KYOTO, Japan -- Trying to dig itself out of one mess, figure skating nearly created another.

Asked to choose between three judging reform proposals Thursday, delegates at the International Skating Union congress dissolved into a dithering mess. At one point, they even considered going back to a system they tossed out four years ago.

Finally, after 2½ hours of meandering, the delegates stuck with what they know, approving a Canadian proposal that makes minor changes to the current system.

"At the end of the day, the logical process was followed and we came up with results," said Peter Rankin, vice president of Ice Skating Australia, which helped get the process moving when it withdrew its proposal in favor of Canada's.

The new plan will be in place for at least two years, when the ISU's radical reform plan is expected to be ready.

"The ISU has shown a proactive response to public opinion," ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta said. "This is proof the ISU has promptly reacted, and positively."

Unlike proposals from the United States and Australia, Canada's proposal doesn't modify the current scoring system. Instead, it expands the judging panel from nine to 14. Before each segment of a competition, a computer will pick nine judges whose scores will be used.

Technical and presentation marks will be added together to get ordinals or placements, just as in the current system. All 14 marks will be displayed on the scoreboard, but no one _ not even the judges _ will know whose marks were used.

A U.S. proposal that would have used the median mark, a statistical consensus among the judges, was defeated soundly. With a two-thirds majority needed, the Americans got 15 votes out of 50. Canada's plan received 39 votes.

An Australian proposal to drop the two highest and two lowest scores was withdrawn when the Australians decided to give their support to the Canadians.

"We would have preferred to see a clear attempt at some real change," said Phyllis Howard, president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association.

Actually, any clarity would have been nice. Despite having more than 24 hours from the time they heard presentations from the Americans, Australians and Canadians on Wednesday morning, the delegates had no clear idea what they were doing.

"Does anyone have a good idea how to handle these things?" Katsuichiro Hisanaga, the ISU's vice president of figure skating and chair of the session, asked as he opened discussion.

Some did, but it didn't do much good. Several people asked to break down the different ideas, deciding first on a calculation system and then going on to selection of the judges.

But the discussion and posturing dragged on.

"We are going around in ever-decreasing circles," Sally Stapleford, chair of the ISU's technical committee, said in exasperation after almost an hour.

"It was just awful," Donald McKnight, president of Ice Skating Australia, said afterward. "It was in complete shambles."

Seeing the discussion were going nowhere, McKnight began talks with the Canadians. Both wanted similar things -- 14 judges with the random selection of nine scores -- and McKnight saw delegates were resistant to changing the way scores were calculated.

So he withdrew Australia's proposal.

"It was a question of trying to expedite debate," he said. "We had to do something to get things moving."

That left the Canadian and the U.S. proposals. Despite several attempts at explanation, delegates seemed confused with what the U.S. idea -- the median mark -- would do to scoring.

And with implementation of the ISU proposal looming two years in the future, many were hesitant to make more drastic change.

"I don't think it would be a wrong signal to the public that we haven't done anything if we don't accept one of the other proposals. I think we've already made a decision," said Gerhardt Bubnik, the ISU's legal adviser.

"It is not absolutely necessary to adopt quick change just for one season. Then, when we're ready for the ISU system, we present the public with another big surprise."

The only surprise was how long it took to make so little a change. Delegates have vowed all week to take dramatic action to clean up figure skating in light of the Salt Lake City scandal.

French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne admitted she'd been pressured to "vote a certain way" when she put Russia's Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze first in Olympic pairs.

The International Olympic Committee even took the unprecedented move of awarding duplicate gold medals to Canada's Jamie Sale and David Pelletier.

Delegates started strong on the reform path Monday, voting to move forward with a radical project that would replace the traditional 6.0 mark with a points system.

But the plan is in its infancy, and needs further testing. So delegates vowed to do something for the interim.

"We could have come to a quicker result," Stapleford said. "We got a result and that was the main aim of the day, wasn't it?"