DiManno: Figure skating audiences alienated by esoteric judging system

[Sara D]

I wish they would somehow encourage more beautiful, held-out moves in addition to transitions. It just seems like the skaters feel like they always have to be doing something, which I guess they do because they will get lower transition scores otherwise. It's true the programs are more difficult now, and it's true that difficulty must be rewarded, but I wish they could somehow balance the difficulty with musicality. In particular, a few of the Russian girls do these hyper-flexibility moves that do not correspond to the music at all and just look like a point grab to me. If that's the future of the sport then I think audiences will continue to be alienated.

I agree with this, I really didn't like the idea of removing the required spiral sequence out of both programs (although there are still a few skaters who do it), and like you said the skater needs to be doing something.. I liked it when back in the 80-90s where skaters took long stance pauses in their program - it went well with the music and it increased interest. My mom used to love watching figure skating when she was a child, and she loved the 90s when you can easily tell who would place first, second, third etc. But now she has lost interest in watching, and the reason was because she found it boring that everyone is skating the same, with overdone music (i.e. Patrick Chan keeping his LPs for 2 seasons, and using the same music this season as Joannie Rochette's LP in 2009, and Joannie Rochette's LP in 2010 was the same as Jeffrey Buttle's LP in 2006 - the only thing I don't approve about Lori Nichol (no offence, even though I know she wasn't Jeff's choreographer at the time)). I think it is a mixture of COP regulations on what is required, what is not, what scores as low transitions, etc, but what about the choreographers themselves? I know that they need to structure their programs around COP, but it is also their decisions on the overall program... I don't know really..

 

[drivingmissdaisy]

Think of baseball, the way they tuck all kinds of abbreviations around the corners of the screens in live time. Serious baseball fans learn the arcane rules but they don't have to go look up the details of the game - they are right there.

The learning curve for baseball is also high, but at least when you learn the rules you can enjoy applying them for 162 games out of the year, plus postseason. Here you are asking fans to understand a complex scoring system when there are maybe 3 televised events per year. And there always seems to be controversy with at least one of those 3.

The scoring system has also made it harder to develop interesting rivalries because there is less variation in your score based on the actual performance, particularly for top skaters. We knew Chan or Kostner would have to have a meltdown to lose the title AND another skater would have to be perfect. These two conditions make it difficult to have much variation in the final result, and so there are fewer interesting rivalries.