Men's and Ladies Short Programs

Note that the Men's and Ladies short programs are separated into 2 groups:

1. Earlier Group
2: Later Group

My guess would be the top contenders are skating in the later group

http://www.isufs.org/results/wc2007/

The top six men (according to the latest ISU ranking) are skating in the last group for short program. This puts Lysacek in the last group (he's ranked 6th) and Weir in the first group (he's ranked 8th).

Yes the short programs in the Ladies and Mens are drawn by world rankings, although slightly a good move it does bias higher judging marking in the later groups and I thought the ISU was going to get a rid of this??

I am all for getting a rid of qualification rounds but this is a competition and should be a free draw and fair to everyone, someone out of the blue always does a clean program but as always gets low component scores!!

Here's how the SP draws work...

42 men means 2 SP groups of 21 (flights would be 5-5-5-6). The top 11 ISU-ranked guys will draw to skate in the final 2 flights of the later group. Top 11 ISU-ranked men currently entered for Worlds are: Joubert, Takahashi, Buttle, Oda, Lambiel, Lysacek, Sandhu, Weir, Preaubert, Verner, Davydov.
#12-21 (draw for the rest of the later group): Ponsero, Mabee, Voronov, Lindemann, Jialiang WU, Othman, Berntsson, Lutai, Urbas, Bradley.

45 ladies means 2 SP groups of 23 (later group - flights would be 5-6-6-6) and 22 (earlier group). The top 12 ISU-ranked ladies at Worlds will draw to skate in the final 2 flights of the later group -- they are: Mao Asada, Meissner, Meier, Sokolova, Yu-Na Kim, Rochette, Nakano, Ando, E. Hughes, Poykio, Czisny, Sebestyen.
#13-23 (draw for the rest of the later group): Korpi, Kostner, Yan LIU, Gedevanishvili, Leung, Martinova, Glebova, Marchei, Joanne Carter, Hegel, Karademir.

There will be separate draws for the Men's earlier SP group of 21 (Anton Kovaleski, etc.) and Ladies' earlier SP group of 22 (includes Gimazetdinova, Tamar Katz, etc.).

Hopefully I got my math and numbers right ... corrections welcomed.