Generally, the judges don’t talk to each other during scoring, but tech referees sometimes do.
I think the judges are forbidden to discuss the scores during the competition? The tech panel has to discuss the decisions and for that they have headphones with mics. Some panels talk a lot and then some not, depends on the persons and their preferences, I guess?
I think it's interesting how some people have alluded to results being decided beforehand or scores being given so that the ISU/organizers/whoever gets a result they want and not what should be in the writer's opinion. I personally am often in agreement with the final results especially if the score sheets reveal a seemingly fair TES evaluation but sometimes wonder about how skaters get particularly high/low PCS scores (but if the same keeps happening over the years, I just have to accept that what I like/dislike in some skater is not an opinion shared by judges).
I don't think, however, that the end result of any competition (expect maybe in ice dance
) can be decided before the competition happens.
In singles and pairs there are quite a few things that can go wrong even with the best and most consistent skaters so that it is difficult to predict the outcome of a performance and score it in such a way that you end up with a predetermined list. The end result can be decided by tenths and even hundreths, so how can you manipulate decisions of the TP and the 9 person panel in just 2-3 minutes times to get to a predetermined result? It would probably require a supercomputer to predict and determine the scores whilst the skater is still on ice and then those scores would have to be relayed to the judges somehow - I don't think anyone has ever seen the panel wearing ear buttons? Not to mention that the majority of the judges should then meekly comply with the suggestions...
The judges give a huge number of scores in each competition that keeping track of what each skater has gotten before and what is still to come would require meticulous bookkeeping by each judge which they really have no time to do. The screens do not allow them to access the leaderboard AFAIK so they cannot check the standings even during warm-ups (some info could be gathered during resurfacing breaks but even then you still have at least 8/10/12 skaters/teams to score afterwards). I cannot remember seeing phones on the tables either. After all, that kind of activity would be visible to the audience and people would start commenting on it pretty quickly, I think.
The time of anonymous judging was bad, of course - I don't know if even the ISU had access to who gave the scores? But you can see from eg the Skating Score's national bias charts that that practice has not been rooted out by the knowing which judge gave which scores. The panels also most times include judges from the most important nations, often reps for rival skaters/teams, so that I really would like to see how the predetermined lists were decided so that everyone in the panel(s) would agree to do it. Or even that the majority would agree to do it.
Then there has been talk of the tech panel which actually has quite a lot of power in their hands since they decide the levels and call mistakes etc. And they have in their disposal not always great material to make those decisions - the one camera angle can be unclear for edge and/or rotation calls. Plus there is a slight tendency at least to look harder at "usual suspects" ie skaters who are known to have problems with certain key aspects. The mistakes made by those who are perceived to be technically correct are not perhaps noticed unless they're very clear. The TP is supposed to composed of independent ISU reps, they do not represent countries, but eg national bias is hard to erase, I think.
I was partly insprired to write this based on Shin Amano's work in the TP of the European's men's competition where the TP was calling seemingly every edge and rotation call - only 4/24 men had no calls in the free. It is annoying that each panel - judges and techies - works a little differently and the results can be very lenient or very strict. How much this makes a difference in the final outcome is more difficult to determine, but eg lack of rotation calls can mean a lot of points gained in the final TES.
E
!!!
). Like step sequences: used to be that if you had the 2 clusters, you were getting lv3/4 anyway, now I’m seeing more and more that tech panels are paying more attention to the complexity/body movement criteria as well.
