Norway has ended up in 6th place instead of 5th after the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) felt compelled to “correct the results” of last weekend’s final in the Eurovision song contest. The change also put Sweden ahead of Norway, if only slightly.
Voting tallies for Norway’s entry, Spirit in the Sky performed by the trio KEiiNO, changed after the EBU discovered it had erred in recalculating the votes of each partcipating country’s juries. The recalculation had been made after Belarus’ jury was disqualified because it had revealed how it had voted in the semi-final.
Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported Wednesday night that the EBU initially replaced Belarus’ jury result with a new result compiled from an average of points from other juries that traditionally vote like Belarus. That was later determined to be incorrect.
The EBU apologized for failing to discover the error until several days after the Eurovision final that was broadcast live to an estimated 200 million television viewers from Tel Aviv on Saturday night. The voting calcuation now determined to be correct didn’t change any of the results among the four top performances, but it meant that Sweden moved ahead of Norway by just three points, ending with 334 compared to Norway’s 331. That was enough to result in the two countries swapping places in their initial rankings. Results for a total of 20 other countries were also altered.
The Netherlands still won the song contest, with a total of 498 points, and Norway remains the winner of the popular vote determined by viewers. Alexandra Rotan of KEiiNO didn’t seem disturbed by the new final result for their song, which featured both the Northern Lights and Sami culture in Norway’s far northern Arctic areas.
“Whether we’re in fifth or sixth place doesn’t matter to us,” she said. “We’re celebrating how we won the votes from the people.” Fellow KEiiNO vocalist Tom Hugo agreed.
“We congratulate John Lundvik (Sweden’s singer) and are glad the mistake was corrected,” Hugo told NRK. “And who knows, since the jury system clearly can’t be fully relied upon, it may be that the EBU finds some other forgotten points for us and we’ll move up again.”
For a final rundown of Eurovision standings, and a link to KEiiNO’s performance at Eurovision, click to NRK’s website here (external link, in Norwegian).
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund
