ISU VP Lakernik: № of quads may be limited | Page 3 | Golden Skate

ISU VP Lakernik: № of quads may be limited

12 minutes = 48 CM (if the CM is 15 sec) or 24 CM (if the CM is 30 secs)
If it’s true that the Japanese federation requested that... then it totally makes sense per their viewpoint. Their CMs are packed on tivi.

That... actually makes sense. I hate it, but "our biggest buyer wants to make more money" makes much more sense than "12 minutes less will make watching more bearable for spectators". But... if a competition was indeed shortened altogether, where would the tv station place those extra ads? At the beginning and ending? Would that really make any difference for them? I'm confused as to how it's work.
 
I like diversity of programs. I like variety and I don't mind the trade-off. Yes, you probably sacrifice some artistry to get the athletic feat - but that's OK for me. Ideally judges would settle that tradeoff using GOE and PCS. The technical and artistic sides of the sport are always somewhat in contest with each other. But, at the end of the day, this is still a sport and I think we should be receptive to allow technical skates. Very few skaters artistry is so bad that I don't think a marvelous athletic feat should be disallowed or discounted. You really wouldn't want to see someone with two quads axels in a program if they could do it?

Ideally though it shouldn't be like that. The two sides should work together, not against each other. There aren't many skaters who can do both remarkably, but the few who do are truly the best the sport has. I always like to see skaters like Boyang, for example, who has very good jumps, but is also actively working on improving all the other aspects of his performance. Though I have to agree that limiting the number/repetition of quads also rubs me the wrong way, it just goes against the idea of what sport is. And there are better ways to encourage skaters to improve artistically than limiting tech.
 
I'll run out of here before the tomatoes start getting thrown, but I'm not all that impressed with any of the current men artistically. I'd only rank two of them as quite good, but not great, and the rest of the elite competitors mostly average. Perhaps you have a different assessment of that so we diverge on that opinion of the tradeoff, but that's probably why I'm more receptive to athletic skates since I'm not all that wowed with what anyone is doing on the artistic side currently in mens (and don't get me started on how much worse women's is lol).

Not really a different assessment. I just think it's harder to work on both, and so they should be made to.
 
So we will never see quad toe - quad toe ever?
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the men also losing a jumping pass with the shortened LP? (Not sure about pairs.)

Dumb to limit quads to one attempt per type of quad per program. Totally unnecessary. People are doing more diverse quads than ever before - we do NOT need to encourage diversity of quads even more.

If we want to reduce the number of falls, penalize them more harshly. That's it. The new GOE scale will only work if it is applied correctly.

I thought he made a very good point about backloading re: Alina's Worlds LP.
 
So we will never see quad toe - quad toe ever?

Well, there really isn't any incentive to do it under the current system anyway, so I don't think we would in competition anyway. Though maybe someone will do it just for the lolz :rofl:
 
Well, maybe this will encourage Nathan to finally bust out 5 different quad types in his freeskate! :biggrin:

4Z+3T
4F
4L
4S
4T
3A+L+3S
3A+3T

:laugh:

I'm not a fan of limiting quads to one attempt per type.
 
That... actually makes sense. I hate it, but "our biggest buyer wants to make more money" makes much more sense than "12 minutes less will make watching more bearable for spectators". But... if a competition was indeed shortened altogether, where would the tv station place those extra ads? At the beginning and ending? Would that really make any difference for them? I'm confused as to how it's work.
Japan was the fed fighting hardest against the time cut. They were okay with the removal of a jumping pass but felt the time shouldn’t be removed, as the remaining 30 seconds were needed to give skaters a chance to show their personality. So I’m surprised to see them blamed. USFSA was definitely not dying on this hill, however....

ISU wants shorter competitions. Broadcasters generally want competitions with easy to programme advertisement breaks. Judges, technical panels, staff, even fans get tired. ISU lopped 30 seconds off the two free skates that run past four minutes, regardless of whether it’s a good idea, simply because that’s where there’s “extra” time that can be cut.
 
For me, all this looks like they want FS to not be an Olympic Sport anymore.

Most suggestions seem tailored to give more freedom to judges to score stuff in a weird way. For instance, GOE, its not like they will have to explain why they gave a +2 here and a +5 there. If a Flutz is not called, that could be quite a massive score difference for example.
Not encouraging stuff that raises BV, such as quads and backloading (whatever you guys say about backloading, it pushes the SPORT forward by forcing skaters to learn harder jumps to counter that).
 
Japan was the fed fighting hardest against the time cut. They were okay with the removal of a jumping pass but felt the time shouldn’t be removed, as the remaining 30 seconds were needed to give skaters a chance to show their personality. So I’m surprised to see them blamed. USFSA was definitely not dying on the this hill, however....

ISU wants shorter competitions. Broadcasters generally want competitions with easy to programme advertisement breaks. Judges, technical panels, staff, even fans get tired. ISU lopped 30 seconds off the two free skates that run past four minutes, regardless of whether it’s a good idea, simply because that’s where there’s “extra” time that can be cut.

how do we know Japan was against this?
 
Japan was the fed fighting hardest against the time cut. They were okay with the removal of a jumping pass but felt the time shouldn’t be removed, as the remaining 30 seconds were needed to give skaters a chance to show their personality. So I’m surprised to see them blamed. USFSA was definitely not dying on the this hill, however....

ISU wants shorter competitions. Broadcasters generally want competitions with easy to programme advertisement breaks. Judges, technical panels, staff, even fans get tired. ISU lopped 30 seconds off the two free skates that run past four minutes, regardless of whether it’s a good idea, simply because that’s where there’s “extra” time that can be cut.
The Japanese tech specialist at WC this year (miss Okabe or something sorry I don’t have time to check right now) said it’s the JSF’s idea to cut 30 seconds for the men FS.
 
Japan was the fed fighting hardest against the time cut. They were okay with the removal of a jumping pass but felt the time shouldn’t be removed, as the remaining 30 seconds were needed to give skaters a chance to show their personality.

I remember reading that, but I can't for the love of me remember where. Could anyone link me?
 
The Japanese tech specialist at WC this year (miss Okabe or something sorry I don’t have time to check right now) said it’s the JSF’s idea to cut 30 seconds for the men FS.

Then who knows. Someone is lying. I can’t find the original post sourcing the claim regarding the Japanese fed being against the time cut (I think it was shortly after Hanyu won the OGM and may have been in his FF? But the search terms return a lot of hits even narrowing the date range), nor can I read Japanese; regardless, I’m not sure I’d take either claim at full value. I don’t start from the assumption that everyone or anything is 100% true, so much as x% “probably true” based on their track record, credibility, motivation to lie, etc. And I adjust values accordingly.

As far as I can tell, the time cut decision was made not so much by the feds but by ISU as an institution. While it’s true it still has to be voted on, ISU really isn’t going to allow failure here. There’s a variety of interest groups in multiple nations that might be benefited by the time cut, so the reasoning that was used to support the plausibility for Japan wanting more ads also works for the USA, for example. Who knows? We probably never will. I don’t doubt the reporting from WC18; I just don’t ... find it 100% credible. Had a fed’s technical specialist made the same comment six or nine months ago when it was less certain that the men were losing thirty seconds in the free skate, that would have been a bombshell; at this point, any member of any fed can claim theirs was the one who came up with the idea because it’s not a secret. (Which is basically why I’m not blown away by her comment, as anyone here can claim to be USFSA or to have inside knowledge of a given fed and name them as the culprit and sound quite credible. That... is not a high enough bar for open-source information, even when talking to someone who actually is a credible source, as in this case.)
 
Going back to the pair conversation, how are they expecting pairs to do their long programs in 4 minutes with the current set of required elements? Are they planning to cut a lift or a spin (and have that element in the SP only)? Are they planning to simplify some elements? Have they thought this through or is this an issue that they will tackle later?
 
I copy my post from another thread. Yukiko Okabe talked about the rule change here, it was broadcasted on March.9. Her comments start around 45:00.

https://twitter.com/momohanbin/status/972687150851371008

・The length of Men's FS was decided to be 4 minutes from now of 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Japan was opposed to this idea (the opinions of the coaches and teachers were the last 30 seconds of the program was very important to show the judges what the skaters were capable of doing to win), but other countries wanted the elements of the program be condensed in 4 minutes and to make the time length equal to the ladies' FS, and the major reason was said to be they wanted to make the time length of the whole competition shorter.
 
Expanding the GOE to +/- 5 will just give the judges another tool to favor certain skaters. If Lakernik was really the architect of the IJS, his suggestions for positive change have no more credibility than the deeply flawed system he created. What real difference will a time cut make for improving performance? Maybe if instead they made PCS a little more holistic so that skaters would not feel the need to be so busy all the time, the extra time could be used for more artistic moves like spread eagles and footwork actually choreographed to the music. Likewise, for ladies, maybe we would start seeing spirals held for more than 2 seconds and Ina Bauers done for artistic rather than point-getting reasons. The most over-rated score is transitions, in my opinion. It drives the entire PCS score and is often duplicative of GOE which gives points for difficult entries. Get rid of that score and make it a feature in composition/choreo along with balance of elements. Somewhere, include artistry in the second mark. And make the second mark simpler, with fewer components--maybe just presentation, composition/choreo and skating skills.
 
As Yuzuru said: "It doesn’t matter if the rules change, I’ll just win again under the new rules” :coffee:
 
I copy my post from another thread. Yukiko Okabe talked about the rule change here, it was broadcasted on March.9. Her comments start around 45:00.

https://twitter.com/momohanbin/status/972687150851371008

・The length of Men's FS was decided to be 4 minutes from now of 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Japan was opposed to this idea (the opinions of the coaches and teachers were the last 30 seconds of the program was very important to show the judges what the skaters were capable of doing to win), but other countries wanted the elements of the program be condensed in 4 minutes and to make the time length equal to the ladies' FS, and the major reason was said to be they wanted to make the time length of the whole competition shorter.
Thank you so much! This is the post I was looking for!

Oops. 😇

(100% teasing, no harm meant!)

ETA: As far as limiting quads, I think it’s a stupid proposal and there was a robust discussion as to why in the scoring changes thread, starting around here. I think the possibility it passes is probably higher than some assume. As for what would happen if quad types were limited to one rep ... you’d get a bipolar distribution of benefits, probably, and I can think of two groups who would benefit (though even the two that benefit don’t benefit equally — it’s more of a “wins, doesn’t necessarily win but doesn’t lose, and loses” outcome), while one group would be harmed. But there’s still significant variance due to how the new scoring will work, so even within “winners” and “losers,” it’s not a uniform distribution of benefits. The potential volatility of the new system is underappreciated, in my opinion, and the risk-reward game could be massive.
 
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