Well if pre-rotation is fine as long as the toe pick skate doesn't actually face directly forward, then it's fine (I assume there's no GOE penalty for it until it gets counted as cheated). And now looking at the videos, if someone starts saying that pre-rotation (less than facing directly forward) does count as an under-rotated jump ("<"), I can quickly pull out gifs of other skaters at the Olympics such as Kostner whose toe picks were nearly facing directly forward when they left the ice, but weren't called for under-rotation.
Here's an
example of a double toe that is clearly prerotated to take off facing forward (toe axel). You don't see that very often at the elite level -- this is clearly a mistake, not the skater's usual technique.
That's the point though -- if fans start arguing that it was just slightly above a quarter turn under-rotated using slow motion, then it's just a matter of pointing out the part about benefit of the doubt in the rules.
Yes, I think we pretty much agree about the overreaching arguments.
Is it because elite skaters usually don't pre-rotate past directly forward, or is it because they do but judges will usually ignore it?
They don't usually rotate past forward, as far as I can tell in real time.
In other words, if the judges gave a 9 for a component in a close competition, I wouldn't find people arguing it should really have been 8.75 or 9.25 to be particularly persuasive, and if that's enough to make the difference in the rankings, then I would just take the scores to be a toss-up in the first place. If some people started arguing that the skater should have gotten a 6 instead, I don't think (or at least I hope not) people could give convincing arguments why the skater deserved a 6 while some other people simultaneously gave convincing arguments why it should have been a 9. Or are the PCS scores really that subjective that this wide of a range is acceptable? I always thought people would generally agree within half a point or a point or so.
This would be an interesting discussion to have -- choose a few programs, and discuss how we would score the program components and why. See if we change our minds by more than 0.5 after reading others' reasonings.
I think there's usually pretty good agreement among experts about the skating skills, although there are exceptions. That can be the hardest component to analyze on video because some of the qualities (speed, flow, the kinds of sounds or lack thereof that the blades make) are much more obvious in person, especially up close. But that's where all judges should have similar training in how to evaluate the skills.
Different judges, or fans, might take different approaches to how to come up with numbers for the other components. Do they just start with the SS score and go up or down from there? If so, do they try to go up and down in increments of 0.25 or whole points? Do they start with a different component? Which criteria in a component such as Performance/Execution or Choreography do they give the most weight to? E.g., some judges, or fans, might put a lot of emphasis on body line, or lack of obvious mistakes, or having a coherent theme to the program, whereas others might put more emphasis on emotional connection to the audience or complex patterning over the ice surface.
So if there were a skater who has excellent skating skills worth 9s, but was significantly bowlegged with bad posture and a generic, albeit well phrased and well patterned, program to generic music, a judge or fan who likes to spread his/her marks and severely punish those particular deficiencies might score this skater as low as 6 for PE or CH, whereas more conservative scorers who put more weight on areas that happen to be this skater's strengths might stay in the 8s for those components. The scoring system will average them out, but those two judges/fans would probably have to have a pretty in-depth discussion about this skater's strengths and weaknesses before they would convince each other that their initial scores had been overly harsh or overly generous, respectively.
As long as everyone respects each others' opinions, I love those kinds of discussions.
Trying to educate myself, though.
