Judging the "Old-Fashioned" Way

[Spun Silver]

I agree that my first point -- it seems more exciting to see 5.8 than to see 123.62 -- does not have any rational basis. It is just how it styrikes me.

I don't think it's irrational. In the old system, you have the idea of perfection (6.0, or 10.0 in gymnastics) and the visceral thrill that the audience felt when perfection was achieved. In the CoP you just have numbers, numbers, and more numbers. I think those are existentially two utterly different systems... one is Platonic with its ideal of perfection, only skaters occasionally actually manage to reach the ideal -- how magnificent, how amazing! In the other there is (at least hypothetically) an infinite, ultimately pointless and hence dreary, increase in numerical points. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." (Pascal)

[gkelly]

To me, 6.0 programs had the potential for that kind of excitement. "Michelle has been perfect so far, now here comes her second triple Lutz. This will determine the championship. Yes!!! First rate! Final split jump, celebratory Y-spin, it's raining teddy bears!" (Any sport where you can't say "it's raining teddy bears" is not a real sport, if you ask me. )

But what if the commentators say all of the above, and the teddy bears do rain, and the Michelle fans are celebrating . . . and then the scores come up

. . . 5.9 5.8 5.9 6.0 5.9
1 2 2 1 2

and she goes into second place behind a performance that the commentator was less enthusiastic about?

At that point, your only source of satisfaction is to enjoy the outrage that your favorite was done wrong. But you have to wait for the commentator to calm down and take off their partisan hat and try to look at the performances more objectively to try to guess what the judges who preferred the other skater might have been thinking. Or they might wallow in their own bias enough to stoke the wuzrobbed fires with guesses related only to nationality and conspiracy theories and not subtle skating details. Either way, we can guess but we'll never have a real clue whether the judges who preferred the other skater were rewarding nationality or style or speed or bigger or harder jumps or pure lutz takeoffs or clockwise turns.

The commentators who tended to get the most excited and whip up enthusiasm for favorites also tended to be the most biased and potentially misleading.

Also, in your scenario sometimes the commentators know after the short program that your favorite needed help to come from behind and can gush over a perfect skate that deservedly takes first place in the free, but they can prepare you for the fact that winning the freeskate won't necessarily be enough to take the title. And then you have to sit back and watch the last skater, who may be someone whose skating bores you completely and/or who had no mathematical chance of winning gold or silver, and root hard for her to come exactly second in the free so the places of the previous skaters will switch due to factored placements. That was a common scenario in 6.0 and often anticlimactic.

Not to mention the very uncommon but bewildering when it happened situation where the standings of two previous skaters in the program you just watched (short or free) flipflopped due to mixed ordinals after a later skater mixes up the ordinals even further.

In IJS, often the score reporting for the long program will say the skater needs X points to win . . . oh, too bad, she didn't get it, she goes into second place . . . without telling you whether the score she got put her in first or fifth just for the freeskate.

In both systems I think the reporting of standings in the arena and by the TV commentators could usually do a better job of distinguishing each skater's placement in the long program as well as overall, which would do a lot to clarify the situations where skaters win the freeskate but not the competition, especially for fans who didn't see the short program or don't understand the details of the scoring system in use.

Michelle always made the final ten seconds of her programs seem like she was scoring from first on a ball hit in the right-field corner. "Here comes the throw! She slides!! (Or lunges. Or makes a shadow crocodile .)

So it sounds like you miss Michelle more than you miss the scoring system she skated under.

I have no doubt that if her career had overlapped with the new scoring system by several years instead of one event, you would have had some exciting moments watching her win (or not) under IJS, and your emotional connection to the new system would have been different.

[janetfan]

and it makes awesome sporting news that patrick chan of canada smashes 3 world records in winning his figure skating world championship! He even got voted athlete of the month.

Now try to do that with 6.0 and create some excitement and respect. He would be just another wimp so far from a 10. What a sissy "sport". Yawn.

NADIA PERFECT!

That was the headline that made worldwide sporting news at the '76 Olympics.

There was no such headline about Patrick here last season as Worlds received minimal print and no Live TV coverage.


Had Yuna skated under 6.0 in Vancouver she would have scored a bunch of 6.0's and she would also have made big sporting news in USA.

Korea's Perfect Girl Sets New Olympic Standard


The media does not get much help with the new scoring system in gymnastics or skating.
And both sports are struggling and not nearly as popular as they were in the past.

Some coincidence, eh?

I agree with SpunSilver's comments.

CoP = quantity and quest for points

6.0 = quality and quest for perfection.

Points in many sports are fine. Basketball is about quantity and the most points wins.

A sport that relies so heavily on music, choreography and costumes used to be about something else. The quest for perfection.

Kobe scoring 81 and Patrick scoring 81 is not the same thing.

The public knows that and so do the advertisers and sponsors.

ESPN knows it too and sadly the "Cathedral of Sports" in USA has walked away from skating.

[Joesitz]

I'm not sure, but it seems we are talking about what kept the TV fans interested in Figure Skating during 6.0 system, and much less in the CoP system. We should not be talking about the avid fans. They are still with any system, and their numbers have never been so great to make up the Nilson ratings alone. I don't thing we lost them.

But the majority of other fans have left the figure skating TV programming, and with them gone, sponsors of TV programs went also. I just don't see them coming back because there is no reason to come back to a sport they do not understand, and refuse to learn the scoring system.

If we look at TV as a whole, figure skating is in the category of sport, and it is also competing with reality contest shows which are plentiful these days. The lost fans can choose World Championship figure skating, or the next best vocalist in song. Nilson has shown the difference. For the olympics, there are many sports for fans to choose from, but TV viewers take what the networks give them.

I do not think those 'other' fans will be back, but new fans should be given a less complex scoring system to keep their interests.

I'm all for modifying the CoP.

[mskater93]

If something "interesting" happens to make figure skating high drama-reality TV, then the casual fans will be back no matter what the scoring system. The huge bounce in ratings (and shows/made for TV cheesefest competitions) was due to high drama (Nancy/Tonya), not to any "real" interest in the sport. Casual fans were turned off when the excitement died down from the reality TV and the moderately casual fan was turned off due to the cheating (how many times did we hear about how Bourne and Kratz were going to get screwed due to conspiracy of Eastern Bloc judges at the Olympics, plus the knee tapping incident that was shown ad nauseum and then the pairs debacle in SLC). The moderately casual fan started to think it was like wresting (where the winner was determined by "script" instead of skating for it). Then they changed the system and went to anonymous judging, which is anathema in the US (more so than the system of judging itself) since Americans like transparency and anonymous judging just smacks of more cheating to a lot of people.

If American ladies start challenging for championships again, it will be worth publicizing for NBC and might draw some of the moderately casual fan back. No one can resist a winner, especially if she's charming (Kwan). Or gritty (Harding). Or spunky (Cohen). Yes, the US is the home to the reigning Men's Olympic champion and the World Dance Champions, but it's not the event that Americans hold dear ever since Peggy won that Olympic title in 68.

I think US Figure Skating needs to change it's tactics when it comes to "Team 2018" (that's what they call the Novice National qualifiers' media training and other seminars during Nationals) on the media training side. They've taught them to be so PC in their comments ("I just want to skate my best"; "I was really disappointed when I fell on the triple Lutz") that they all sound like the Stepford Wives. Yeah, Johnny's comments have been a little out there ("I call this costume icicles on coke") but it's at least interesting. So we are clear, I am not a big fan of Johnny and wished Jeremy had beaten ALL the US men at Worlds/Olympics (without sacrificing placements) in the last several years.

[janetfan]

If something "interesting" happens to make figure skating high drama-reality TV, then the casual fans will be back no matter what the scoring system. The huge bounce in ratings (and shows/made for TV cheesefest competitions) was due to high drama (Nancy/Tonya), not to any "real" interest in the sport. Casual fans were turned off when the excitement died down from the reality TV and the moderately casual fan was turned off due to the cheating (how many times did we hear about how Bourne and Kratz were going to get screwed due to conspiracy of Eastern Bloc judges at the Olympics, plus the knee tapping incident that was shown ad nauseum and then the pairs debacle in SLC). The moderately casual fan started to think it was like wresting (where the winner was determined by "script" instead of skating for it). Then they changed the system and went to anonymous judging, which is anathema in the US (more so than the system of judging itself) since Americans like transparency and anonymous judging just smacks of more cheating to a lot of people.

If American ladies start challenging for championships again, it will be worth publicizing for NBC and might draw some of the moderately casual fan back. No one can resist a winner, especially if she's charming (Kwan). Or gritty (Harding). Or spunky (Cohen). Yes, the US is the home to the reigning Men's Olympic champion and the World Dance Champions, but it's not the event that Americans hold dear ever since Peggy won that Olympic title in 68.

I think US Figure Skating needs to change it's tactics when it comes to "Team 2018" (that's what they call the Novice National qualifiers' media training and other seminars during Nationals) on the media training side. They've taught them to be so PC in their comments ("I just want to skate my best"; "I was really disappointed when I fell on the triple Lutz") that they all sound like the Stepford Wives. Yeah, Johnny's comments have been a little out there ("I call this costume icicles on coke") but it's at least interesting. So we are clear, I am not a big fan of Johnny and wished Jeremy had beaten ALL the US men at Worlds/Olympics (without sacrificing placements) in the last several years.

Good post and lots of good points. I agree that many US fans walked away after the SLC scandal as in "enough is enough."
Post scandal reporting made it clear that ISU had no interest in either getting to the bottom of the scandal or cleaning up the sport.

I appreciate new fans have seen much they like about skating. I am a skating fan too but have seen enough questionable things over the years to ever accept anonymous judging and particularly from a Cinquanta led ISU.

So basicallythe CoP has no chance with me and several generations of fans who see it as a way to cover up cheating rather than preventing it.

Good old Frank Carroll has said the same thing so it is not only fans who refuse to accept the secrecy.


Skating seems to be run by people who look like they just walked out of a wax museum.
It is doubtful how in touch they are with the times and changing cultural trends.

I think a new team, with much younger people calling the shots and especially working on re-shaping the stodgy image of skating is esential for any bounce back.

It is nice that NBC shows skating but their approach feels outdated.
ESPN can be much edgier at times and it wouldn't hurt if American men saw skating coverage and interviews on the sports channel as opposed to the family entertainment channel.

Image and communication count more than ever in the digital age.
Nothing wrong with Smuckers and insurance companies but skating needs Nike, or a similar sponsor with a 21st century marketing style.

Skating needs to be LESS about puppies and memories of grandma.
The ads Nike and ESPN did for the US Women's soccer team were so totally different than anything that comes out of US Skating, it's sponsors, and NBC.

If skating wants to be seen as a real sport then someone should get the word out already and re-shape the image.

The US Women's soccer team has a couple of Stanford girls, and all of the players were college all-Americans, many from top universities.
Nike and ESPN never felt that was relevant in shaping the image of the team and Women's soccer.

The end result was a broadcast rating as high for the final as the Men's baseball World Series.

[Mathman]

I don't think it's irrational. In the old system, you have the idea of perfection (6.0, or 10.0 in gymnastics) and the visceral thrill that the audience felt when perfection was achieved. In the CoP you just have numbers, numbers, and more numbers. I think those are existentially two utterly different systems... one is Platonic with its ideal of perfection, only skaters occasionally actually manage to reach the ideal -- how magnificent, how amazing! In the other there is (at least hypothetically) an infinite, ultimately pointless and hence dreary, increase in numerical points. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." (Pascal)

Yes, this is the spirit of what I am struggling to say.

It is not figure skating whose integrity I am trying to protect, it is numbers'. Numbers have served us faithfully over the centuries. They do not deserved carelessly to be abused.

The 6.0 system employed ordinal placements in exactly the way that ordinal placements were invented to be employed. There is a harmonious match between the judging system and the thing being judged.

In contrast, the CoP uses decimal numbers in a perverse and unnatural way.

If I say that my desk is 123.76 centimeters long, that means something.

If I say that my computer weighs 123.76 ounces (yes, my computer is that old ), that means something.

If I say that I stretched my measuring tape across Mao Asada's long program and it measured 123.76, that is a fraudulent use of the metric and arithmetical properties of decimal numbers.

(Just my opinion, of course. )

[Joesitz]

It's true a skating scandal will bring back some lost fans and not because of the sport, but because of the little girls invoved in a fraudulent games. Once the scandal is cleared up, so go the fans of lurid TV. It's a one-time thing, and we are back to square one.

Getting a top Lady skater needs publicity. Will she get it as she did in the old days? Quien sabe? Who cares when some other reality show is also showing on TV.

Sponsors go with athletes who promote their products for a better revenue. What can you sell by championing Lady figure skaters?

It's too late to change the image. The downgrading of TV viewing has already happened.

I don't see any other way except to revise the CoP so that new fans enjoy the sport, and maybe, just maybe it will become yet again of major interest. Of course, it will never attact men as it does women. So sponsors can only go after the women's market.

[jatale]

Well, I'm all in favor of CoP. I think it is a much better system than the old politically subverted 6.0 system. First of all, there IS NO SUCH THING AS PERFECTION! People are fallible, they cannot do anything perfectly. A score of 6.0 is so subjective as to be ludicrous IMO. Maybe the 6.0 system was easier to understand, but do you want to cheapen a sport with simplistic scoring or allow the sport to truly reflect the complexity and difficulty of its true nature? Figure skating is a sophisticated, highly demanding, very athletic, technical and artistic enterprise that deserves a scoring system capable of reflecting that. I don't think the simplistic and naive 6.0 system met that criteria.

When you revisit CoP scores for skaters 25 years from now, a combined score of say 250 for ladies, will reflect programs that are more accomplished than the programs of today - and that reality would be there for all to see (just look at YouTube or it's successor). With the 6.0 system, there is noway to see any progress, a 30 year old 6.0 program is as good as a 6.0 program of today - that is just ridiculous. Peggy Flemings beautiful 1968 OGM programs were lovely, but they do not compare to Yuna Kim's 2010 OGM programs in technical content or in the complexity of combining artistic elements within a more difficult technical framework. If the CoP existed in Peggy's time we would at least have a metric to help distinguish what was superior in Yuna's programs and what was superior in Peggy's. I think that is valuable information. No system is perfect and CoP is still reliant on many subjective judgments (which at least are made visible in the detailed breakdown of the actual scoring), but figure skating is not as simple to score as the high-jump or javelin throw either.

[gkelly]

Well, I'm all in favor of CoP. I think it is a much better system than the old politically subverted 6.0 system. First of all, there IS NO SUCH THING AS PERFECTION!

Remember, the 6.0 standard was invented to measure the perfection of circles drawn on the ice, three times on each foot.

There is a platonic ideal of a perfect circle. If one perfect circle is worth 1.0, then six perfect circles drawn perfectly on top of each other would be worth 6.0.

No one ever earned scores anywhere near 6.0 for drawing circles. Trixi Schuba and maybe some other school figures experts occasionally broke 5.0, but that was rare.

The same scoring standard, with 6.0 = perfect and flawless, 5.0 = very good, 4.0 = good, etc., with subdivisions of 0.1, was also used for freeskating programs for over a century.

What would 6.0 = perfect mean in that context? Flawless technique throughout? Regardless of the difficulty of the technical content? It's actually a pretty meaningless number -- regardless of whether any human being is capable of achieving perfection or not -- because the content of freeskating programs is so variable in any given competition, let alone from one decade to another.

It seemed that in practice 6.0 for technical merit meant "state of the art in terms of technical content, delivered with good quality and no visible errors" or "successful completion of one or more envelope-pushing technical elements with only one or two small to medium flaws elsewhere in the program," as the case may be. Hard to imagine anyone outdoing that performance technically at the current moment in skating history.

6.0 for artistic impression or presentation meant something like "(at least superficially) flawless execution and emotionally moving performance," the latter part of which would necessarily be somewhat subjective.

Of course sometimes 6.0 just meant "I already gave someone else 5.9/5.9 and this performance was better so I need a 6.0 to put it ahead." Or "I already gave someone else 5.9s or a 5.9 and a 5.8; this performance doesn't quite deserve to beat it but was noticeably better in one of the marks, so I'll give 6.0 for that mark to reward the good areas and 5.8 or 5.7 for the other mark, using the tiebreaker if necessary, to keep the other skater ahead."

At national championships sometimes it meant "Hey, look, international judges! Our champion is the greatest!"

In the last events before the changeover to the new judging system, it could mean "That performance was pretty darn good, and it's our last chance to give out this special mark, so I'm giving it to this performance."

If the CoP existed in Peggy's time we would at least have a metric to help distinguish what was superior in Yuna's programs and what was superior in Peggy's. I think that is valuable information.

I agree (with jatale's whole post, in fact).

I think that, in theory, a code of points can make for much more meaningful comparisons between programs from different eras. For example, if Janet Lynn deserves 8s and 9s and maybe the occasional perfect 10 in PCS for peformances with no triples or one barely held triple, how does that compare to a skater who lands six or seven triples but only deserves PCS in the 5s?

What about fairly comparing skaters in the same event today whose strengths and weaknesses are that different?

However, the well-balanced program rules would need to be a lot more flexible than has been the case for past 7-8 years. So far it's a lost opportunity.

[Spun Silver]

^ (jatale)
Re: metrics allowing us to compare skaters from different eras, I don't think you are taking account the evolution of the CoP itself just in the few years that it's existed. If the system is constantly being tweaked, you can't compare scores across time. Heck, it's often said on this board that you can't compare scores across competitions in a single season, or national v. international competitions.

IMO the objectivity of CoP is a lot more apparent than real.

I find it very hard to believe that you need CoP to describe the differences between Peggy Fleming and Yu Na Kim. As for superiority - it's not really a fair comparison, is it? Skating has gotten a lot more complicated so of course Yu Na is going to skate circles around Peggy technically. Whether Yu Na is superior to her in every way -- I would need to rewatch a lot of Peggy to answer that question, but my gut reaction is that you are something of a "presentist" - i.e., assuming that the present is always superior to the past or "old." Art doesn't work like that at all, so insofar as skating is artistic then I certainly wouldn't assume Yu Na is clearly superior to a great skater of the past.

I'll grant you the system's complexity, though. : )

[Tonichelle]

but we're still arguing personal taste. I'm not a huge fan of either Peggy or Yuna, for example. I prefer Janet Lynn or Alissa Cizsny. That's the problem of the "sport" part of skating... if the ISU wants to stay with the IOC they had to change, just like gymnastics did. THAT is why we have CoP. If we take skating out of the Olympics we can do whatever we want to the judging system. But the Olympics are about sport first.

[SkateFiguring]

Well, I'm all in favor of CoP. I think it is a much better system than the old politically subverted 6.0 system. First of all, there IS NO SUCH THING AS PERFECTION! People are fallible, they cannot do anything perfectly. A score of 6.0 is so subjective as to be ludicrous IMO. Maybe the 6.0 system was easier to understand, but do you want to cheapen a sport with simplistic scoring or allow the sport to truly reflect the complexity and difficulty of its true nature? Figure skating is a sophisticated, highly demanding, very athletic, technical and artistic enterprise that deserves a scoring system capable of reflecting that. I don't think the simplistic and naive 6.0 system met that criteria.

When you revisit CoP scores for skaters 25 years from now, a combined score of say 250 for ladies, will reflect programs that are more accomplished than the programs of today - and that reality would be there for all to see (just look at YouTube or it's successor). With the 6.0 system, there is noway to see any progress, a 30 year old 6.0 program is as good as a 6.0 program of today - that is just ridiculous. Peggy Flemings beautiful 1968 OGM programs were lovely, but they do not compare to Yuna Kim's 2010 OGM programs in technical content or in the complexity of combining artistic elements within a more difficult technical framework. If the CoP existed in Peggy's time we would at least have a metric to help distinguish what was superior in Yuna's programs and what was superior in Peggy's. I think that is valuable information. No system is perfect and CoP is still reliant on many subjective judgments (which at least are made visible in the detailed breakdown of the actual scoring), but figure skating is not as simple to score as the high-jump or javelin throw either.

Thank you jatale for expressing what I didn't get around to write.

ITA with your post.

Let the scoring system and the numbers also reflect the progress of the sport and make meaningful comparisons and analyses possible. The so-called perfectoin under 6.0 is purely emotional and illusionary. Such exuberant moments will always be enjoyed and remembered regardless of scoring methodology. In many sports, a goal is worth a point however it is scored. But amidst the uncountable number of all goals scored, a few are so very special that they are seared in memories and history. But they don't receive extra points for their emotional impact. Consider also such emotions are not uniform for all fans who may even be at the extreme opposite ends of the emotiona scale. If 6.0 offered momentary satisfaction of exaggerated emotional declarations, it blurred reality and objectivity, especially in the long run as a historical statistic. A perfect double jump and a perfect quad are equally perfect and equally exciting in different eras, but their differences outside the emotional realm should be noted in the record books.

Much of the excitement in sports is record breaking, reflecting the continual evolution and progress of the sport, not just winning a particular event. As excited as we are about an exhilerating record breaking performance, we also expect a new record to break the current one. A numerical scoring system let us follow the progress. A 6.0 or 10.0 does not. That is just one of the many reasons why they are gone now.

[janetfan]

I posted a link over at the "Patrick Chan New Quad " thread that had some interesting comments from Lori.

One of the things Lori made clear is that in her opinion the PCS are not understood by the majority of the judges.

Joe Inman has made the same point. It makes me wonder that if leading and acknowledged CoP experts think the system is too complicated for the judges then how in the world are fans supposed to understand it

Johnny and Sasha have both commented that they know of skating board fans who are more well versed in the CoP than they are.

Some of the posts here are from members that Johnny and Sasha may have been referring too.

Such comments don't carry much weight with me when Lori is telling us the judges don't get it. Not to mention when Lori says how limiting the CoP rules feel to her at times and how they stifle creativity.

I agree with joesitz that an overhaul is needed. I agree with Mishin who stated "the new system was rushed and not close to being ready when it was (forcibly) introduced."

I will agree the CoP is different. It has some good ideas. But it feels far from an improvement over 6.0

There is a big difference between being new and being better. I hope for a better system and don't think it will happen without some new oficials running ISU.

[Joesitz]

Jatale and other avid fans who are blinded by Skating's fall from grace. Only an avid fan can feel that way. The only time all kinds of fans will be of interest is every 4 years as it competes with other sports.

The matter concerns only the non-avid fans who left skating to go on to other reality TV shows. I really think it is too late to bring them back. The urgency is to revise and simplify the CoP for the new fans who come about.

And maybe Hernando is correct in wanting new Officials to run the sport since the present officials are set-in-their-ways.