Portland Judging SCANDLE

OK, I was there & I want to know why there was no reporting of the scandal the judges should have been called on. BeBe should have been on the podium, any number of pairs should have occupied 3rd place besides the pair they GAVE it to. One judge gave Johnny Weir a 5.3 on Technical!!!! There WAS ALOT of BOOING from the audience & the tv people took it out. ABC should stand for awfully bad coverage OR awfully bad camera-work. Anybody agree!!

And that's the way it was at the 2005 US Nationals.

the only boo-ing I remember was for the skaters NOT shown on TV

I did get the feeling at times that the attitude among the judges there was the same as it was in Dortmund -- which, to me IMO, seemed to be "Well, if we're going to be accused of abusing the system anyway, let's just go ahead and do it one last time." It's like the minute they announced COP was going to take over, it gave everyone a license to go absolutely nuts and just slap up whatever they felt like regardless of actual performance level.

The marks that I found most interesting were those given to Kimmie Meissner; there was a NOTABLE drop between the technical marks and the artistic marks. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with this -- HOWEVER -- it seems to me to be a little inconsistent. Over the years we have seen a LOT of ladies (and men, for that matter) who are more technically oriented than artistically oriented, and yet THEIR marks never seemed to drop down that noticeably between the two categories. And Meissner actually is better artistically than some I can think of who fall into this category. I think they gave her the TM marks to acknowledge the axel (partly for fear of a riot) and dropped the AI marks to make sure that she wouldn't sneak in ahead of either Kwan or Cohen in the event that either one of THEM had a less than stellar skate technically. There have been a lot of performances over the years that SHOULD have been marked like this, but except for the Chinese, they rarely were.

Tonichelle said:

the only boo-ing I remember was for the skaters NOT shown on TV

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The MOST booing was for the low marks Evora & Ladwig got in the free. And you are right, they SHOULD have been on tv. Seemed that abc wanted to show that all was well. They definately skated better & cleaner than Hensman & P. Hensman fell on the side by side, fell on the throw & did a double!

actually they already had planned not to show them before they even skated

we sat behind ABC/ESPN monitor dudes(who were more interested in watching football ) and they had the list... and they were never on it (not even after their placement in teh short)...

Not sure why, but the feeling was in our section that while they were showing the "favorites" they were also showing the young guns that are "destined" to be great after '06....not saying it's right, but they have to look at marketablity post-Olys/MK