The Increase of 'Questionable' Judging Trends

The Increase of 'Questionable' Judging Trends by Richard O'Neill (an International Coach who has had skaters at various World Championships in the past. He is currently Technical Director of the Puerto Rican Figure Skating Federation.)


Blazing Blades.com

Another professional is questioning Chan's highly inflated PCS score. This is not good news for those Chan fan boys.

http://kwantifiable.xanga.com/757701167/blazing-blades-guest-author-series/

Chan's PCs scores were clearly too high considering the errors performed. Scores in the 9's out of a maximum of 10 were not justified. More precisely, his performance and execution segment score averaged 8.21 compared to his 8.5 average at Skate Canada for a better skated program compared to the same marred program as he skated in Paris. In addition, you can compare these scores to his 9.11 world performance score for this same segment and question the validity of his Paris scores. The actual performance in Paris was obviously a much lesser quality compared to Moscow or Toronto. I suggest his average PC's scores in Paris were inappropriate and given for historical respect of his qualities rather than for his actual given day performance in Paris. I can agree with the opinion, that Chan deserved to win Paris. However, I highly dispute a given margin of 10 points over the 2nd place skater to do so. Yes, Chan would have probably still won, if he was given realistic scores in the PCs. However, this panel's average scores were outside 'the corridor' of realistic scoring and failed to abide by the definitions of PCs. This is not a positive trend in our sport. The 'corridor rationale' of the new judging system, failed in this case.

What message is this trend sending skaters and coaches? Chan is one smart kid. Undoubtably, he viewed some Paris judging details as a 'gift'. I am confident his training strategy for better performances will continue as planned. Trust me, I am Canadian... I want to see Chan win. But, I want him to win fairly based upon the definitions of our sport and more importantly, I want the integrity of the new judging system to be certain for all future competitions.

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Note on the Author - Richard O'Neill is an International Coach who has had skaters at various World Championships in the past. He is currently Technical Director of the Puerto Rican Figure Skating Federation.

I hope a 'Chan PCS rule' will be set up by ISU sooner rather than later.

Thank you, visaliakid, for this article link.

I am very glad that Mr. O'Neill has come forward with his analysis and warning. The patently obvious has been made mathematically explicit.

On Mr. O'Neill's impression that there is a wider spread of GOEs this year than in the past, with wider corridors and more marks outside the corridor, I wish he had provided some past data for comparison, instead of just a couple of current examples. I expect that he is right, though.

To me, this is not necessarily a bad thing. And in fact, I believe that the last couple of sets of rule changes have deliberately given the judges more leeway to rely on their own judgement about how to balance the pluses and minus for a particular element.

About the ISU's review procedure for judging out of the corridor, a few marks per competition where one judge differs from his colleagues is OK. You have to have quite a few, typically showing some sort of systematic bias, before you are in jeopardy of a reprimand.

Thanks for the article very interesting read.

Mr. O'Neil's detailed examples and complaints do nothing to explain the title of his article. He questions the judging because of 1) the wide corridor of marks given to a particular skater, and 2) the narrow corridor of marks given to another skater. So what is the sign of questionable judging?

He never establishes what makes a judging questionable, nor does he demonstrate his claim that there is an increase in questionable judging. To show an increase or a trend, the current number of such incidents have to be compared to those in the past. It's more like a random rant from a coach whose students never get near the podium.

This Chan fan boy is crying - the whole time Chan stands on the podium while the Canadian flag is raised and the Canadian anthem is playing. Sniff.

Thanks a lot for the article. I did not read it thoroughly, but I am very happy that some of the professionals are coming forward to improve current judging system.
My wish is that something will be done by the world this year. The fact that Dai's near perfect long was defeated by Chan's mistake ridden long at GPF may help conscientious judges to reconsider this system.

Please ISU, you need to do something to keep the figure skating a sports, not a play full of favoritism.

I feel bad for Patrick being so targeted by disgruntle figure skating fans, figure heads and media alike recently. Something he really doesn't deserve, but more to do with the nature/faults of human judging and sometimes the politics of this sport.

Such problem is always there with any systems consist of human judgement using numerics. They conflict by nature. How can you expect 'cognition' and 'interpretation' will always be correctly, consistently and equally applied using numeric with 100% success rate? To do such thing would be impossible. Plus the fact they also modify points/rules year by year (a fall is less penalized than the 1/2/3 years before), makes the idea of relative comparison/impression bit of a farce. Jumps became currencies and are no longer about beauty and whether it is suitably applied or well executed within the context of a fully realized artistic program with good musicality and interpretation. The very reasons people watch figure skating as oppose to gymnastics for example.

While the problem is always there. The problem only became more obvious when the skater failed to deliver what they are suppose to on the day, or the indirect effect of a poorly/slanted judged competition early in the season. When there appear to be NO recaliberation process after (internal briefing to put right to wrong on what should be the correct mark given comparatively field wide. If there is, these result should be published for public scrutiny/interest). Other wise the system ends up haywire when different skaters are seen to be given different 'yardstick' with the rest, it ends up a conflict between those think they deserve it to those who do not. When there are wide disagreements, who looses? The skater does, the sport does.

In general any human judgement adapting numeric are susceptible to

- Residual/Psychology problems (Reputation, Impressions/Environmental factors, Influencing, Peer pressure.)
- Latency (Without enough time to process and deliberate, how the judges feel 'in the moment' may be different after when they have time to process and can compare with the whole field more objectively.)

Like many, I suggested the score system need to be improved and put forward some ideas forward. TES with expanding the GOE scale of values that reward risks and penalize failures and contrivances (do enough just to score points rather than sport performance). The PCS breaking them into 2 categories/panelists; SS and TR and Execution on 1; Performance, interpretation, choreography on another with judges that are not anonymous. To ensure high quality of judging with real depth of realization means we require those who are qualified to judge the artistic aspect of skating performance without anonymity, to train to think holistically, comparatively according to what is delivered on the day and not subject to typical influences. I would also hope the second panelist could offer constructive comments and feedback other than numeric after the competition. Yes, we need Simon Cowell judging Whitney Houston, and tell her she is crap when she delivered crap that day. (I paid serious £££ to a Whitney Huston concert a while back and I was really disappointed with her singing, frankly someone need to tell the great Diva she is not great all the time! Just like Patrick Chan when he failed to deliver his best on the day, and similarly shower him with praises when he did.)

I have asked before if there had been proper attempt by the ISU to address incorrect/widely diverse markings from one competition to the next, through a field wide 'recalibration' and internal briefing. I suspect NOT, due to the young and immature system, old traditional conservative sport culture and organisation, lack in resources, or dare I suggest - basic pride and arrogance that came with any human judging and organisation? To apply such exercise would certainly admit there might be possible faults in the system and to explore it further would prove certain skaters are indeed getting preferential treatment.

Yet human judgement by nature has its own tendencies and natural problems, it might be good to acknowledge it sooner than later to ensure only the highest quality of judging is correctly applied through out, and assures credibility to the sport. Something I think the sport has never fully recovered from the 2002 Olympics scandal (which was when I left the sport then - until 2010 Olympics when the ladies figure skating brought me back).

Thanks for posting this article....very interesting.....especially the Adam R. remarks....
"Quality in thought and deed is just what you like...." Robert Pirsig

visaliakid said:

The Increase of 'Questionable' Judging Trends by Richard O'Neill (an International Coach who has had skaters at various World Championships in the past. He is currently Technical Director of the Puerto Rican Figure Skating Federation.)


Blazing Blades.com

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So visaliakid, or Pete, I looked around your site to see you have any other article about the same issue and actually found one linked analysis that answers Mr. O'Neal quite well:

From your site Blazing Blade to Opining on Grand Prix Final: Time to play “How Patrick Chan Won” again.

I find Mr. Wong's clear and simple comparisons and explanations a lot easier to understand and accept than Mr. O'Neal verbose yet confusing rants that never build a case.

I'm not quite clear on this outrage about Patrick Chan. What do they want? Do they want Takahashi win gold instead of Chan? Or do they want to change PCS scoring in LP to make Takahashi win about 1 point over Chan, so in the end Takahashi would lose about 10 points to Chan instead of losing about 11 points?

If it's the first one, forget about it. It is totally obsurd.

If it's the second one, it seemed not worth of this level of out cry.

9 points, Bluebonnett, Takahashi could lose by 9 points instead of 11. Of course had it actually happened that way, do you think there wouldn't be as much outrage anyways? There would likely be arguments that Takahashi should heve won the LP by at least 12 points. Anything short of that requires a system overhaul.

No matter how the scoring system change, Takahashi is not going to win gold in the time and situation like this one. That is the fact. Sorry, live with it!

If the system changed to the point that Takahashi could win a gold under this exact situation, it could not be called a sport any more. That will really kill this sport.

Patrick should give Evan a call. Evan was raked over the coals for winning the Olympic Medal without a quad and the outcome of that outrage implemented changes to the rules
regarding the value of the quad jump, just saying.....

Bluebonnet said:

I'm not quite clear on this outrage about Patrick Chan. What do they want? Do they want Takahashi win gold instead of Chan? Or do they want to change PCS scoring in LP to make Takahashi win about 1 point over Chan, so in the end Takahashi would lose about 10 points to Chan instead of losing about 11 points?

If it's the first one, forget about it. It is totally obsurd.

If it's the second one, it seemed not worth of this level of out cry.

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Chan didn't deserve such high mark in the short or the long. Same goes for Paris too where he was given a score over the 80s with falls. What's the point of having a competition if Patrick can make big time errors in both phases and still win by massive amounts?

I'm not so sure that Daisuke should have won the competition but he should have won that long by quite a lot.

bekalc said:

Chan didn't deserve such high mark in the short or the long. Same goes for Paris too where he was given a score over the 80s with falls. What's the point of having a competition if Patrick can make big time errors in both phases and still win by massive amounts?

I'm not so sure that Daisuke should have won the competition but he should have won that long by quite a lot.

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List your numbers to show how much Daisuke should win? Without them, it is just baseless.

Bluebonnet said:

List your numbers to show how much Daisuke should win? Without them, it is just baseless.

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I don't have numbers. I just know that as a technical skate when you look what both skaters actually completed correctly it was a lot better. And as a performance it was also better.

bekalc said:

I don't have numbers. I just know that as a technical skate when you look what both skaters actually completed correctly it was a lot better. And as a performance it was also better.

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Typical!

Bluebonnet said:

Typical!

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That's my opinion. I care far less for what you tried, in comparision to what you actually did. And if you think its about hating on Patrick, I had no problem with Patrick beating Daisuke at Skate Canada earlier this year. Chan's a fabulous skater when he skates well this wasn't his bets performance technically or performance wise.

You know what i find is ridiculous. When skaters ubers are so caught up in their skater, that they think their skaters deserve ridiculously high scores no matter how their skater actually skated. That they can't sit there and say you know what maybe the other skater out skated my skater this time.

I adored Yu-na Kim back in the day, but I was also able to appreciate Asada. And while I was rooting for Kim to win, I certainly wasn't rooting for Kim to win regardless of how she or Asada skated. I felt that Kim winning 2010 worlds long program showcased all the problems with this sport.

At the end of the day I'm a fan of this sport, far more than I'm a fan of a particular skater. And I don't know how this sport can survive if people want to argue that how the skater skates, that night just doesn't matter.

Here are some numbers. I haven't added them up to see what result they would produce.

When I watched the men's long programs from the GPF live on TV, I tried scoring along for fun. So these are my numbers based on what I saw on TV, my understanding of the rules, my perception of the quality. Your mileage, or that of the official judges, may vary.

At the end of the event I expected Takahashi to win the freeskate but not by enough to make up for his short program deficit. I was surprised Chan took the freeskate. Adding up the PCS, I see I gave them different scores for each individual component but the same overall total, so the TES would make the difference. I haven't done the math yet to figure out how the results would have come out with these tech panel calls if I were the only judge. Should I?

Takahashi
4T -2
3A +2
3S +2
CCSp2 +1
CiSt4 +2
FCCoSp4 0
3A+3T 0
3F+2T +1
3Lo 0
3Lz+2T +1
3F +1
ChSt1 +2
CCoSP4 +1
8.5 8.0 8.75 9.0 9.25

Chan
4T -2
4T+2T -2
3A +2
CiSt4 +2
FCCoSp +1
3LZ+1Lo+3S 0
3Lo +1
3F+3T +1
FCSSp4 +1
3Lz -3
2A +1
ChSt1 +1
CCoSp4 0
9.0 8.75 8.25 9.0 8.5
(1.00 fall deduction)