Controversial Olympic Competitons

[Joesitz (RIP)]

Are you serious? MK is a great skater but there is no need to disparage her competitors in order to make your point. Technical content is not "big tricks" - skating at its best should combine great choreo and expression with difficult content. Looking at some of Kwan's contemporaries, I don't think Sasha Cohen, Shizuka Arakawa or Maria Butyrskaya (to name a few) skated ugly, boring routines with nothing but "tricks" to help them keep up with Michelle. Irina Slutskaya, whom I suspect this may be referring to, is debatable. Personally, I liked her skating.

Of course I am not disparaging her competitors. She was up against the best in the world and managed to win 5 World titles. The 6.0 system showed the best whole ;package. The CoP system changed all that to give the Tech skaters their due. Not so much in the first few years of it, but how it grew to become a better rating system. IMO, what figure skating was all about in the 6.0 system was beautiful skating beyond acrobatics. MK was proof of that. In the CoP system it's all about the Sport. Personally, I am all for doing away with the background music. I like real sports.

Joe

 

[mycelticblessing]

The 6.0 system showed the best whole ;package. The CoP system changed all that to give the Tech skaters their due. Not so much in the first few years of it, but how it grew to become a better rating system. IMO, what figure skating was all about in the 6.0 system was beautiful skating beyond acrobatics. MK was proof of that. In the CoP system it's all about the Sport. Personally, I am all for doing away with the background music. I like real sports.

Joe

So you think it would be better for figure skaters to run through their programs without any music? That wouldn't be figure skating anymore. Music helps to add to the expression and beauty of skating. Beautiful skating still exists even under CoP. And figure skating is most definitely a REAL sport, with music.

 

[hockeyfan228]

OK, but seriously...are you all saying that the ISU went to the trouble of inventing a new scoring system just so they could look back years later and say, "nyah, nyah, everybody, if the new system had been in effect the result of the 2002 Olympics might have turned out differently?

Oh, Mathman, you know that the ISU already had formulated the bones of the NJS a couple of years before the Olympics, and that SLC just put in on the fast track. Of course they didn't create a system in reaction to anything that happened two years later, but when putting together the details, they would have been crazy not to try to address the issues they saw.

They did try to address the ambiguity of allowing the individual judges to decide how important skating skills and transitions should be weighted vs. non-tangibles like "you know it when you see it" (The Bianchetti Rule). That's not how it worked out, since Plushenko could score in the 8's for transitions and most PCS scoring looks like protocol scoring, but at least the foundation is in the written code, however little it's enforced.

One of the points of the NJS is to draw a line in the sand: this is worth this, and this is worth this in relation to that, and you can argue the weighting -- a 4T should be worth 30% more than a 3A instead of 20% -- but at least they're trying to tell you what gets valued and what doesn't get valued. Just like at work -- you can spend your time as an Assistant Professor being the mentor to 30 graduate students, helping them with their theses, but if you haven't published, you don't get tenure, because publishing is X% of your "score", and it's up to you to decide how to spend your time.

 

[hockeyfan228]

Would the Court of Arbitration be able to penalize the people who actually made the deals/pressured the judges, etc.? I know that, in cases of cheating, some innocent athletes may lose their medals because a team-mate cheated (as when an entire relay team is stripped of their Oly medals in a specific relay event because one member used steroids), but at least the cheater gets stripped, too. I think it would be simply wrong to let the CoA strip the innocent unless it also had the power to punish the guilty.

I don't know if there's any precedent for this, except to strip innocent teammates of medals if one member was guilty.

They may have had the power to invalidate the judge's marks -- i.e., to remove the corrupt marks without making a conclusion -- and/or to ask the ISU to make the decision based on some of their own guidelines or precedents. This could have been to use the substitute judges marks, but not necessarily. This could have been to allow the SP to be the tie-breaker, since there was a clear decision (for B&S) in the SP and a tie in the LP, or to allow a tie in the LP, but use total ordinals to give the victory outright to B&S. (Other possibilities were mentioned over the years.)

A Court of Arbitration decision would not necessarily have given S&P a gold medal, even if they ruled in favor of disallowing LeGougne's marks, but there would have been an investigation, and CoA is not known to pull punches in these. That's what the ISU, in my opinion, was trying to avoid.

 

[hockeyfan228]

I, too, feel that M/D gave the magical performance of the night, not G/G. Although overall I am much more of a G/G fan than M/D. And, of course, M/D didn't have the bobbles - the old preference for a clean skate - but it was more than that. M/D were ON.

What you see as "ON" I see as powerful, but rushed and unfinished. That's why we're still debating this all these years

 

[Mafke]

So you think it would be better for figure skaters to run through their programs without any music?

I'm assuming more that he means it should be like skateboarding or other extreme sports: each competitor has X amount of time to go out and do tricks worth set amount of points and the one who pulls in the most points wins.
(There might be music in the background but there would be no more relation between it and the skater than there was between the music and Plushenko in Turin).

 

[Mathman]

Personally, I am all for doing away with the background music. I like real sports.

I am always surprised anew when you say this, Joe, because the skaters that you value the the most -- Michelle Kwan, Kurt Browing, Stephane Lambiel -- are the most musical.

On the other hand, you are not that impressed with skaters like Plushenko who accomplish prodigious feats of athleticism, but lack musicality.

I think, in your heart of hearts, you do like skaters who can relate to the music, after all.

Me, too.

 

[Joesitz (RIP)]

So you think it would be better for figure skaters to run through their programs without any music? That wouldn't be figure skating anymore. Music helps to add to the expression and beauty of skating. Beautiful skating still exists even under CoP. And figure skating is most definitely a REAL sport, with music.

Of course not. As I wrote in the past, I think figure skating can be a competitive sport as is Diving. The contestants can select 5 jumps, 5 spins, and two footwork pieces (circular and straight - music is not necessary). The judges should rate the elements as it does in the CoP's Technical. The sum of the parts of the individual contestants will show the podium winners. This would be pure sport.

There would be no arguments over who did the best.

Beautiful skating should remain in Exhibitions and in Professional Shows.

Joe

Mathman - You got it. (unfortunately, no smily in Edit)