Backloading: What should ISU do?

gkelly · Nov 8, 2017

Eclair said:
I don't want to see a dozen of skaters doing it and loosing viewers. What I want is PREVENTING skaters from thinking that putting all their jumps in one half (doesn't matter if it's first or second) is a good idea.

There are many things I don't especially enjoy seeing skaters doing. Sometimes some of those skaters win. Should the ISU make rules against all of them?

What if something that's a pet peeve of mine is one of your favorite aspects, and something that you really dislike is one of my favorites? Who decides what to reward, what to penalize, what to ban, what to leave to the discretion of individual judges?

(Well, I think the ISU technical committee decides. Based on what? should they just follow their own preferences? Poll international judges? International-level skaters and coaches? Diehard fans wholove to debate online? Thats easy' -- just read the forums. casual fans? lower level competitors and coaches?)

Eclair · Nov 8, 2017

gkelly said:
There are many things I don't especially enjoy seeing skaters doing. Sometimes some of those skaters win. Should the ISU make rules against all of them?

What if something that's a pet peeve of mine is one of your favorite aspects, and something that you really dislike is one of my favorites? Who decides what to reward, what to penalize, what to ban, what to leave to the discretion of individual judges?

(Well, I think the ISU technical committee decides. Based on what? should they just follow their own preferences? Poll international judges? International-level skaters and coaches? Diehard fans wholove to debate online? Thats easy' -- just read the forums. casual fans? lower level competitors and coaches?)

I don't think ANYONE thinks that putting all jumps into one half makes a program beautiful. I'd even go as far as to say that EVERYONE agrees that putting all jumps in one half is generally not a good idea. And you have to find someone who says, that putting all jump in one half is his favourite aspect of someone's skating.

The rule for the bonus in the second half was supposed to encourage skaters NOT putting everything into one half. Adding a rule that discourages putting all jumps into the second half would be enforcing the original thought of the second half bonus rule, which is to achieve a balanced program.

moriel · Nov 8, 2017

Eclair said:
I don't think ANYONE thinks that putting all jumps into one half makes a program beautiful. I'd even go as far as to say that EVERYONE agrees that putting all jumps in one half is generally not a good idea. And you have to find someone who says, that putting all jump in one half is his favourite aspect of someone's skating.

The rule for the bonus in the second half was supposed to encourage skaters NOT putting everything into one half. Adding a rule that discourages putting all jumps into the second half would be enforcing the original thought of the second half bonus rule, which is to achieve a balanced program.

Sorry for popping your bubble.

I actually think that.
Putting all jumps into one half can make a beautiful program. While I think Alina's program lacks a bit of polish, I really like it.
Overall, with all jumps in second half, the first half looks pretty interesting artistically. Since the jumps come later, a beautiful step sequence, for example, couldnt be ruined because skater just splatted and is too upset to properly perform.

While I probably wouldnt like all programs 100% backloaded, I would really like to see more backloaded programs.

Mathman · Nov 8, 2017

gkelly said:
There are many things I don't especially enjoy seeing skaters doing. Sometimes some of those skaters win. Should the ISU make rules against all of them?

If the bonus rule were relaxed to provide a bonus for at most four (the highest-valued four) of the jumps in the second half, that would not constitute a rule preventing backloading. Alina Zagitova could present her exact same beautiful program; the only difference would be that she would get 3 extra points instead of 4. I do not see what would be so awful about such a tweak in the rules.

The judges could still give out GOEs and PCSs as they thought the performance deserved.

Blades of Passion · Nov 8, 2017

Regardless of what your personal preference is about an unbalanced jump layout aesthetically, the fact is that the bonus is supposed to reward jumps that are late in a program when the skater has already expended a good deal of energy. Doing 1 spin and a footwork sequence is not enough content for someone to deserve a bonus for jumps. In Zagitova's program the "second half" of her program really doesn't start until after the first two jump elements. At that point of her program she has executed the amount of content everyone else has in their normal "first half".

This also shows why the bonus for the SP is especially ridiculous with the current rules. At this point in ladies skating, the backloading rule only restricts choreography, forcing everyone to put most or all of their jumps in the "second half". This is not the way it should be and I'm so tried of seeing the current program layouts. Nearly everyone does jump/spin/spin in the first half of their SP, or they fully backload like Medvedeva/Zagitova and do spin+footwork as the first half, and then all 3 of the jumps in a row afterward. ENOUGH.

gkelly · Nov 8, 2017

Trends may have changed this fall. I'm not going to search through all the GP and Senior B protocols so far this season to check.

As of 2017 Worlds, for which we have 37 recent ladies' short programs detailed all in one place (http://www.isuresults.com/results/season1617/wc2017/wc2017_Ladies_SP_Scores.pdf),

of those 37, 27 started with the jump combination, or 28 if you count the last-place skater who fell on all her jumps and had the first one called as the combo.

One skater (Medvedeva) had all three of her SP jumps in the second half. Of the remaining 36, 16 had two jumps in the bonus, 20 had one jump in the bonus, and 0 had no jumps in the bonus.

So that's more backloading, or at least less frontloading, than before the short program bonus was instituted. Nevertheless, slightly over half the jumps executed that day did not earn bonuses.

drivingmissdaisy · Nov 8, 2017

Mathman said:
If the bonus rule were relaxed to provide a bonus for at most four (the highest-valued four) of the jumps in the second half, that would not constitute a rule preventing backloading. Alina Zagitova could present her exact same beautiful program; the only difference would be that she would get 3 extra points instead of 4. I do not see what would be so awful about such a tweak in the rules.

The judges could still give out GOEs and PCSs as they thought the performance deserved.

If I calculated this correctly, Alina got a bit less than 4.5 points from bonus in the CoC LP. She got less than 2 points more in bonus than Wakaba, who has 4 passes in bonus. It seems that the bonus really will have an impact only in close competitions, as was the case in CoC but usually isn't. Evgenia and Alina are crushing it because most of the other skaters can't do solid jumps in the LP, not because of the bonus (most of the time).

Mathman · Nov 8, 2017

drivingmissdaisy said:
Evgenia and Alina are crushing it because most of the other skaters can't do solid jumps in the LP, not because of the bonus (most of the time).

All the more reason why we needn't be hanging onto the current bonus rule like it is the Bible.

Baron Vladimir · Nov 8, 2017

gkelly said:
If you believe that judges are supposed to be penalizing programs that group all the jumps together in time and are now wrongly ignoring it, where does that belief derive from?

There is nothing explicit there about the temporal layout of the elements, unlike the specific references to "every angle in a 360- degree skater viewer relationship" and "interesting and meaningful variety of patterns and directions of travel" that would apply to the spatial layout.

http://usfigureskating.org/content/ISU program-component-chart_sandp-and-id_08-16.pdf

I was trying to explain again and again that balanced programme in Figure Skating only refers to usage of ice rink and ice surface, but it planned out people dont want to hear what really balanced programme means.. they were just wrongly exploiting the word 'balance' in order to bash the skater who is winning (and judges cause they didn't penalize that).... Thanks for being a voice of reason, again :bow:

Shayuki · Nov 8, 2017

They could increase the bonus for backloading to 0.15 instead of 0.1 so that more skaters would be tempted to use the most beautiful jump layout.

drivingmissdaisy · Nov 8, 2017

Mathman said:
All the more reason why we needn't be hanging onto the current bonus rule like it is the Bible.

I agree, although I do think that anytime you add complexity to a rulebook there should be a very good reason to do so. The bonus for late program triples is a good reason. Modifying the rule to encourage late program triples, but not too many late program triples, may or may not be.

gkelly · Nov 8, 2017

I don't think that there is a single most beautiful program layout.

I don't think that there is a single most well-balanced number of jumps or number of spins that a free skate program should contain. I'd prefer to have some flexibility in how many of each can earn points. However, I have no evidence that anyone at the ISU agrees with me on that point.

I don't think that technical elements should always outweigh program components, or that program components should always outweigh technical elements. I expect that sometimes the winners will be stronger in one, sometimes the other, sometimes as evenly balanced as possible.

I do expect that skaters who are strong in most areas should have an advantage over those who excel in one area and are deficient in another. Another way in which a program can be "unbalanced" or lack proportion would be to have excellent spins and weak jumps, or vice versa. Or excellent TES and weak PCS or vice versa.

One thing I love about this sport is that there are so many different and in some cases contradictory aspects that go into making a good performance that different skaters can deserve to win for different reasons. I want to encourage diversity of approaches, as long as they're not seriously unbalanced approaches. NOT to determine one best way and try to make every skater fit into a predetermined ideal.

So I'd like to see either more kinds of automatic rewards built into the system to encourage different kinds of athletic, technical, and performance strengths, or else to allow judges the flexibility to reward what impresses them in each of the scoring areas.

Bcash · Nov 8, 2017

gkelly said:
I think it's important to remember that skating judging -- especially judging of freeskating as opposed to school figures -- developed as an oral tradition that has gotten written down into rules and guidelines over the decades, with a big step forward into more detailed codification with the adoption of the IJS.

Under 6.0 there were only ever a couple of pages of guidelines for judging all aspects of the two scores.

Under IJS there are more detailed rules, but they do not attempt to cover every single aspect of a program that a knowledgeable judge (or other observer) might consider when evaluating a performance, nor to dictate which aspects of the various component scores should be given more or less weight. There is room for disagreement built in. And the mental scales about what each of the numbers 0-10 mean will be based largely on oral tradition of judges comparing their impressions thousands of skaters they have seen over their judging careers with the ways other judges also use the criteria and apply their own expertise. No two individuals will have the exact same history or the exact same ways of translating words into numbers, so we're never going to see identical scores from all judges.

And that's not a bad thing. Nine judges will bring more combined expertise and a broader combined perspective than any individual, even the most knowledgeable and rigorous and perceptive and honest individual possible, ever could.

"Broken" implies that the system was at one time intact/functional and that something has gone wrong to disrupt the healthy system.

If the idea is that subjectivity is the problem and the ideal would be complete objectivity, complete agreement between judges, complete documentation of every thought process that goes into every score, then there was never an ideal that worked once at least in theory and then got broken.

If anything, in terms of those values, IJS is a big improvement over ordinal judging, and most (but not all, IMO) of the tweaks to the rules over the last 15 years have been incremental improvements to the original system.

So rather than saying the system is currently broken, I think it would be more accurate to say that it is not currently working as well as it could or should. The ideal that it should be aiming for is somewhere in an imagined future, not an actual past.

However, that still leaves the question as to whether all subjective evaluation is by definition a problem that should be rooted out, or whether it's inherent in the nature of what's being evaluated.

It's one thing to measure exactly how fast a skater was going or exactly how many degrees of rotation a jump attained in the air between the instant the blades leaves the ice and touches back down again. Someday we may have feasible means to measure those technical aspects 100% accurately and objectively.

But there's no way to measure on an objective scale how well a skater projects to the spectators or how well a program construction reflects the music or demonstrates "balance."

If you believe that judges are supposed to be penalizing programs that group all the jumps together in time and are now wrongly ignoring it, where does that belief derive from?

When it comes to the question of program construction (the Choreography or Composition component), there never has been a strict guideline on how to consider element layout -- only guidelines which judges interpret through their own knowledge and through oral tradition discussions in seminars, post-event discussions with other officials, etc.

Between ~2009 and 2016, the Choreography component was defined as "An intentional, developed, and/or original arrangement of all movements according to the principles of proportion, unity, space, pattern, structure, and phrasing" with the following criteria, with explanations:

There is nothing explicit there about the temporal layout of the elements, unlike the specific references to "every angle in a 360- degree skater viewer relationship" and "interesting and meaningful variety of patterns and directions of travel" that would apply to the spatial layout.

The place where temporal layout could be considered would be under "Proportion (equal weight of all parts)." If a judge felt that large durations of the program were not carrying their weight in achieving the aesthetic pursuit of the composition, that would be the place to penalize it.

The definition mentions "principles of proportion [...and] structure." This would also be support for considering the weight of various segments of the program across time. It doesn't dictate what is good or bad program structure but does guide judges toward considering structural concerns and relative weights of different parts of the program.

(Note that "proportion" between parts of a program could refer not only to beginning, middle, and end of a program duration, but also distribution of elements and travel patterns in space, and and to the numbers and importance of different kinds of elements/skills.)

However, last year (for reasons that have not been publicly explained), the ISU decided to supersede these detailed PCS guidelines with a more streamlined version of the criteria and of the PCS overview chart:
http://usfigureskating.org/content/ISU program-component-chart_sandp-and-id_08-16.pdf

Note that the name of the fourth-listed component is now "Composition," there are now fewer criteria listed, and all mentions of "proportion" are among what has been deleted. Also the detailed explanations are no longer available. Would that revision constitute "breaking" better guidelines that existed up to 2016?

Even if we returned to the old guidelines, even if we required judges to score each criterion separately and either use all separate scores or combine then into one Composition or Choreography score, there would still be room for other aspects of proportion or balance to outweigh the temporal layout, or for other criteria for this component to outweigh the proportion/balance considerations as a whole.

There's no history to establish that grouping jumps or other element types together is bad by definition. And if there is a general oral-tradition feeling that it should be discouraged, under today's rules or those of a couple years ago it would still need to be balanced against other aspects of proportion that might make more of an impact in any particular program.

Where does the argument come from that grouping jumps together in time should be discouraged more severely than any other aspects of program construction?

A very informative and well-reasoned post. Thank you.

FCSSp4 · Nov 9, 2017

If a rule was implemented with an intention to encourage a certain behavior or action (In this case, backloading was encouraged to lessen front loaded programs which I suppose, in that time was viewed negatively for being imbalanced) but fails to do so, it might be time to re-examine the rule and the conditions.

Personally, I think we've reached the peak of the system for the ladies until the girls learn 3A and quads both of which are bigger point getters in BV and GOE . I think this is a problem that will eventually fix itself in time.

CanadianSkaterGuy · Nov 9, 2017

moriel said:
Why would that be necessary? How many senior ladies DON'T have at least 2 jumps in first half?
Should we really make rules because of 1-2 skaters?

Well, it's would be necessary to force skaters to have a more well-balanced program.

Why is it necessary to have preceeding footwork before the solo SP jump? Why is it necessary to have an axel type jump in the FS? The list of questions could go on...

Like I said, it would be a nice to have, but I think backloading is fine, because (as you said) only 1-2 skaters are actually leveraging it. And the bonus isn't even that crazy high.

Miller · Nov 9, 2017

gkelly said:
Trends may have changed this fall. I'm not going to search through all the GP and Senior B protocols so far this season to check.

As of 2017 Worlds, for which we have 37 recent ladies' short programs detailed all in one place (http://www.isuresults.com/results/season1617/wc2017/wc2017_Ladies_SP_Scores.pdf),

of those 37, 27 started with the jump combination, or 28 if you count the last-place skater who fell on all her jumps and had the first one called as the combo.

One skater (Medvedeva) had all three of her SP jumps in the second half. Of the remaining 36, 16 had two jumps in the bonus, 20 had one jump in the bonus, and 0 had no jumps in the bonus.

So that's more backloading, or at least less frontloading, than before the short program bonus was instituted. Nevertheless, slightly over half the jumps executed that day did not earn bonuses.

Worth noting that Eteri has 5 youngsters, Alexandra Trusova, Anastasia Tarakanova, Daria Panenkova, Alena Kostornaya and Anna Shcherbakova all doing at least a 1/6 split (Anna last season before being injured) and Alexandra is only doing a 1/6 because she's attempting a 4S. For the time being think things should be left as they are - only Daria is senior eligible next season, but the ISU needs to keep a close eye on it, I feel that a 0/3 split in the SP is going to be very common very soon, except for skaters who do a 1/2 with a 2A as a placement holder for a possible 3A attempt, plus they would only lose out by 0.33 for doing the 2A in the first half anyway.

YesWay · Nov 9, 2017

I contend that there is no definition of "balanced" or "unbalanced" that could work for all pieces of music, all choreography and all programs, and that creating a such a definition and imposing it on skaters, would lead to more limited, more "samey" programs, and less variety.

I think skaters and choreographers should have complete freedom to place jumps and other components wherever they like in the program.

I also think jumps in the 2nd half deserve a bonus, because they require more strength/stamina/athleticism.

So by all means, put a limit/cap on the 2nd-half bonus if something "needs" to be done (and I am not convinced anything does need to be done)... but there should never be an automatic penalty for "too many" jumps in 2nd half of a program...

FCSSp4 said:
Personally, I think we've reached the peak of the system for the ladies until the girls learn 3A and quads both of which are bigger point getters in BV and GOE . I think this is a problem that will eventually fix itself in time.

Yes, I think we may be on the verge of a 3A/Quad era in Ladies skating, which could make 2nd-half bonuses less significant...

GF2445 · Nov 9, 2017

We need to start getting more women/ladies doing 3A and Quads. Once that starts, some balance in terms of the element layout might come back.

For me personally, happy to keep the 10% bonus for the last 4 jumping passes, all other jumping passes in the second half, a reduced 5% bonus.

gkelly · Nov 9, 2017

I think we will see some triple axels and quads from ladies in coming years.

I doubt it will become common, something that everyone does, or even that every medal contender does. Unless there is a significant improvement in equipment that will allow everyone to jump higher, those jumps are just at the limits of human possibility for adult women, and even challenging for younger teen girls (who are at their peak strength-to-weight ratio).

So I expect that some of the best jumpers will learn these jumps as juniors or beginning seniors, include them in their programs, and sometimes win medals. But some of them will get injured or go through growth spurts and leave those hardest jumps out of their programs temporarily. Some of them will completely lose the ability to do those jumps as their bodies finish growing and maturing. And some will try hard to master them but never quite succeed.

As long as these skaters excel in other jumping skills, in non-jump elements, and in PCS they should still be able to hold their own.

So I'd want to see rules that allow for pushing the envelope in various directions:
*More jump revolutions, for those who can
*Jumps in both directions, for those who can
*Double walleys and inside axels added to the scale of values, with base values greater than double axel
*Bonuses for harder jumps at the ends of combinations
*Flexibility in number of each kind of element in a freeskate, so if a skater capable of fitting 7 triples plus 2 double axels (or "high-value doubles" if 2W and 2IA become elements) into 5 or 6 jump passes by use of multiple 3-3 and maybe a 3-3-3 combination could use the extra element slot(s) for another high-value spin or sequence

I'd also like to see leveled spiral sequence or field moves sequence, with base value higher than double axel for level 4, as an optional element in the freeskate, with features available that would encourage skaters to push the limits in terms of technical edge-based challenge in extended positions and not just flexibility.

*And, yes, backloading would also be a valid strategy.

Then we would see some skaters doing 3A and quads and some pushing the limits in other directions, with an occasional few who can do most of the above.

If we get to the point where 10 skaters in the world can do 3A or quad, but many of them are comparatively weak on skating skills or presentation, I want to see skaters who do excel in those areas to have other options for finishing in the top 10 and sometimes on podiums ahead of skaters whose body types allow them to jump higher or rotate faster.

Mathman · Nov 9, 2017

Baron Vladimir said:
I was trying to explain again and again that balanced programme in Figure Skating only refers to usage of ice rink and ice surface,...

I think it is absurd to deny that choreography is something that unfolds in time as well as space, even though there are also criteria for ice coverage and "theater in the round." One cannot do all elements simultaneously. One element must follow another in time. Music enfolds in time. To me, the specific language that each segment of the choreography should carry equal weight in presenting the full vision of the program could not be more clear. Jump when you think it best, but make sure that each segment of the composition carries its own portion of the load.

Backloading: What should ISU do?

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