I don't see why we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. Come up with a format that honors the traditions of the sport and excites the audience, too.
Well, different fans will be excited by or interested in different things. How do we decide which fans' preferences take precedence?
Some of the differences will be based on what draws each fan to the sport.
Some will be most excited by the jumps -- they can see the differences between doubles, triples, and quads more easily than the differences between different takeoffs, or between everything else that happens on the ice as opposed to in the air, and the higher risk of splatting and the greater glory of succeeding with the hardest jumps. Anything that encourages and rewards more jump risks would be their preference.
Others may have been drawn in by the "artistry." Maybe their first favorite skater was a competitor who was especially gifted in musical interpretation or body line, or maybe they were first attracted by exhibition or professional skating and later expanded their interest to competition. These fans will probably prefer rules that discourage splats and encourage more interesting aesthetic use of the whole body.
Probably no casual fans are excited by the difference between, say, a three turn and a bracket. But skaters know the difference and want them rewarded commensurately. And fans who go beyond casual viewing and become interested in the details of the sport and its technique can learn to recognize and, yes, get excited by details that eluded them when they first started watching.
You could still have scoring that takes into account intricacies that casual fans are not aware of (like the differences between different jumps), but keep the ordinal one-third/two-thirds idea to determine the overall winner.
First of all, it confuses the use of the word "ordinal" in the 6.0 system to use it like that.
Ordinals were the rankings given by each judge to all the skaters in one phase of the event. It was rare for any judge's ordinals for the field to match the overall result, especially in large events.
The one-third/two-thirds split in value between short and long program was referred to as
factored placements.
And of course the split might not be one-third/two-thirds when there were additional phases of competition. It was different when there were figures plus short program plus long program. It was different when qualifying rounds counted toward the overall results. It was different in the experimental Grand Prix Finals a decade ago that required skaters to perform two long programs.
And for ice dance it was different when compulsory dances were part of the event.
So fans who remember Elaine Zayak's come from behind to win 1982 Worlds from 7th place after the SP, for example, might have a different idea of "exciting" than fans who sweated over whether their favorites could pull up from 4th.
Fans who started watching in the last 5 or 6 years were never excited by the intricacies of ordinals or factored placements in the first place and learned from the beginning of their fandom to be more interested in point spreads.
Some fans who started following short programs in the 1970s or 80s may have enjoyed the apples-to-apples comparisons of every skater doing the same solo jump, the same required double jump in the combination, the same flying spin, the same shape of step sequence, etc. They may want to go back to those kinds of requirements.
Some, likely newer fans and/or fans who only watch the top elite skaters, may want to require specific triple jumps, ignoring the fact that not everyone who can do some triples and can compete credibly at the senior level is capable of executing every kind of triple.
Other longtime fans may not miss those requirements and be happy with the current balance of requirements and options.
Some fans may want to get rid of all specific requirements in the short program and replace them with the equivalent, much looser, long-program requirements. E.g., an axel jump, a solo jump, a jump combination, a flying spin, a spin in one position, a combination spin, a step sequence.
You were arguing in favor of the latter. Which would be a
brand new approach to the short program structure, not a return to the way it ever used to be in real life. That may have been what you thought short programs were about when you didn't know the rules, but you were wrong.
I am not saying that this is the only way to do it. But the knife cuts both ways. If you have a format that is thrilling to spectators, it seems like you ought to have a good reason before abandoning it."I like it the way it is" may not be a good reason for change, but it is a good reason to keep it the way it is.
We were discussing whether to change the short program requirements to make them even looser than they ever have been, more like long programs.
The short program requirements
did not change with the introduction of the new scoring system, by the way.
But then you started arguing that they should be changed to something they never were before because you liked the way things were before.
To which I say, huh?
How did we go from discussing whether women should be able to do triple axels to fulfill the solo axel required element to whether we should go back to factored placements, and specifically the one-third/two-third split that used for most competitions in the 1990s and early 2000s?
).
(Go Rachael!)
