2010 Oly Mens long judges.....

Anyone have a link to the names of the 2010 Olympics mens long program judges? I am googled out.
I watched the Plushy-Evan smack down last night while I did my exercises, so for fun I went and looked up
the judges scores.... 4 of the judges never gave Plushy a negative GOE despite all those scarry landings on his
jumps. The same 4 gave him very high PCs. So I went to Wiki.....

"In 2008, the International Skating Union ruled to reduce the number of judges from 12 to 9. Ottavio Cinquanta cited economic difficulties as the prime reason for this change. Because the top and bottom extreme scores are dropped and two more scores are dropped at random, the scores of 5 judges will determine the outcome of competitions."

Of course, Plushy fans like "Sour Grapes Stojko" can say skating is dead and Evan fans can say Plushy aint got no PCs, but that is not my concern here.

People can argue till the cows come home that favoritism is alive and well and just masked by judges being anonamous, but I was wondering with all the close scores we have seen (GPFinal Pairs) how many winners are being picked by the roulette wheel of a computer?

(Anyone have link to the 2010 judges?)

Thanks!

CoyoteChris said:

4 of the judges never gave Plushy a negative GOE despite all those scarry landings on his
jumps. The same 4 gave him very high PCs.

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According to Mathman, it was not the same 4 judges. The numbers listed were totally random.

For what it's worth, here are the names of the judges. You still have some Googling to do, however, if you want to know what countries they are from.

http://www.isuresults.com/results/owg2010/SEG002OF.HTM

This won't help, though, because, as Bluebonnet says, the judges are listed in random order for each skater separately. The order that is listed for Plushenko is not the same as the order listed here, or the order for Lysacek.

But for each skater separately the judges are listed in the same order in each line, including the PCSs.

In almost all cases it is possible to figure out which judges scores were randomly eliminated, so we could go through and see if Lysacek or Plushenko got a break in the random draw.

2006 Olympics Men's tech team:
Referee Igor PROKOP SVK
Tech Controller Sissy KRICK GER
Tech Spec Pirjo UIMONEN FIN
Asst Tech Spec Igor BICH RUS

Men's SP judges:
Coco SHEAN USA
Daniela CAVELLI ITA
Vera TAUCHMANOVA CZE
Patrick IBENS BEL
Vladislav PETUKHOV UKR
Philippe MERIGUET FRA
Aniela HEBEL-SZMAK POL
Masako KUBOTA JPN
Teri SEDEJ SLO

Men's FS judges:
Coco SHEAN USA
Vera TAUCHMANOVA CZE
Philippe MERIGUET FRA
Lenka BOHUNICKA SVK
Vladislav PETUKHOV UKR
Teri SEDEJ SLO
Deborah ISLAM CAN
Elena FOMINA RUS
Inger ANDERSSON SWE

chuckm said:

Tech Controller Sissy KRICK GER

Patrick IBENS BEL

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Wasn't Sissy Krick one of the two judges who had B/S second in the SP at SLC?

Shortly after the Olympics, Ibens spoke to Tony Wheeler about judging in general and touched upon the Olympics as well. For those who a haven't yet read the interview, it's worth checking out; very educational.

Specifically as to the 2010 Olympics and the judging, it was a generously scored event all around - very lenient tech panels and judges who gave high PCS and GOEs even to programs that didn't really deserve it; it was more noticeable in the men's event because it was probably the sloppiest. Then the ISU appeared to make some changes to back away from that sort of overscoring, and at the beginning of last season scores dropped a bit - but now it's gotten even worse, with sky-high PCS/GOEs and skaters getting new PBs left and right, even when their performance isn't particularly special.

CoyoteChris said:

Anyone have a link to the names of the 2010 Olympics mens long program judges? I am googled out.
I watched the Plushy-Evan smack down last night while I did my exercises, so for fun I went and looked up
the judges scores.... 4 of the judges never gave Plushy a negative GOE despite all those scarry landings on his
jumps. The same 4 gave him very high PCs. So I went to Wiki.....

Click to expand...

Yes, I wanna know who gave Plushy high marks, because I already know who scored him low. :yes: I hate the anonymous judging!:disagree:

there were no scary landings. no step outs, no two foots, no turn outs, there were leans in the air which is not a scary landing. Only lysacek had a scary landing on his second 3A where he really pitched forward and looked like he was going to fall.

Thanks, Mathman. Yes, I believe you are correct. Unencoubered by the thought process, I would think since the high and the low must be thrown out, and the scores are given, that would be pretty easy to calculate, except for the obvious tie situation. That leaves a complex calculation as to which of the other two scores were randomly thrown out. Say, for instance, two judges gave different scores but their totals were the same? But say for a minute there were no such conflicts. What you are left with is the scores of the five counted judges. So how could a code breaker figure out who those judges were, or, for that matter, who they were not? It is certainly not foolproof, but theoretically, given enough money and code breakers, one could look at the historical trends, if you will, of all possible judges over a season or two on each skater and look at their biases or trends. For instance, consider Plushy's first sloppy jump....the one where he leans out of the circle and cat like, just stays on his feet...the one where Scottie says, "I DONT KNOW HOW HE LANDED THAT! By studying how each judge would handle that GOE on skaters they like or dont like or are non committal on, I think codebreakers could accrue enough data for make an algorithm that, while certainly not fool proof, could predict how a specific judge would score that element. Or the stupid ISU could just require the scores of each judge and their nation of origin be put up on a screen. Thanks for the list and help, folks!

gmyers said:

there were no scary landings. no step outs, no two foots, no turn outs, there were leans in the air which is not a scary landing. Only lysacek had a scary landing on his second 3A where he really pitched forward and looked like he was going to fall.

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Oh, I´m a fan and did not get any feeling of scare that he was going to fall in that combination. And I watched a live broadcast. Some of Plushenko´s jumps looked very scary in the air. LOL, don´t you remember Stojko and Yagudin, sometimes it looked like the nose is going to touch the ice...

Oh my, it seems that Europe was very well represented:

Referee, Tech Controller, Tech Spec and Asst Tech Spec all were from Europe. And from 9 SP judges 7 were European and and the same in FS...

I would have said the comm block countries were well represented....Jaana, I would be interested in what your own TV commentators said in real time while Plushy was jumping...here, at the 30 second point, is our Associated Press saying Plushy lost the gold due to his sloppy jumping and weak spin....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq7qqxY4RhY&feature=fvsr
(Hey Jaana, aren't folks there still a bit sore about the winter war and the continuation war? Sorry...Just kidding.....)

Good Lord. I'll be 90 and people will still be dredging this up.

CoyoteChris said:

What you are left with is the scores of the five counted judges.

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That part is almost always easy because for a given skater, the same two judges' marks are thrown out in each line. And the same two judges are throw out for all skaters, only they are listed in different orders.(I think the random selection is done first, then high and low thrown out next.)

This is all we need to do -- I'll do it when I get a chance -- to determine whether the final result might have been different if the random selection had been different. For this contest I doubt that that was the case, because if it had been, then there would already have been a big hue and cry abput Lysacek winning by a crap shoot.

So how could a code breaker figure out who those judges were, or, for that matter, who they were not? It is certainly not foolproof, but theoretically, given enough money and code breakers, one could look at the historical trends, if you will, of all possible judges over a season or two on each skater and look at their biases or trends....

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Sometime you can make an educated guess for free, and it is great sport to do so. I agree that it ought to be child's play for serious espionage/FBI types.

Or the stupid ISU could just require the scores of each judge and their nation of origin be put up on a screen.

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Or that.

But I wouldn't call the ISU stupid. Their entire motive is to make this sort of analysis as hard as possible. They did a pretty good job of it.

Although... They could have done even better. They could have encoded all the data in the first place, so instead of "Lysacek..3A..7.5" it would read "jr8g74hn462555f0g993hdhgo7."

Edited to add: Here is a cool factoid that I learned when I tried to look up the correct spelling of "hue and cry." The original Latin precursors literally meant "trumpet and voice."

communist block? Seriously? That is REALLY tired. Being the last skater obviously the judges knew that someone quadless was in first place and I can't believe there wasn't some thought of what that would mean if that person won. Plushenko had no mistakes on jumps on landings or anything below a level 3 spin so whatever. Plushenko should have won - him losing was the scandal not the narrow margin by which he lost.

Mathman said:

That part is almost always easy because for a given skater, the same two judges' marks are thrown out in each line. And the same two judges are throw out for all skaters, only they are listed in different orders.(I think the random selection is done first, then high and low thrown out next.)

This is all we need to do -- I'll do it when I get a chance -- to determine whether the final result might have been different if the random selection had been different.

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Huh? Didn't they get rid of the random selection back around 2008-2009, before the 2010 Olympics, at the same time that the panels were reduced in size from 12 to 9?

The high and low marks that get trimmed will often be different judges each time. If there aren't real outliers and the range of marks is something like 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 for GOEs, then throwing out one 0 and one 1 before calculating the results doesn't really assign specific judges as the ones whose marks are thrown out.

For PCS it's more likely to be clear which marks are trimmed, but not always.

gmyers said:

Being the last skater obviously the judges knew that someone quadless was in first place and I can't believe there wasn't some thought of what that would mean if that person won.

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Maybe the judges wanted the quad to be restored to its rightful place in the scoring system. So they let Lysacek win, knowing that this would force the ISU to raise the values of quads in the future.

gkelly said:

Huh? Didn't they get rid of the random selection back around 2008-2009, before the 2010 Olympics, at the same time that the panels were reduced in size from 12 to 9?

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My recollection was that they reduced the panel from 12 to 9 for all events except the Olympics at that time. Then at the last minute (in the fall of 2009) they came out with an executive order (there being no time to consult the whole council) to reduce the panel for the Olympics, too. The reason given was to save money and to make the Olympics like other events.

Reading between the lines, I wonder if these changes had to be negotiated with the IOC, which would account for the peculiar timing and for Cinquanta's backdooring of the full ISU congress.

Still, I am pretty sure that at the 2010 Olympics they still had a random draw to reduce the participating judges' panel from 9 to 7, then discarded high and low to leave five scores to average.

I think this is clear from the protocols.

http://www.isuresults.com/results/owg2010/owg10_Men_FS_Scores.pdf

Notice that all the PCSs are decimals ending in 5 or 0. This is because you are averaging over five scores. Since the PCSs are graduated in quarters of a point, the decimal part of the answer in always so many 20ths. Hence .00, .05, .10, .15, etc.

If the averaging had been done over seven scores the decimal parts of the PCS would be in 28th of a point, rounded to two decimal places: .04, .07, .11, etc., like it is now.

For instance, for Lysacek's Transitions, if you just throw out high and low and average the remaining seven scores you get 8.04. If you delete at random one of the 8.00s and one of the 8.50s, then throw out high and low and average the other five you get the 7.95 listed on the protocol. (In this instance Lysacek was hurt by the random draw -- he lost 9 one-hundredths of a point by sheer bad luck.)

By the way, one advantage to averaging over five instead of seven is that there are no rounding errors. Remember the fuss when Lysacek and Weir exactly tied at U.S. nationals because of a software glitch? The rounding procedure programmed into the computers was not the same as the procedure specified by the ISU rules. If the computer had done it right, Weir would have won.

But neither rounding method was mathematically sound. The correct method would have been not to round anything at all until the very last step. In that case, Lysacek would have won.

For PCS it's more likely to be clear which marks are trimmed, but not always.

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Its a distinction without a difference. Under the current system (no random draw) I can't think f any reason why it would matter. In each set of nine scores the high and low get thrown out. If two different judges gave the same lowest mark, once those marks enter the computer the judges loose individual ownership of their scores. There is no distinction between"The Russian judge's 6.75 was excluded from the total but the Japanese judge's 6.75 was included" and the other way around.

Anyway, if the goal is to try to detect patterns of cheating, bias, collusion, etc., we should look at all 9 scores.

Ref: "This is all we need to do -- I'll do it when I get a chance -- to determine whether the final result might have been different if the random selection had been different. For this contest I doubt that that was the case, because if it had been, then there would already have been a big hue and cry abput Lysacek winning by a crap shoot."

Very interesting mathamatical point, mathman. The problem would be the data entry, but ingnoring that for a minute, we have all seen competitions decided by a point or two and sometimes much less. So, what if a commentator had a real time mathamatical modeling computer that would say, "with these nine scores, and the final result for pairs being S/S having 212.26 and V/T having 212.18, the majority of random pics would have picked V/T as the winners, therefore the Germans better go buy lottery tickets...." Maybe no one cares anymore, but I thought the idea was to make the scoring more fair, not random. I also thought that someone would be holding judges who showed favoritism accountable. BTW, anyone who thinks the comm block is so last century has never had their country's natural gas shut off, or threatened to be shut off, by Mother Russia. Or you could ask Elene Gedevanishvili if SHE thinks the comm bloc is dead....
"In October 2006, Gedevanishvili was forced to leave Moscow after the Russian authorities revoked her mother's visa on a technicality.[5] .
Gedevanishvili was awarded the Order of Honor by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili for her achievements as an athlete and in recognition of her treatment in Russia.

CoyoteChris said:

I would have said the comm block countries were well represented....Jaana, I would be interested in what your own TV commentators said in real time while Plushy was jumping...here, at the 30 second point, is our Associated Press saying Plushy lost the gold due to his sloppy jumping and weak spin....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq7qqxY4RhY&feature=fvsr
(Hey Jaana, aren't folks there still a bit sore about the winter war and the continuation war? Sorry...Just kidding.....)

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Yes, in the freeskate former Soviet Union countries were really well represented (CZE, SVK, UKR, SLO and RUS). It is a sign of good judging that Plushenko still did not win (it was a figure skating competition and not a quad or figure jumping competition, LOL). And in my opinion the judging would have been even excellent, if Plushenko´s PCS would have been lower.

I did not watch the Olympics on our National TV, but on Eurosport with Finnish commentators. As the Lysacek´s freeskate was repeated the next day, they mentioned understanding why Lysacek won (the quality of his skating and the programme). Live they had the feeling that Plushenko should have won, which is understandable since he was the last to skate.

CoyoteChris, Russia´s numerous attacks against Finland during the history of our excistence are not a joking matter, in my opinion.

This discussion is interesting, but did you ever checked the comments posted on youtube????? Priceless!!!!:thumbsup:

CoyoteChris said:

Ref:Very interesting mathamatical point, mathman. The problem would be the data entry, but ingnoring that for a minute, we have all seen competitions decided by a point or two and sometimes much less. So, what if a commentator had a real time mathamatical modeling computer that would say, "with these nine scores, and the final result for pairs being S/S having 212.26 and V/T having 212.18, the majority of random pics would have picked V/T as the winners, therefore the Germans better go buy lottery tickets...."

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I believe the first version of the random draw was something like this: out of 14 judges eliminate 3 by a random draw, then throw out the two highest and the two lowest. I am not 100% sure if I remember the details exactly right, but in any case there are two mathematical issues. These were debated with great vigor at one time.

(1) Does the random draw turn the contest into a roll of the dice, or does it just seem that way. I am quite sure that it just seems that way. Here's why.

Suppose there are 50 countries in the judges' pool. Six months before the contest 14 countries are chosen at random to supply judges. At the time of the contest another random draw takes place in which 11 scoring judges are selected from among the 14.

Mathematically speaking the result is exactly the same as if the 11 were chose at random from the original pool of 50 in the first place. So, no, the two-stage random draw is no more of a crap shoot than is the one-stage random draw. Either way, each country has exactly 11 chances out of 50 of landing a spot on the scoring panel.

(This analysis is ever-so-slightly skewed in later versions of the procedure in which some judges were carried over from the short program to the long and others, chosen at random, were replaced.)

The ways in which the two methods (one random draw well before the event versus a two-stage random draw) differ are not mathematical but rather involve things like, once the 14 candidates have been chosen the lobbying starts -- the 14 get invited to cocktail parties, they receive birthday presents, etc. -- so in that sense the extra three are not treated the same as the 36 who were not chosen in the first round.

So, since there is no mathematical reason pro or con, what are the advantages of having a two-stage draw versus the traditional one-stage draw?

Disadvantages: The two-stage draw is stupid on its face, and makes everybody say...huh?

Advantages: The ISU offered some, but I will not list them here in order to save the ISU embarrassment.

Anyway, the bottom line is, any method of choosing judges is a crap-shoot. At 2002 worlds as soon as the panel of judges was announced it was clear that there were 6 Slutskaya judges and 3 Michelle Kwan judges on the panel. In the ABC broadcast, after Michelle had skated Peggy Fleming turned to Dick Button and asked, "Well, do you think that was enough to beat Slutskaya?" Button replied, "With this panel of judges, no."

Maybe no one cares anymore, but I thought the idea was to make the scoring more fair, not random.

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Well, no one cares any more because there isn't any random draw any more, so these questions are now moot.

As to the motive behind the changes in judging procedures (anonymity, etc.), the intuition was not to make the judging more fair but to make it so hopelessly opaque that no one would be able to support complaints about the judging a la Salt Lake City.

Or you could ask Elene Gedevanishvili if SHE thinks the comm bloc is dead....

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Well, Georgia was part of the Soviet bloc.

Edited to add: Oops, I forgot mathematical point #2 -- the trimming of the mean. Suppose that we have a certain number of scoring judges, however determined. Should we throw out the highest and lowest before averaging? Should we throw out the two highest and the two lowest? (One version of the iSU judging procedure called for throwing out the two lowest and the one highest.) The extreme version of trimming would be to throw out all except the middle -- in there words, to use the median score instead of some sort of average.

The main question is, does it make any difference, or would the same person win almost all the time bio matter which system is used? (There are also questions about measures of variation, etc.) Unfortunately there are not any nice formulas to apply in determining the sampling distribution of the trimmed mean. (Formulas that have "sigma over the square root of n" don't work -- which throws out 90% of all statistical methods. ) Most studies of this kind involve boot-strapping methods where you try to get and approximation, then use that approximation to get a better one, etc.

In general, all of these methods -- the mean, the median, and the in-between idea of the trimmed mean -- turn out about the same in situations where the data is approximately symmetric about the mean. (It does not need to be normally distributed.)

Applied to figure skating scores, the most dramatic asymmetry occurs via keying error -- a judge intend to type 9.5 and hits 0.5 by mistake. The current method of minimal trimming (delete only one high and one low mark) catches that kind of error without throwing away any valuable data. So I think the current method is a good one and the best available.