- Joined
- Oct 25, 2012
- Country
-
Thanks for the interview link.
Hey, don't worry. You are one person that I trust to give reliable information!
Now for my long overdue Dance predictions.
Dance was the most difficult category to do. And what didn’t help was that, instead of starting into it on Tuesday night, I thought “I won’t have time to do it all tonight, and I can’t be bothered opening all the Bios tonight and then opening them all again tomorrow. I’ll do it all in one go in the morning”. And come Wednesday morning, all the profiles I was looking for on Stats On Ice were coming up with 404 errors!
So, I was only able to sort them by ISU PB, rather than by the absolute PB’s that I prefer to use.
All things being equal, we should know who should be on the podium. BUT, Papadakis and Cizeron are only coming back from injury, and we have no idea what form they are likely to be in. I was hoping that they might have done a sneaky competition that had gone under my radar but not Curran Oi’s. But, alas, I couldn’t check.
So, I decided to be cautious and put Anna and Luca on top. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to drop Gabriella and Guillaume down too much, just in case they are back to full form. So, I put them in second. And then Team Beaver.
I was happy enough to keep Guignard / Fabbri in fourth place. They have been working so hard this season, entering as many competitions as they can. Hey, they were even leading the ISU Season’s World Rankings for a long time, purely because of the sheer number of competitions they had done. However, there is a concern that this could work against them. They might start suffering from burn out. But, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
After this, it is the Hunger Games. There are so many couples who are capable of claiming the remaining 2 positions in the Top 6! The couples from 5th right down to 20th by ISU PB order could finish in any position!
And I go down that far because, from looking them up during the Nationals Game, I remember that a lot of the couples have absolute PB’s that are a LOT higher than their ISU PB’s. And before anybody says “Nationals Inflation”, it is not just scores from Nationals that we are talking about. A lot of them were from Senior B internationals.
But I can’t look them up! :hairpull:
In the end, I took the easy way out and put the 2 remaining Russian couples in my Top 6. This involved moving Tobias / Tkachenko behind Stepanova / Bukin, but their ISU PB’s are practically identical so there was no need to feel guilty.
I also moved Coomes / Buckland up ahead of Tobias / Tkachenko. Penny and Nick’s ISU PB was 2 points behind Isabella and Ilia’s, but the English couple are far higher up than the Israeli couple in both ISU World Standings and ISU World Rankings.
For the rest of the couples, I did take into consideration the ISU PB’s and World Rankings. But I also looked back to the predictions I made for 4 Nationals, German and Italian Championships, and at the outcomes of those competitions. And I fed these into my predictions for Euros.
To be totally honest, I did push some couples out of the Top 15 purely because I was not as familiar with them as I am with some of the couples below them. And that is why I like being able to check the data, so that I can get an idea of what these couples that I am not familiar with are like.
I can tell you something, I am never letting myself get into this position again. In future, I am not going to wait for the Final Entry Lists to be published. I am going to make predictions based on the Provisional Entry Lists, and hope that there are not changes. And I am certainly not going to leave finishing off predictions until the morning an event starts, just in case any of the information I want to use is not able to be accessed.
It isn’t as much fun using the scientific method when you know that the absolute PB order is significantly different to the ISU PB order, but you can’t check it.
And it definitely isn’t as much fun when you are finalising your predictions half an hour before the segment starts!
I'll start on my Pairs predictions this afternoon in between the Short Dance And the Men's Free, and post it when it is finished (probably tomorrow morning).
Caroliza_fan
EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIPS
Ice Dance
1. Anna CAPPELLINI / Luca LANOTTE, ITA
2. Gabriella PAPADAKIS / Guillaume CIZERON, FRA
3. Ekaterina BOBROVA / Dmitri SOLOVIEV, RUS
4. Charlene GUIGNARD / Marco FABBRI, ITA
5. Victoria SINITSINA / Nikita KATSALAPOV, RUS
6. Alexandra STEPANOVA / Ivan BUKIN, RUS
Just for fun
7. Penny COOMES / Nicholas BUCKLAND, GBR
8. Isabella TOBIAS / Ilia TKACHENKO, ISR
9. Laurence FOURNIER BEAUDRY / Nikolaj SORENSEN, DEN
10. Alisa AGAFONOVA / Alper UCAR, TUR
11. Federica TESTA / Lukas CSOLLEY, SVK
12. Natalia KALISZEK / Maksim SPODIREV, POL
13. Cortney MANSOUR / Michal CESKA, CZE
14. Viktoria KAVALIOVA / Yurii BIELIAIEV, BLR
15. Kavita LORENZ / Panagiotis POLIZOAKIS, GER
arty:
rest of you 
)
I guess thank you everyone who bombed more than me 
)