And also the SS and TR components, as you mentioned later in the post?
So if all those technical details of the elements and skating content are enough to add up to a win, you don't question the win itself?
But,
None of us have a voice in terms of affecting the results. Not even qualified experts not on the panel at that event have that kind of voice.
We can all have opinions and express them here at Golden Skate. And your opinion, shared by many, on this matter is that falls should affect the Performance/Execution and Interpretation components to some degree.
Let's say we all agree on that in principle.
So then the question becomes, to what degree?
Doesn't it depend on how disruptive each specific fall (or stumble) was to the overall effect of the program? Not all falls are equal.
There are three kinds of penalties for falls, two kinds for stumbles that do not meet the definition of a fall.
1) All falls that are determined to qualify as falls receive a 1-point deduction.
Maybe the fall deduction should differ for different disciplines and different levels, just as the PCS factors do. I.e., it would be higher for senior men than senior ladies or novice men. But in setting the value of what the fall deduction should be at this level for this discipline, consider that the scores for a long program might range from above 180 for the very very best skaters in the world on a good day to well under half that for a weak senior man on a bad day. Better to base the scale on an average value than on the outliers.
2) Falls on elements are penalized in GOE
(falls between elements don't get this penalty)
The point value of each negative GOE step is 1.0 for triple jumps. It's lower for lower-value elements, so that the grade of -3 subtracts enough points to take away a significant portion of the base value but still leave a positive remainder. However, that value might be less than 1 point, so after the fall deduction the net impact of a fall on a low-value element subtracts rather than adds points to the total score.
For quads and triple axels, though, the GOE steps right now are worth 1.0, same as triples. But the base values of these jumps are so high that after subtracting 3.0 and GOE and the fall deduction, a rotated quad with a fall still adds more to the total score than an easier triple jump. A few years ago they tried making the -GOE values for these jumps larger, so that -1 took off 1.5 points and -3 took off 4.5.
I think they should go back to those values. Successful or even nearly-successful quads would earn many points, as intended. But failed quads would earn fewer points.
3) Judges can lower any or all of the program components if they think the criteria for that component were negatively affected by the fall. The Performance/Execution component is the one that would most often be affected.
This is the area where fans who don't keep up on the nitty-gritty technical details can have meaningful opinions.
Perhaps, on the question of "How did the fall affect the overall effect of the performance?" people who are sitting back and watching the whole performance for its aesthetic impact can have a more meaningful opinion than people who are busy scrutinizing all the technical details and individual bullet points of the components.
Fans look at the forest -- judges may be too busy measuring the trees (and lots of other little plants that the fans don't even notice).
But it's the judges who have to give the scores.
And even among fans in the audience, or among judges on the panel, there will be differences of opinion about just how disruptive a given error was.
Often we react emotionally to errors because we were hoping so hard for success that the failure, and a 1-second break in a 240+-second program affects our enjoyment of the remaining performance.
Even a single flub at the end of an otherwise stellar performance can seriously let the wind out of our sails because it ruins the pleasure of what would have been perfection.
Or we feel glee if a skater we don't like and didn't want to win ruins his or her own chances, leaving an opening for our favorites. Etc.
Or a fall at the beginning is ignored or even embraced if it was on a new, high-risk element and the skater shakes it off and uses the disappointment of that failure to fire up an exciting recovery for the rest of the program.
Or the skater reacts to a fall (especially a silly one between elements) with such good humor and incorporates it into the flow of the program so well that we don't perceive it as a flaw.
The specifics of each particular fall can be different. Its effect on our emotional connection to the skater can be different, in part depending on our own emotional opinion about that skater before the fall occurred, so different fans will feel differently about the same fall.
Even if we had a separate panel of judges to look only at Performance/Execution, Choreography, and Interpretation, i.e., a panel of experts to sit back and focus on the forest, there's no guarantee that their opinions of how disruptive a given fall is would agree with each other or agree with our own.
So there isn't really a way to build in a hard and fast rule to require judges to penalize falls exactly as much as any given fan's opinion says each one should be penalized.
Making sure that there will always be some penalty for falling down (but not for other disruptive errors) is why the fall deduction was implemented. As mentioned above, maybe the size of the deduction should be scaled better to the average scores for each level and discipline.
But for the effect on P/E or other components, we still have to rely on judges to apply their own judgment in considering the disruption in relation to all the other good and bad aspects of that performance by those criteria.
All I can think to help would be writing in guidelines that judges should reduce the affected components by 0.25-0.5 per fall, or more for severe disruptions. That would be a reminder and a support for them to reflect falls in those scores, but it wouldn't force them to give a specific score -- we still have to rely on their expert judgment of the whole component.
There's certainly no way to require in advance that a fall or a specific number of falls will always cause the skater to lose a placement. That all depends on how the other skaters skate, and on all the little details in TES and the other PCS criteria that may or may not overshadow the cumulative penalties for a given fall.
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