International Skating Union has steered clear of allegations of a conspiracy involving Russians.

Now that may be impossible.

In the aftermath of charges that as many as six judges might have been contacted by a reputed Russian mobster charged with fixing the pairs and ice dancing, the ISU will have to reopen a case it thought was closed.

“Everything needs to come out,” Sally Stapleford, a former high-ranking ISU official who was a key witness in the scandal, said Friday by telephone from Beijing, where she is attending a judging seminar.

“I would hope nobody’s going to turn a blind eye or bend to fear. I’m surprised that anybody can be surprised that the Russians were involved. That’s what was alleged all along, that this was a deal with the Russians. I feel completely vindicated by what has come out in the last few days.”

On the night the scandal broke in Salt Lake City, when the Russian pair Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze won by a 5-4 vote, Stapleford and other witnesses said they heard French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne’s emotional outburst alleging a deal involving the Russians.

Stapleford wrote a letter the next day to ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta, detailing what she had heard.

The following day, after Cinquanta held a news conference suggesting nothing was wrong, another witness, international judge Jon Jackson, wrote him a letter that supported Stapleford’s account.

Two days later, under pressure from International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge to move on, the ISU announced that duplicate gold medals would be awarded to the Canadian pair, Jamie Sale and David Pelletier.

Despite the letters from Stapleford and Jackson, plus a similar letter from referee Ron Pfenning, Cinquanta said there was no evidence of Russian influence on Le Gougne and nothing to suggest a vote-swapping deal involving the pairs and dance.

“That to me was an indication the man was covering for someone,” Jackson said Friday in a telephone interview from a skating event in Lake Placid, N.Y. “He didn’t want the investigation going into the Russians. Now I see him quoted today, again saying they had no evidence, that they couldn’t go forward. That’s simply not true.”

Cinquanta said Thursday he first learned of the alleged conspiracy on the news and had never heard of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, the alleged mobster accused of orchestrating the vote-swapping deal.

At the ISU hearing on Le Gougne in Lausanne, Switzerland, in late April, Jackson was asked specifically by the council about the part of his letter that quoted Le Gougne talking about Russian involvement in a vote-swapping plot.

“I said, ‘Yes, it was a quid pro quo,'” said Jackson, chairman of the international committee for the U.S. Figure Skating Association. “That testimony is all on the record.”

Stapleford and two other ISU technical committee members, Walburga Grimm of Germany and Britta Lindgren of Sweden, also testified that Le Gougne told them she voted for the Russians under pressure in a vote-swapping deal involving ice dancing.

But instead of questioning the ice dancing judges, other judges in the pairs, or any Russians who might have been part of a scheme, the ISU council focused solely on Le Gougne and French federation chief Didier Gailhaguet. Both were suspended for three years, plus the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Far from being chastened by the scandal, Russian skating officials gained power at the ISU Congress in Kyoto, Japan, in early June. Stapleford stepped down after 10 years as chair of the influential technical committee and was replaced by Russian Alexander Lakernik. As the nonvoting assistant referee in the pairs, Lakernik had favored the Russians, in effect supporting the five judges who put the Russians first.

“I knew the Russians wanted me out after Salt Lake,” Stapleford said. “I knew I had made powerful enemies who wanted to see my demise. One of the former Soviet Union general secretaries came up to me after I stepped down and said, ‘Sally, you didn’t have a chance. Sorry, you’re fighting the mafia.”‘