That is what is wrong with the new system, IMHO. It takes a judged sport and tries to pretend that it is not.
In what way does it pretend that the sport is not judged?
There are judges. Every score the
judges give (GOEs and PCS) are based on qualitative judgment. No one ever claimed otherwise.
There are objective aspects to the scoring: the base value parts of the TES. (Even the Scale of Values is somewhat subjective in terms of quantifying how much more difficult one element is than another, which is why we get changes to the SoV every couple of years. But the values remain steady until the next rule change. And yes, there are gray areas where elements are borderline in terms of jump rotation, whether or not a skater achieved a level feature, where individual tech panel members' perceptions and strictness can come into play. But for the vast majority of elements, the base values are indisputable according to the current SoV.)
And all this is very similar to other
judged sports such as diving, gymnastics, etc. A basically objective score for difficulty that is modified by some arithmetical processes to reflect the judgments of expert human judges regarding the quality of execution.
Does the fact that these sports do not use ordinal rankings mean that they are not judged?
The differences with figure skating that makes it different from most judged sports are that 1) Skating is not only about the elements but also largely (in some disciplines and some eras primarily) about the process of moving across the ice outside of discrete elements, and 2) aesthetic impact of the performance as a whole is incorporated into the scoring.
To me it's a question of honesty. I think the CoP tries to hoodwink people into thinking that if a performance gets 129.47 points, then by gum this performance is worth 129.47 points. Not, for instance 129.46 points. Thus figure skating is a "real sport" just like horse racing, where your horse ran the route in 1 minute 29.47 seconds.
Do you have a problem with decimal places in diving or gymnastics scores? Do they hoodwink you into believing that those sports are purely objective and not judged?
Or are you just setting up a straw man argument?
Is it just me or half the people that want the 6.0 back just want an easier system to b***h about the scores/placements? 0_0
I don't doubt that a lot of fans just want a system that provides them more fun as viewers, regardless of how it relates to the actual analysis of the skating difficulty and quality.
There are also some coaches, judges, former skaters, and some long-time fans who preferred the old system and would be happy to see it restored for reasons related to actual analysis of the skating.
I have no idea what percentage of those who miss 6.0 each group constitutes.
As someone mentioned earlier, I think there is a strong tendency to feel more warmth for the system one grew up with, that newer skaters/officials/fans are more likely to like the new system and those who had already invested decades of their lives getting to know with the old system inside and out are more likely to miss it.
Look at what ijs has done to pair skating. Hardly watchable anymore with the exception of a few teams.
Speaking for myself, I find pairs much more watchable now than in the past. You speaking for yourself have a different opinion. I guess we have different tastes. Chacun a son gout.
That is what was so great about the good old days. Everyone got to be a judge, and we were all experts.
Now we are cowed into silence. One skater got 125.29 points, the other skater got 126.96 points. Well, you can't argue with math.
You're welcome to score along at home, to call the elements and levels if you like, or to play judge and assign GOEs and PCS. If you like math and computers, you can make a program to add up your scores and see how close you come to the official totals and whether your order of totals matches that of the panels.
The less math-inclined who still like to analyze the actual skating can just give GOEs and PCS, maybe even just rough PCS ("I'd have her averaging in the low 8s for that program") and disagree with specific calls or scores on the protocols.
You have to wait until the protocols are published though, since there's too much information to announce while the skater is in the Kiss-and-Cry and the next skater is ready to start her program.
If you keep up with the rules and have a good sense of the standards across the field, you can score at home with just as much expertise as an off-duty judge.
But for any areas where the scores are based on judgment, if you disagree with the consensus of the panel, that doesn't make you wrong, but you also have no effect on the official results -- same as any off-duty judge following along for fun.
And, for that matter, any individual judge on the panel, whose scores do contribute to the final result, will usually not agree with every official decision. Where there are differences of opinion among the official judges, someone will always be in the minority.
Fans who operate purely on gut feeling without studying the rules, or who watch on video with a very different perspective than in the arena with seats comparable to the panel, will find themselves disagreeing with the panel more often than those (hardcore fans, off-duty judges, etc.) with more skating knowledge and better views.
If it's fun to feel "I'm right, the experts are wrong," it's just as possible to take that attitude with either system.
All of which is just as true with 6.0 as with IJS.
In addition to anonymity, which I believe promotes shady scoring, I think there are more potential ways to manipulate scores under the new system by spreading it out between GOE, PCS and tech calls. For example, over the last two season, there have been some skaters who have been given unprecedented rapid increases in PCS scores which the older and best skaters never even came close to and still don't get. I don't remember seeing this under 6.0.
Not sure exactly what kinds of situations you're referring to. Oksana Baiul springs to mind, if I'm understanding this correctly.
The fact that I knew who gave the low marks in 6.0 also made it obvious when there was preference in scoring, though it wouldn't change the results.
It would be perfectly possible to get rid of anonymity and identify which judges gave which marks. Again, because of the sheer number of marks it wouldn't be feasible to show them all, with judges identified, during the K&C announcement. But if the ISU does ever decide to drop the anonymity and if making it easy to associate judges with scores were a priority, it wouldn't be hard to put little flags or country abbreviations above each judge's column on the protocols.
And we had anonymity with 6.0 during 2003 and 2004, just to reiterate that the scoring system and the anonymity are two separate issues.[/QUOTE]
To me, this is not necessarily a bad thing or a flaw in the system.
Ideally, it ought to go like this. The first skater performs. The judge, relying on his experience of having judged hundreds of contests, says to himself: "compared to all the skates I have seen, I'll give that a 5.7, 5.6. (At this point there is a break while the median mark of all the judges is computed for that skater. I don't know exactly what use the judges were supposed to make of this information, but at least you knew whether you were tending to score on the high side or the low, compared to your fellow judges. Anyway…) Now the next skater goes. His performance is either better or worse than that of the first skater. You score him accordingly, being careful to leave enough room to insert someone else in between if that's how it turns out. If you give the second skater 5.7, 5.8, then on the "protocols" you see that this judge gave skater B a first place ordinal and thought that A and B were about equal in tech, but B was markedly better in presentation.
To me, this is perfectly easy to understand and a model of clarity. More so than saying, in the IJS, skater A deserved a score of 7.75 in choreography -- not 7.5 and not 8.0. But only a 7,50 in musical interpretation (not 7.25 or 7.75).
It's certainly simpler. And usually it made sense. But it could be difficult to understand if a judge marks B higher in presentation when it seemed obvious to you that A clearly presented better than B, or that B was clearly better technically than artistically. If you're familiar with the ins and outs of 6.0 you might make a good guess as to what the judge was rewarding in the second mark that you would have rewarded in the first mark or not at all, or as to why the judge had to manipulate the scores and tiebreakers to give the skaters the ordinals he thought they each deserved -- to avoid getting boxed in, or to wriggle out of a box they'd already created for themselves, depending on skate order.
Probably not, but this has more to do with the poor job most commentators are doing in explaining the system, not with the system itself. This rule is actually very straightforward: it was mandatory for her to do a triple as a solo jump and she didn't.
Since I'm not very familiar with 6.0 technical deductions: would Gracie still have been in medal contention under 6.0 after having an invalid element in the short program? I've always had the impression that these types of mistakes were punished more harshly under 6.0, but I might be wrong.
It wouldn't have been invalid element
The SP rules change from year to year.
In the early 1990s, all the senior ladies had to do a double solo jump. In the late 1990s, they had the choice of double or triple. So doubling that jump would give the skater a hit on the base value for the program as a whole but no deduction. There were no written rules/guidelines that I'm aware of for how to set those base marks in general, or how to reflect the difference between a double or triple solo jump specifically. Each judge probably had his or her own method for deciding. But in a field where the majority of skaters were doing triple solo jumps, even the best skater probably couldn't expect more than 5.5 for required elements when doing a double.
In the early 2000s under 6.0, there was a 0.4 deduction for doubling a required triple jump ("Less than required revolutions"). So if a judge would have otherwise given the skater 5.8/5.8 and that was the only mistake she made, then the score would end up being 5.4/5.8.
The requirements for the solo jump haven't changed under IJS, but the way the scoring system handles them has. A couple years ago, the double jump would have scored full base value for the double, but the GOE was required to be -3. So a double flip would have been worth 1.0, as opposed to 5.3 +/- GOE.
Now the double jump where a triple is required simply gets no point at all.
The difference in the score for that jump by this year's rules vs. 2014 rules was 1 point.
)
"
