hockeyfan228 said:I don't think a skater like Jennifer Don, with little difficult technical content are likely to make it through the qualis into the SP, either. She competed against very few skaters when she won last year, and won one of the first events to use CoP.
I'm basing my estimate of her likely Worlds placement on both Nebelhorn and Four Continents (which used the interim system).
Here are the borderline skaters from Worlds that I'm guessing Don would have been in the mix with:
Worlds
Final not Reached
25. Julia LAUTOWA AUT 15 25
26. Michelle CANTU MEX 15 26
27. Mojca KOPAC SLO 14 27
28. Sara FALOTICO BEL 13 28
29. Daria TIMOSHENKO AZE 12 29
30. Ji Eun CHOI KOR 14 30
(16 in qual = tied for 31). Diane CHEN TPE
Nebelhorn
1. Jennifer DON USA143,07 1 1
5. Daria TIMOSHENKO 62 5 7
7. Amber CORWIN USA 117,87 3 8
8. Sara FALOTICO BEL 113,64 12 5
Four Continents
13. Jennifer DON USA 19,5 13 13
14. Fan ZHANG CHN 21,0 14 14
15. Michelle CANTU MEX 23,0 16 15
20. Diane CHEN TPE 30,5 19 21
Of course there's no guarantee that Don would have beaten Timoshenko, Falotico, Cantu, and Chen at Worlds, or that she would have lost to them all. I'd say they're all at a somewhat similar level and the results will depend how they each skate and how that particular judging panel happens to rate them each.
How likely is it that a skater with her skill set would make it out of Nationals in the US, Japan, Russia, Hungary, Ukraine, or even France, Germany, or Canada to be eligible to compete in the first place?
Heh, these days she might well be able to get out of France or Germany, assuming she skated well when she needed to.
If it takes higher skills to be a top skater, I don't see why higher skills aren't required to qualify.
I wouldn't define that skill level purely in terms of jump content, though.
Instead of making the cutoff be 15.7 worth of base mark (mid-level difficulty allowable for senior ladies) in short program jump content, if you want to set a cutoff, it would make more sense to me to set a cutoff score for the whole program, including jump and non-jump elements, grades of execution, and program components, and let the skater work toward that total by maximizing whatever their strengths happen to be.
And if you're going to use scores from previous competitions to determine who meet the minimums to enter Worlds in the first place, better to use long programs or short-plus-long at whole competitions, to give a better picture of the skaters' whole skill sets and not just their short program jump content.
The skater a cut-off model hurts is a skater with no international competitions or qualifying scores within the last year*, who places high enough in his/her national championship, and is injured or ill and cannot compete at 4C's or Euros in order to qualify.
E.g., Rudy Galindo in 1996. Of course there was no Four Continents back then, much less Code of Points, but he did go to the one available international between Nationals and Worlds and withdrew after the short due to injury.
That kind of thing might not happen to medal contenders every year, but chances are there would be at least one man or woman each year who would have been able to get past quals and maybe short program under the current system but wouldn't get to go at all if a good point total at a previous international event were necessary. And occasionally it would happen to medal contenders.
In other words, no system is perfect. I don't see that the simple fact of holding a qualifying competition at the Worlds venue is such a problem that it needs to be scrapped in favor of some other system that will introduce different problems. I do think that the way cuts are made at Worlds and whether any established skaters should be exempted from the qualifying process should be open to discussion.