I believe I've already said several times in this thread that I think the negative GOE values for quads and triple axels should be larger than for lower valued jumps.
I believe I have also addressed the possibility that the fall deduction could be slightly larger than 1.0 per fall for senior men (and less than 1.0 per fall for levels below junior). And also that guidelines could be written into the program component criteria to encourage judges to reflect falls or other disruptive errors in their component scores, especially Performance/Execution where applicable.
But under the rules as they currently exist, I think that Chan was marked appropriately.
For me it was not a jarring mistake. It happened because the jump combination was almost too good (covered too much ice) and he bounced right back up and hopped back into the lighthearted program, so it made me smile more than cringe.
Your mileage may vary.
And I don't think that falls should automatically preclude a win. In fact, in the 6.0 era the rulebook explicitly stated that they did not.
I don't divide it by discipline, especially men vs. women, but by each individual skater's strengths and weaknesses. They can't all do everything. On average men will be better jumpers and women will be better at flexibility moves. But I don't think the system should be designed to penalize skaters whose biggest strength is something that's more often associated with the opposite sex. Let them each use whatever they can do well to earn points.
The results in the long program were quite close. As Mathman has reminded us, the way the ISU has chosen to present the scores in recent years means we can't know which judges gave which scores to each skater so we can't figure out what their rankings "would have" been. But I suspect that if we could get comparative score breakdowns by judge we would see the equivalent of "mixed ordinals" in the long program.
The way the judges give many individual scores, some of which are multiplied by factors in the computer, and don't know what some of the other scores are (e.g., they don't know what levels the tech panels calls for spins and step sequences), there really isn't any way for a judge to keep track of how many points an earlier skater has and make sure to give a later skater more or fewer to guarantee a specific placement. Too much math to keep track of and too many unknown values.
At best, if they wanted to try to manipulate the scores they could make a point of being overly generous on a skater they want to prop up and overly strict on that skater's close rivals. But even if they tried to bring about a specific result, if we added up for each skater the base marks for the elements called by the tech panels and the factored GOEs and PCS from one judge, that judge might be surprised at the way his or her own rankings came out.
A scratch spin on its own, even a fast one, is one of the first moves that beginning skaters do. I've seen skaters who can do excellent scratch spins before they can do single axels.
The base value for such an element would justifiably be low. Spinning so fast that the spin actually blurs, and keeping it centered at the same time, would be qualities that should earn positive GOEs.
Also, because of the nature of the scratch spin, it's hard to think of features that could raise the level. I can imagine a level 2 back scratch or change-foot spin, but I don't think a scratch spin on its own could earn level 3 or 4.
I would argue that the values of the positive GOEs should be high to encourage skaters to include simple moves that they can do with very high quality, and to develop the skills to do so if they don't already have them.
The scratch spin would be more valuable as an ending position in a combination spin (or change-foot upright spin that also includes other upright variations), if the skater can do it well enough to enhance the GOE of the higher level spin.
We very rarely saw solo scratch spins in the 1990s or early 2000s either. Even before IJS, the skaters were spontaneously choosing to do more complicated spins.
Maybe if skaters were allowed to include a fourth spin in their free programs, incentives could be built in to include excellent level 1 or level 2 scratch spins. Of course, only the skaters who can make it excellent would bother.
Last edited:
