Replying to CanadianSkaterGuy's post here:
Well, you're talking about it being a good strategy points-wise. I'm talking about performances I'd like to see, and my conclusion is that I don't want to see more failed quad attempts. I don't, personally, find anything impressive about "attempting" five quads if you fail on three of them. At the end of the day, you still only completed two clean quads over someone else who planned three quads and completed all three. And you've likely got a crappier performance as well because of all the falls/stumbles/hand-downs. Of course, I have no medals to hand out, so skaters aren't exactly going to listen to me.
But even in terms of points, attempting more quads isn't always a good idea. You could end up expending so much energy on the quads that you end up missing the other elements. You can see this from someone like Javi (who is probably the best current quad jumper)--landing more quads than his competitors but losing because he messed up something else.
I dunno, maybe I'm too old-school. I love quads but I think they should be high-risk, high-reward. I feel like the low-risk, high-reward COP has... almost ruined quads for me. It's not exciting anymore when you know that a skater can go down on a quad and still be fine. There's nothing impressive about being a risk-taker anymore, because frankly there's not enough risk in the scores. When going down on a quad is fairly okay, of course everybody and their pet cat (or pet Godzilla) attempts the quad.
Well, you're talking about it being a good strategy points-wise. I'm talking about performances I'd like to see, and my conclusion is that I don't want to see more failed quad attempts. I don't, personally, find anything impressive about "attempting" five quads if you fail on three of them. At the end of the day, you still only completed two clean quads over someone else who planned three quads and completed all three. And you've likely got a crappier performance as well because of all the falls/stumbles/hand-downs. Of course, I have no medals to hand out, so skaters aren't exactly going to listen to me.
But even in terms of points, attempting more quads isn't always a good idea. You could end up expending so much energy on the quads that you end up missing the other elements. You can see this from someone like Javi (who is probably the best current quad jumper)--landing more quads than his competitors but losing because he messed up something else.
I dunno, maybe I'm too old-school. I love quads but I think they should be high-risk, high-reward. I feel like the low-risk, high-reward COP has... almost ruined quads for me. It's not exciting anymore when you know that a skater can go down on a quad and still be fine. There's nothing impressive about being a risk-taker anymore, because frankly there's not enough risk in the scores. When going down on a quad is fairly okay, of course everybody and their pet cat (or pet Godzilla) attempts the quad.