Are judges able to "rank" skaters while they are judging?

I'm not sure John Curry's R and J was the one Toller skated in. Toller skated in a televised production that featured I think Brian Pockar (a Canadian skater from the eighties) as Romeo. Toller was a splendid Tybalt. Dorothy Hamill may have been in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=032DwlgcNHo


The ballet movie I was referring to, Joe, was a very old filming of a Bolshoi Ballet production featuring Galina Ulanova as Juliet. You would love it; it's from the first great internationally available era of the Bolshoi, before Maya Plisetskaya. This could be it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq7-4QBfadY

Olympia said:

I'm not sure John Curry's R and J was the one Toller skated in. Toller skated in a televised production that featured I think Brian Pockar (a Canadian skater from the eighties) as Romeo. Toller was a splendid Tybalt. Dorothy Hamill may have been in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=032DwlgcNHo

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Actually, Toller also skated to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet but I believe John Curry used different sections of the suite.

Thanks, Evangeline. I couldn't remember Curry's--maybe it wasn't televised?--but I'll never forget the one Toller was in. Thank goodness some of it at least is on YouTube. What a treat. Toller's like Kurt and Janet Lynn: another example of a skater so good that he didn't need a world gold to validate it. You could watch him today and still be mesmerized by his freshness and technique, despite the fact that jumps have advanced.

Olympia said:

Thanks, Evangeline. I couldn't remember Curry's--maybe it wasn't televised?--but I'll never forget the one Toller was in. Thank goodness some of it at least is on YouTube. What a treat. Toller's like Kurt and Janet Lynn: another example of a skater so good that he didn't need a world gold to validate it. You could watch him today and still be mesmerized by his freshness and technique, despite the fact that jumps have advanced.

Click to expand...

It is true jumps have advanced since Toller.
But when I watch Toller skate I get the feeling other things may have regressed. He had beautiful edges and superior balance and his posture and stretch appears to outclass most of today's skaters.

Very few Men in skating history seemed as enjoyable for me to watch as Toller. He was inventive and maybe it is best he was from an earlier era. The CoP would have stifled his creativity which is what set him apart.

After watching the Vancouver Olympics he said, "I watched with shock and awe and horror. I find the new marking system to be stupendously flawed -- as political and as inaccurate as the former one."

I tend to ignore Toller in what he says just because he's so off on his opinions of Kurt's skating most of the time that he must be off on everything