The Televote Winner Who Wasn't

MAY 15 2016 · 12:40

Sergey Lazarev · "You Are the Only One" · Russia · 2016 Placement: 3rd · Language: English · Composers: Philipp Kirkorov, Dimitris Kontopoulos, John Ballard, Ralph Charlie · Venue: Globe Arena · Host: Stockholm, Sweden · Type: rivalry · Broadcast: HD On the night of 14 May 2016 at Stockholm's Globe Arena, a thirty-three-year-old Russian pop star who had been a betting favorite for months climbed a digital wall that appeared to be part of the stage itself, sang a four-on-the-floor European pop song built by a Greek-Russian-Swedish songwriting team, and for twenty minutes looked like he was going to win Eurovision. Sergey Lazarev had been Russia's obvious choice — a Channel One-approved mainstream artist with a Kirkorov-produced song written for maximum televote appeal. The staging was among the most technically ambitious of the decade: Lazarev performed against a projection-mapped wall that created the illusion he was climbing a building, stepping into a butterfly-filled room, emerging onto a cloudscape. The performance ended to the loudest in-arena reaction of the night. When the televote began rolling in, Russia led — by a large margin, for a long time. Jamala's Ukrainian entry was gaining steadily but not as fast. In the old pre-2016 combined-scoring system, Lazarev would likely have won. But 2016 was the first year juries and televotes were revealed separately; the jury had placed Russia fifth. The combined math delivered the win to Ukraine, the runner-up slot to Australia, and Russia into third place — a result Russian state broadcasters and Kirkorov publicly disputed for weeks afterward. Russia's televote win, submerged inside the new structure, became the first test case of how the modern scoring system would be read. Context 2016 sat at a particular Russia-Ukraine inflection. Crimea had been annexed in 2014; the Donbas war was ongoing; Jamala's '1944,' about the Stalin-era deportation of Crimean Tatars, was legible to every delegation as a direct reference to contemporary Russian policy. The EBU had formally ruled the song compliant with Eurovision's no-politics rules, but the political frame could not be ignored. Lazarev's campaign had been long, Western-charm-offensive in shape, and explicitly positioned as an attempt to restore Russia's public image inside Eurovision's soft-power theatre. The split-scoring reform that year had been designed partly to reduce regional bloc voting — which, in effect, structurally limited the kind of televote runaway Russia was positioned to produce. Legacy Lazarev returned to Eurovision in 2019 with 'Scream,' placed third again, and remains one of the most-decorated Russian Eurovision entrants in history. His 2016 staging is still studied — the digital-wall illusion has been quoted in several subsequent productions. The split-scoring system has remained. Russia's Eurovision participation was suspended after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and, as of the 2025 contest, the country has not returned. 'You Are the Only One' and '1944' have become paired case-studies in how the modern scoring system structures political outcomes. Mythology Russia's 2016 result is often misremembered as a televote loss — Russia actually placed first on televote that night. It is also sometimes described as a politically-engineered third-place finish; the arithmetic is verifiable and the jury-televote split is the straightforward explanation. Lazarev is occasionally misidentified as a newcomer; he had been a major Russian pop star for over a decade before 2016.