All feelings! I truly believe that the judges are much more objective than us fans. Let's give Akiko a big hug! That's all we could and should do.
By the way, I think that to compare numbers from two different competitions often lead to wrong conclusions.
I do not have skin in the game whether Akiko or Mao wins. I have made a point of saying that I like Mao, her skating and respect her hard work and determination to improve as an athlete. This is not a case of a me slamming one skater to raise the other one up. And heck, I made a point of saying that Akiko shouldn't make so mistakes in the short program, and getting comments from people that I was selling Akiko short (pun not intended) on how good her free skates are! So I don't really have any emotions or feelings to act on. In the end, it's just a competition, life goes on, and there will be other competitions.
However that doesn't mean questioning the judging =/= a lack of willingness to understand the result. I have done my best effort -- as an hobby student of the the sport -- to understand the current criteria of the system. I am the first person to spend hours calculating scores, analyzing them and reading the efforts by other posters (like Doris) to understand parts of the system I don't know about (i.e. Ice Dance levels). And there have been times where a result didn't make sense to me initially, but I went back, looked it over and said, "OK, I get it."
That was not the case here. For this particular competition, I have looked at the protocols several times, watched the YouTube videos several times with the bullet points of each of the program components in mind. I've already established that Mao is superior to Akiko in SS and TR and that my issue is IN/PE/CH. And as for your final point (re comparing competitions), the ISU compares competitions to determine personal and season's bests, so I'm not sure why there is this self-imposed ban to do some comparison between different competitions. That said, I do acknowledge it's not a perfect system because you're dealing with different judging panels. That is why also compared Mao's PCS at this competition between the two segments (using the factoring system). Again I stand firm that it doesn't make sense for Mao to receive nearly same PCS (in fact it was a touch higher) for this FS as her terrific SP.
If I come off frustrated, it's because I don't like being painted as someone that is just acting on emotion/blind fandom when I have made a concerted effort on this board to help myself and others to look deeper at the scores, even the ones I don't agree with.
I think one of the most important simple changes that should be made (under any judging system that combines the results from two or more competition phases, by any mathematical method) is this:
During the final phase of the competition, after each skater skates, before announcing that skater's overall placement, always announce the placement in that phase of the competition only.
Audiences won't always have seen the short program/short dance and those who have seen it might not remember the standings or might not be familiar with the rules for combining results from the separate phases.
What they do know is what they just saw and who they thought was better today. So make sure to let them know what the standings were today.
E.g., instead of "for a total of xxx.xx points for the freeskating. That gives her an overall total of zzz.zz, which puts her currently in first place!"
take a few extra seconds to say "...for a total of xxx.xx points for the freeskating. That puts her her currently second in the freeskate. Combined with her short program score of yy.yy, that gives her an overall total of zzz.zz, which puts her currently in first place!"
That will cut down on a lot of the outrage when it was clear that this skater has already been outskated today, and the judging panel agrees.
There will still be times when the majority of the audience disagree with the majority of the judging panel about today's results specifically, but hey, that's life. Some of the judges may disagree too. It would be interesting to calculate ordinals to find out how many judges (and which ones) gave the highest scores to which skaters, but I don't see that happening as long as the ISU believes that anonymous judging is less subject to pressure from federations.
That is a good idea. I agree it would have reduced some of the outrage at this competition, but it's not like the audience didn't know Mao was first by a margin, they probably had it written down in their programs and the score is flashed on the screen during their skate. I still think many in the audience (and the commentators) believed Akiko did enough to make up the deficit.
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