Dai: I love Dai. He is a fabulous performer, the best one competing right now. However, now that I've seen him live and healthy, I've changed my opinion on his skating skills. He's a solid skater, with decent basics, but he's not a great skater. He seems to work harder to gain speed than Hanyu and Patrick and even Jason Brown and his edges are short and quick and a bit shallow.
I agree with most of what you said regarding all the skaters, but I wouldn’t compare Takahashi’s speed to Jason Brown. I could see that Hanyu and Chan could accelerate in less than one second because they were indeed fast, but Jason… As much as I like him, I wouldn’t compare his skating skills with Takahashi’s. And how do you feel about Jeremy’s acceleration then? Was he fast or slow?
Olympia, from the competitions I watched live, I’d say that Kostner has better blade work than Asada. And if you like speed and accelerations, then Ando is faster than Asada.
wallylutz, are you trying to justify for the scoring? I don’t think we should try to do any justifications, because the more one tries to do this, the more questions arise.
1) I’m not surprised by their TES, since the protocals already tell us clearly why Hanyu beat Javier in TES four consecutive times. I’m only surprised that Javier received higher PCS than Hanyu four consecutive times. If it weren’t for Javier’s overscored PCS, then Hanyu would’ve been on podium yesterday.
SS is not the only component - it merely counts for 20% of the total PCS.
2) If this is true, then I understand why people in this thread are infuriated by Chan’s PCS higher than Takahashi’s. Many posters in this thread tried to justify that Chan skated faster than Takahashi and had better SS, so his PCS was rightfully higher than takahashi’s. But if SS merely counts for 20% of the total PCS, then Chan’s IN, PE, and CH should be arguably lower than Takahashi’s. But that was not how the judges scored.
So I hope we don’t get into the whole justification issue. I was excited to see your report and just tried to share my feeling.
Suffice to say, SS isn't static and can very improve from SP to LP. In Javier's case, that is indeed the case. While he was noticeably slow in the SP, he had better speed in the LP.
3) Yet his PCS (39.07) was 3 points higher than Hanyu’s (36.07) in the SP! When I saw them skating live, Javier was sooo slow in the SP, while Hanyu was faster than Jeremy and had a good flow. Maybe he wasn’t as fast on Friday due to the sprained ankle, but still should be much faster than Javier. And Javier did not have that many more transitions than Hanyu. So if the PCS were scored correctly in the SP, then Javier would not have gotten the 3-point margin over Hanyu. Remember Javier edged Hanyu by only 1.73 points overall, so that 3-point PCS margin in SP made the difference between 3rd and 4th places.
4) When I saw Javier skating live last time, he was definitely slower than Hanyu throughout the whole LP. He especially showed weaknesses in skating skills during the footworks, as compared to Jeremy and Hanyu. Maybe Javier has improved a lot over the short period and actually skated much faster yesterday (which I don’t think so based on watching TV), but even with his “improvement” he still should not have received higher SS mark than Hanyu’s. But in fact, Javier’s SS mark was not only higher than Hanyu’s but very close to Jeremy’s.
SS marks in LP:
Jeremy: 8.36
Javier: 8.21
Hanyu: 8.04
Brezina: 7.54
Javier’s SS (and IN and PE) are actually on the same range with Brezina’s and should they should have received similar PCS, so it’s difficult for me to rationalize why Javier has been so boosted. Such boost is incorrect for various reasons:
--I know Javier is a very easy-going and hard-working person. I really want him to improve and become a real all-round skater, but if he continues to get such generous marks then it’s not going to help him at all.
--For the past few years ISU has been trying to educate the audience that a skater needs to have skating skills of Chan and Takahashi in order to score high on PCS. Then all of a sudden it starts to reward generous marks to Javier, someone with mediocre skating skills. ISU is self-contradictory here.
--This is so unfair to other skaters who worked hard on their skating skills—
not just Hanyu but also Jeremy, who deserved a larger margin between his PCS and Javier’s. And think about someone like
Kozuka, who was lowballed for such a long time. Then all of a sudden ISU tells him that Javier should consistently get 81s in PCS for his inferior skating skills.
How are you so sure he'll use former agents??? Are you a CIA agent investigating this story????
besides he competed at the exact same time that the football match between Real Madrid and Barcelona. The country basically collapses when one of these matches happen, and of course, today everybody is talking about it. Anyway Javier has got some mentions in the news, and I should be happy with that.
So it's a moving target with no consistency to the claim. I think the credibility of the "plaintiffs" suffer greatly when their primary claim keeps changing. But I also suspect they know their claims can't withstand scrutiny when examined rigorously, hence that's why they prefer to keep their complaints vague.
