Wondering just what it is that makes CoP skating SO OFFENSIVE for most viewers to watch :think:
Snobbery is not the answer because even snobs should hope to see a sport they love flourish and prosper as opposed to failing and dissapearing from TV broadcasts.
So what is it about the CoP that is so offensive and TV prohibitive??
I have theories that I could expand upon at length, in another thread.
In summary, I'd say that the casual fan -- someone who tunes in to watch skating on TV once every four year up to maybe four times in one year -- is not interested in skating as a technical sport and is not interested in putting any extra effort into learning more than what they can pick up through listening to TV commentary at the few competitions they watch months or years apart.
They're interested in what they can see with their own eyes: Did the skater move gracefully? Did they express the music? Did they fall or make other obvious mistakes? Did they try the hardest jumps (according to the commentators) and did they succeed? Did they skate with confidence and (as far as can be told on TV) speed? Are they charismatic on the ice?
Some casual fans may be most interested in enjoying the performances as dances; others may be most interested in the obvious athletic risks.
It's possible to summarize those aspects of a performance into two marks for technical merit and artistic impression and to use them to rank skaters. It's often easy to have obvious rankings for small groups of skaters. If only 3-6 competitors per discipline are shown, even casual fans who can't tell an inside edge from a toepick can have an opinion on how to rank those skaters.
If you only watch the top skaters and know that 6.0 (or 10.0) is the maximum score, then it's easy to use numbers in the 5.0-5.9 (or 9.0-9.9) range to rank those top skaters according to your perception of what is the possible best. Even casual fans can play along at home.
Judges care about all those things too, so often the judges rankings match the rankings that a casual viewer would arrive at. Fans feel competent and knowledgeable at picking the winners.
Judges also care about many more picky technical details and always have. So sometimes the results are surprising to casual viewers but fair to knowledgeable viewers.
Or where there is room for disagreement, the controversies can be interesting especially where medal results are involved. It can be fun to second-guess the judges or debate with other fans.
With the IJS, there are a lot of details reflected in the scoring protocols that are of interest only to participants and diehard fans. The casual fan's eyes would glaze over if television tried to show every score for every element and component, and it would take time away from showing more skating. So they just summarize the scores into one number that doesn't give much information. Since the details of how the numbers were arrived at aren't shown on TV, fans who learn about skating only through TV don't learn how to interpret those numbers and find them mysterious. Only a few will go beyond the TV coverage to come to websites like this, or attend live competitions in person, to learn about the sport at more than a casual level. TV networks need the eyes of the masses, not the dedicated few, so they tailor their broadcasts for the casual fan who doesn't want to have to study to enjoy watching the sport. But then they don't understand the scores so it's less satisfying then when they could come up with scores in the same range as the judges under the old system.
That said, I watched the ladies short program from US Nationals on Ice Network with my 11-year-old niece who is only casually interested in skating, and over the course of ~20 skaters she got pretty good at predicting the final scores each skater would receive. Watching the whole field rather than just the top few gives a better context for understanding the final numbers. But it takes more time than the casual viewer is willing to invest.
I think the TV networks should do a better job of pointing casual viewers to the information, and sources of information, that would allow them to become informed viewers and enjoy the kind of nitpicking over edges we engage in here. Most won't bother, but at least they'll have a better idea of the level of detail by which skating is and really always actually has been judged.
And yes, I am a snob in the sense that I care about the details of skating technique that require more than a casual interest to appreciate. I think that the ISU should make its decisions based first on what best serves the athletes who devote their lives to mastering the sport, not for what is most fun for the once-a-year viewer to watch. (And no, I don't always agree with the decisions that they make.)
I definitely don't want to see the sport centered around the athlete's control of blades on ice no longer exists at the elite level because all the elite skaters are coopted into performing casual fan-friendly entertainment programs instead.
If pro or pro-am competitions can offer a venue for that kind of entertainment without replacing the serious sport, then everybody wins.
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