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Meanwhile most countries have no good juniors & seniors at all. Export them, please. :sad4:
2016-17 State of Russian Ladies skating
- Thread starter moriel
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Meanwhile most countries have no good juniors & seniors at all. Export them, please. :sad4:
And if there are 15 Russian skaters? Anyone in the top 24 is guaranteed 1 slot. Also organisers want 'bums on seats' - is Gracie Gold only going to get 1 slot this coming season? l can't think of a single very strong skater who got lowballed this way after missing say the world champs and had only 1 guaranteed slot. The weakest events are traditionally TDF and Cup of China due to the lack of strength of the home skaters, the other 4 are uniformly strong throughout, plus if a country's skaters did get blackballed you could be pretty sure they would avoid inviting other countries skaters in the future. Hence I would suggest organisers do their best to get as many good skaters to their events as possible whilst still giving their own skaters the best chance possible to get on the podium while the focus of their own particular country is on the event. The 15 or 16 you refer to is just due to not enough skaters being highly ranked enough.
Nops, the scores are the same through all the season: one gets 15 points for gold and so on, regardless.
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You are slightly confused about 'guaranteed at least one spot'. You may be eligible for one spot, but ISU can't guarantee the spot because if your own federation doesn't submit your name, the hosting federations won't choose you (they are choosing from the names the skaters' federations submitted). So even if someone is in the top 24, the won't get a GP spot if his/her federation did not submit his/her name. Ask Sokolova! The Russian federation practically retired her this way.
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OK. The document I am reading, last year's details, does say guaranteed, but I bow to your better knowledge re this, plus I suspect a federation doesn't low ball/black ball it's own skaters very often. Elena Sokolova stopped skating 10 years ago after all, and in an Olympic year they're going to want all the spots they can get.
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Novel, and interesting idea..:agree:
This would make for a deeper field, as well as giving more opportunities for small country skaters/teams.
How about 18 skaters/teams in singles, and 15 ice dance, and 15 pairs in the GPs? Or, basically 3 flights for each discipline except pairs? But still only 6 skaters/teams each for the GPF?
Would this make the event run too many days?
I think not....Canadian nationals can get the seniors done in 2 days with this many berths.
But it does mean that they need practice ice on the Thursday and early in the morning before the SPs on Friday. Canadian nationals manages to get everyone in by having a second rink for practices, with each skater team getting one on the event rink and one on the other. But I'm not sure that TdF has the facilities for that.
Certainly, the cost would be higher for an event that is about a third larger, and it may be an impediment. But it might also attract a wider broadcast audience.
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- Feb 17, 2010
The JGP fields are huge, as an example: http://www.isuresults.com/events/cat00028703.htm
I'm not sure what prevents the senior events from expanding the fields.
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- Feb 22, 2016
Surely it would be less TV-friendly if there was more skaters involved I suspect.
topic:Not that the North American networks using time delayed 'live' broadcasts show every skater / team anyway. Snarks aside...if the networks and streaming services refuse to pay for the rights for the first flight of the Freeskates, ISU could just do what Skate Canada does and fill in the 'wall to wall' coverage with it's own coverage...
Wonder if SC BC/YK section will forgive us for requesting more middle-of-the-night services from Ted Barton in Vancouver.
.....And how long will it take for one of the major networks to figure out that Ted is the best English language skating commentator bar none and try to nab him with $$$?
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On topic, but the idea that any great skating country should have to leave half it's talent behind during GP season is just wrong.....
Need to build the global fan base, need to build the global fan base.... [chant on...]
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I tried doing my math, and got that, for ladies, If we took highest rank at one event, and then highest score as tiebreaker, we would get, this year, same ladies at GPF, except Satko wuld be replaced by Wagner (who won a gold and had a bad performance).
Not sure about it anymore.
As for adding more people... I suppose the GP events are mostly paid by the feds. Which means that, if a FED will have to pay more, they will also want stuff in return: such as adding more local skaters and / or more host picks to it. For instance: american FED will most likely not want 3 extra russian ladies, all capable of beating their own skaters.
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If there were 3 to 6 extra single skaters per event, lets call it 6 say, you could have 1 host pick, 1 Russian (max 4 out of 18 from any one country) and 4 others. Would still be nice balance and I'm sure there's enough skaters world wide that the quality would be OK. Each GP is effectively 1/3rd of the skating world, each skater skates 2 events out of 6, so so long as there's 54 (plus a few more for host picks) skaters of good enough quality then you'd be fine, though of course the cost/return will always be an issue.
I wonder whether though there are enough strong pairs/ice dance couples to justify increasing the numbers much. For example 15 of each at each event and you're talking about 50 good enough couples worldwide taking account of host picks and are there enough of these. 12 dance couples maybe, but pairs the disparity between even the 8th couple and the strongest at each event is very evident, and perhaps that should stay the same - the minimum TES score will always be the telltale, as soon as you get lots more skaters/couples exceeding this then this should be the sign to think about increasing numbers.
The federation wants results. While they wouldn't want to harm any of their skaters, they want their skaters to be as succesful as possible, because it will make the federation look good. So think about it. If you were the federation, would you want 16 of your skaters to have one event each, or would you want 8 skaters to have two events? Taking into consideration that if 16 skaters has one event each, none of them has any chance to get to GPF even if they win medals in their one event. Whereas if 8 skaters are having two each and win medals, up to six of them could qualify to GPF, which would make you look good. (You would get the credit for creating in your country a figure skating program that delivers really good results). So what would you choose? I think it is quite possible that they will look at Leonova and Sakhanovich's results from the last year, and decide that a better strategy is to ensure that skaters like Tsurskaya, Zagitova and Konstantinova have two events each, rather then having them to have one event and Leonova and Sakhanovich also one event. The way to make sure this happens is not submitting the names of the weakest skaters (even if they would be guaranteed one event if they did submit their name), and then waiting for Tsurskaya, Zagitova and Konstantinova to get the one event they are guaranteed and giving them a second event in Russian home GP.
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Note that any increase in the numbers of competitors at GP events, would mean either:
a) one or more extra groups, and at least one extra ice resurfacing... not just for the competitions, but also for every practice session. This would add a significant amount of time to the proceedings. Possibly not something the organisers or TV broadcasters would want, and also keeps the officials from their lobster and champagne dinners (do not underestimate the importance of this, they already reduced time for skaters to start, from 1 min to 30 secs, just to shave 5 or 6 minutes off the competitions). They could skip the extra resurfacing but that would be unfair and possibly even dangerous for the skaters. Or...
b) same number of groups but more skaters per group, meaning more skaters on the ice during warmups and practices. This would be dangerous and/or restrictive. And I note that 5 Ice Dance couples on the ice at once is already way too dangerous - I've seen for myself, the number of near misses or actual collisions...
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- Nov 13, 2012
Well, the question has arisen because in some of the big skating countries, really good skaters don't get enough senior A events to justify the season. We might have more senior ice dance teams and pairs teams hang in if they actually had a serious chance at getting two GP events, even if they won't go to Euros/4CC or Worlds...
BUT If we want to build a viewing audience in the smaller federations, they need to see that their skaters are in the Grand Prix events. Many only get just one outing. Need to see this an an essential investment to build the fan base outside the big skating countries....After all, if we think of World Cup cycling or skiing, do they only let in 12 competitors?
And if the minimum TES were set at the same threshold as Europeans/4CCs or a bit lower, it would ensure a reasonable level of competitiveness.
But, we are here in a Russian Ladies thread, so we don´t really care about small countries - we thing that current GP system is unfair to a FS powerhouse =P
The thing is, the tweaks that are suggested for GP circuit do not benefit the russian ladies - even if the number of competitors is increased, it comes with huge extra cost for the hosts, which means they will want either local skaters or host picks (which are commonly chosen to increase the chances of the home skaters to medal at home) - there is no point for a federation to spend extra money just to give all the ladies we love 2 GP spots, its not to their advantage.
Agree with virtually all of this. I'd hold or lower the current TES a bit for pairs and dance so that more couples qualify/get the motivation and let numbers increase that way. You do want the GP series to still be prestige events. The TES's for Europeans/4CC are quite low to allow lots and lots of smaller countries to put in entries and some of these wouldn't really be at the standard you would expect of a GP. However for Ladies/men you could probably hold them at same level as now, round about world champ level, there's quite a lot of small country skaters get the TES but don't get GP slots because there's too many other skaters ahead of them. Expanding numbers would help these a lot and also allow more deserving skaters who we might not otherwise see from bigger countries.
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Well I think it does help them because as earlier said you could soon end up with more Russian ladies qualified for the GPs than there are slots to accommodate them unless you end up with them all having 1 slot and no chance of them reaching the GPF etc. etc. Increasing the numbers per event to 18/4 per country gives 24 slots in theory which would hopefully be enough even for the legions of juniors coming through.
The cost is a concern but then it probably depends on how you expand the series. Currently there are 2 groups of 6, 5 and 4 for singles, dance and pairs and the question is whether you increase these to 3 i.e. 18 singles, 15 dance and 12 pairs. If you do this the number of skaters per event increases a lot from 60 to 90, but if you were to do it for singles only it would only be from 60 to 72 i.e. only a small marginal cost. OK this might seem unfair on dance/pairs but I imagine TV companies are far more interested in showing singles, notwithstanding certain pairs/dance couples in certain countries. Hence as stated earlier you could expand the singles for the time being and see how dance/pairs goes as and as more and more reach the minimum TES standard you can expand these as well i.e. not a one-off hit to the organisers but more gradual which I hope would be more acceptable, and as TGee has said hopefully expands the interest in smaller countries due to their skaters getting more representation.
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Agreed that perhaps this may need to be it's own new thread along the lines of "Should the number of entries at GP events be increased?" Not sure if it's been discussed before, but the GPs have come along way from the small invitationals that Skate America and Skate Canada International started with 40 years ago.
Actually, I do think more of the Russian women could get one or two GPs if there were 18 ladies per event. And not just by adding host picks for Rostelecom Cup.
And with the depth of field with the junior ladies soon to be competing as seniors, I do think it's an issue. I really don't want to see some of the senior Russian ladies shut out and pushed to premature retirement due to a "bad season" that leaves them with ISU rankings below the juniors. The Challenger senior Bs, on their own, do not have the status in the system or the strength on strength competition that is needed to help a skater reach national team level.
What would it mean if Yulia Lipnitskaya or Liza Tuk got one or no GPs next year? Not sure that none is a possible scenario, but one certainly...
I'm not worried about whether the Russian networks would broadcast a longer GP if there were more Russian women, I know that they will..and that will help the revenue base for all the host countries, but isn't enough on its own to make larger GP events viable in the long run.
But honestly, if we had a bigger global audience/market for figure skating, then the viability of the sport would increase which would help Russian skaters as well as the small country skaters. The SPs can be broadcast/streamed in a reasonable period of time even with three flights. And broadcasting the SPs and/or first flight of the freeskates on the ISU channel, where the broadcaster with the rights will only broadcast the top two flights of the freeskates, is a viable option that will build the audience.
As I've noted below, Skate Canada can get all the senior events completed in two days at nationals with the 18,18, 15, 15 allocations for entries, and a second rink available for practices.
Who would have anticipated 40 years ago that Japan would be one of the big skating countries? And would figure skating have survived if it was just Russia, Canada, and the United States..? And will there be a global fan base for Russian ladies who watch the GPs, as there is now, if the lack of slots means they disappear quickly to make room for the new up and coming skaters?
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