For all of you who are interested, someone made heat maps of all the skaters tonight on his twitter!
You can see them here
Gracie has got fantastic ice coverage compared to some of the other ladies
This is so interesting... it illustrate coverage and speed really well and shows how imbalanced and with little coverage behind Medvedev's program,with regards to elements and how much resting points in between. Where as Mao, Zijun, Grace, and even Anna has much bigger coverage, spacing out of the elements. Miyahara's choreography is fairly balanced, even if her coverage is small, but it is expected. Amy Lin looks surprisingly decent too despite really bad falls. I consider her senior debut season a success... if you want to fall, do it like Anna do, at least, you made an impression.
Actually I have just caught up with the ladies... I intially thought Zijun, Mirai did some mini disaster based on the score sheet but having looked through the performance thought they did great! Better than expected. Mirai seems to have been on the receiver end of some fairly strictlytech calls,all UR coming to light. Zijun did a season best for sure, even if her PCS is depressing. But not as much Soyoun, what the heck.. 48??!!!
I felt Mao was unfairly held down for Satoko, and maybe to the old standard of PCS records where Yuna and Carolina was still competing. Bear in mind the golden standard of PCS from Vancouver Yuna only received 71PCS+, where as today, Evgenia received 72.34 and Ashley 73.78.
Anna's PCS suffered having Evegenia blew the roof off with 150+, the judges mentally check to leave room for an American and possibly a Japanese as they fulfilled the quotas for Russian podium. Where as Evegenia's order the judges want to ensure at least 1 Russia is on the podium and to compensate from previous outing (when they try to do that, they always over do it, like at Sochi). If Anna had skated earlier than Evegenia, her PCS would have been higher, same applies for Elena. Ashley benefitted from the Gracie messing up and there should be an American on the podium. She deserve her placement, the score is understandable with how the judges marked the whole event, even she had 2 ur, and a !. They were much strict with the calls today than during the SP.
I am frustrated with Elena, she is hampered by poor packaging but that has nothing to do with her talent and ability. Switch their package around with Evegenia, Elena would have done much better. This is when you wonder if this is a sport or a pagent.
PCS for the final flight was as expected out of this world. I feel sorry for anyone skate before it. But hey... ISU has been trying to break the WR for a whole through padding and making all these tweaks on rule changes (easier to get higher GOEs, encourage higher GOEs and PCS, add tanos, add second halfs, increase the toe values overall particularly in the 2nd half.) It is bound to happen. This shows how important a Tech panel can influence the outcome as well. It will be interesting to see how the reshuffle next year among the Russian youngsters, and how easy and strict different tech judging are going to be like between different events around the world. They will also need to revise the tech rule or something for pre-rotation... it is getting to a point of silly. Other wise the next generation of skaters are focus on how to pre-rotate more than rotate.
If I was to be honest, nobody deserve 71+ tonight, except may be Mao and Ashley.
:hap57:
