- Joined
- Jul 26, 2003
Speed was not the criteria in the presentation mark under 6.0. Speed was a consideration in the technical mark.antmanb said:
Changes in speed was the criteria in the pre mark. Not only is it more difficult to vary the speed, it allows the skater to interpret the music by matching speed to the musical dynamics. It also allowed the judges to compare the edgework, balance, and security at both fast and slow speeds, and to watch how the skaters transition between fast and slow skating.
Re: the arguments Slutskaya could have made: Kwan was slower, therefore her technical mark should have been lower than the max less required deductions, that not all of the judges deducted for Kwan's flaw on the 3F, and that she was underrated on pre scores. (It would be hard to argue that Kwan's pre scores were overrated, when every judge, including the Russian judge, gave Kwan a 5.9.)
Re: the flawed 3F: of the five judges that put Kwan in first, three of them deducted in full for the flaw: 5.7 (Blangsted)/5.5 (Pizzocari)/5.6 (Inman); the latter two deducted more. The other two judges (Krick and Hrachovcova) gave her 5.8 and 5.9, which did not include the mandatory deduction on the 3F.
Three of the five judges that put Kwan in first (Krick, Pizzocari, and Inman) did so by two tenth margins, and two of them had already given Kwan more than just the flip deduction. Krick could have given Kwan the full .3 deduction on the 3F (5.7 vs. 5.8) and Kwan still would have won that ordinal. It's Hrachovcova's ordinal that could have swung the contest: she gave Kwan 5.9/5.9 vs. 5.8/5.9 for Slutskaya. She didn't have much choice if she thought that Kwan was better than Slutskaya, since Slutskaya skated first. But she didn't deduct for both of Slutskaya's main flaws either (break between steps and jump and travel on spin.) i think may have she boxed herself in and was trying to rank skaters both in tech and pre. She could have given Kwan 5.8/6.0 instead of 5.9/5.9, but that would have broken the 6.0 barrier. (All of the top contenders had already skated before Kwan: Cohen, Slutskaya, Butyrskaya, Hughes, Suguri, bu there still would have been room for a superior skate, as unlikely as it was to be rewarded.)
Re: the pre scores. Even if passion were a criteria -- and it wasn't, the criteria was for interpretation -- I wouldn't call her rendition to a muzak version of Schubert's Serenade passionate. (She tried for passion in her Tosca free skate, but I don't think it suited her. Her 2005 and 2006 free skates had more fire, less melodrama, although I don't think she pulled off Flamenco style (but then, neither do most ice dancers, and they're paid to do that.)
Of the judges who gave Kwan first place ordinals, two gave Slutskaya second place ordinals. Hrachovcova gave them both 5.9's for pre, and Blangsted gave Kwan 5.9 and Slutskaya 5.8 after taking the deductions from both and tying them technically. Of the three judges that put Kwan in first, Cohen in second, and Slutskaya in third, Krick score pre as Kwan 5.9, Cohen 5.8, and Slutskaya 5.7; Pizzocari scored it Kwan 5.9, Cohen 5.7, and Slutskaya 5.6, and Inman scored Kwan 5.9, Cohen 5.8, and Slutskaya 5.6.
Of the four judges who gave Slutskaya first place ordinals, three gave her 5.8 and tied the two in total, with the technical score serving as the tie-break, and the fourth, Deborah Islam, gave her a 5.9, and a .1 higher tech score.
Looking at the 6.0 system, it's impossible to know for sure whether the judges were stack ranking each ordinal and adding them together, or whether they were creating combinations that resulted in the overall ordinal. For example, did Inman think that Cohen was two degrees (tenths) of pre score over Slutskaya, and that Kwan was three degrees over IS? Or did he give Slutskaya 5.6 in pre, so that the total score for Cohen was higher? (If he had given Slutskaya 5.7 in pre, IS and SC would have been tied, and the tech score would have been the tiebreaker.) Did Hrachovcova really think that Kwan was technically superior than Slutskaya, or did she box herself in earlier and ignore the mandatory deductions (or miss the flip landing)?
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