Men - Free Program

[Blades of Passion]

and in the Wier's case, not particularly artistic either

I think it is one of the most beautiful and thoughtful openings to a (singles) program ever, the type of thing which has been completely abandoned in modern-day CoP.

As Kurt said: "you can hear a pin drop as he skates into his opening Triple Axel combination." That's exactly what the music needed.

 

[ImaginaryPogue]

I don't mean the choregraphic opening - I agree, that was lovely - I mean the actual set-up to the 3A. Timewise, I mean 1:40 to 1:52.

 

[Blades of Passion]

The idea I am getting at is that trying to throw in lots of extra turns and steps in the time leading up to the Axel, just to say "hey looking I'm doing more, so give me more points!", would have done a disservice to the movements that came beforehand and the purity of the music and buildup of tension leading into the jump. It would have made the choreography and interpretation and performance worse. But that's how the judges are scoring right now (you do more movement and we give you higher scores for ALL of the PCS) and that's a big, BIG problem.

 

[Bluebonnet]

I can't think of many cases where building up tension leading into jumps needed. Jeremy Abbott's quad in his OLympic season LP is a good tension building up example. Abbott is one of the few who could blend jumps into his choreography. But I can think of many many cases where skaters' long preparation before jumps are dull and take the program out of the natural flow. For example, Lu Chen's jumps. Adam Rippon is another painful example too. Plushenko, Joubert, and Weir all need a bit too long before jumps.

 

[Blades of Passion]

Alexei. Yagudin.

 

[Bluebonnet]

Alexei Yagudin generally belonged to the group of good tension building. Plushenko was good in that reqard earlier in his career. Some skaters always need long preparation for jumps but placed jumps in wrong places in relation to the music, so the long period before jumps are felt especially long and annoying. Many ladies have such long and annoying jumping pathes.

I often make excuses in my mind for them whenever I felt their jumping pathes were too long. Only in resent years under CoP, I've found that there are possibilities to jump right after a movement - the transitions as it's called. And it is refreshing. In many cases, it is needed in order to fit into the music. The ability gave skaters the choice to use it whenever it's needed. Not many skaters are capable of that though. Chan and Abbott are extraordinary in this account.

 

[Mathman]

With regard to steps immediately preceding, one judge told me that in scoring the steps into the jump in the SP under the 6.0 judging system, you would calculate the amount of time between the steps and the jump - 1001, 1002, 1003, and deduct .1 for each second between the last of the steps and the jump. I would expect that a similar standard would be reasonable in determining whether the requirements under that bullet are met under the new scoring system.

When watching Nobunari Oda, his jumps come right out of his choreography with no set up at all. Jeremy Abbott is doing the same thing in his LP this season. With a quad it's harder but I find that Patrick's second quad has almost no set up.

Now that I have had a chance to read the actual language of the GOE guidelines, I would give Patrick 7 of the 8 bullets (excluding only "unusual air position") and a +3 GOE for almost all of his elements.

People who have followed the CoP from its beginning were startled when all of a sudden there was an explosion of +2 and +3 GOEs. Now we are seeing them routinely across the board for good performances from the top skaters -- as well as PCS in the high nines with a sprinkling of 10s. The very first year of the CoP Sasha Cohen got a couple of nines and everyone thought that was scandalous over-scoring, so they came out with new guidelines (for the 2004 season) so that no one would score that high any more.

But now, comparing the language of the old rules (2008) with the new (2011), it is clear that the ISU wants higher scores. It used to be literally unheard of for anyone to get a +3 on anything. It would have to be the most spectacular element of all time -- then maybe it would get +2. Now they have changed the rules. Instead of requiring "exceptional, superior, outstanding" qualities, all you need is a "good" entry, take-off, air position, and landing to get a +3.

I'm not complaining. In the past there was too little in the way of rewarding elements that were performed pretty well, as opposed to not-so-good ones.

 

[Dragonlady]

People who have followed the CoP from its beginning were startled when all of a sudden there was an explosion of +2 and +3 GOEs. Now we are seeing them routinely across the board for good performances from the top skaters -- as well as PCS in the high nines with a sprinkling of 10s. The very first year of the CoP Sasha Cohen got a couple of nines and everyone thought that was scandalous over-scoring, so they came out with new guidelines (for the 2004 season) so that no one would score that high any more.

It’s not that Sasha Cohen received 9’s in PCS, it’s how she skated when getting 9’s that was the issue. I was in Mississauga when she set the scoring record that stood for years, until finally broken by Yu-Na Kim in the 2009/2010 season. Her SP (Malaguena) really was spectacular, even with the wobbles into her flip and flutz but her LP (Swan Lake) was a disaster. At the time, I called it a “dead fish” of a program.

To start with, she was slow and cautious throughout the program. She missed her opening flutz which would have been her combo but for the shaky landing. Her second flutz attempt was worse than the first, being seriously short in rotation, and there was no combo in the program at all and I think she fell on another jump attempt. I think, in total, Sasha had 4 clean triples. She stumbled in the footwork. Even her spins were slow. The program really looked new and undertrained, which was surprising given how well she had skated it the Marshall’s competition a few weeks earlier.

Her basic skating was also an issue for me. I sat in the first row and I could clearly hear her scratching past me so the judges had to have heard it too. Watching and listening to her in warm-up was in stark contrast to Shizuka who has some of the cleanest, quietest edges ever. It was a treat just to watch her stroke around the ice. I figured Sasha would win the gold because she had a huge lead after the SP, but I didn’t expect her to win the LP, especially after Shizuka nailed her 3Z/3T.

I don’t understand how a skater who is slow, tentative, who wobbles from edge to edge in the entry to two of her jumps, and who fails to perform a program and simply skates through the music, is deserving of 9’s in any PCS category. The judges appeared to completely ignore Cohen’s flat, listless performance in the LP and gifted her with the same kind of PCS marks she’d been given for her SP. It always rankled me that this LP was held up for years as the best program in CoP history.

This was the first event judged under the new judging system and problems were immediately apparent. The following season, the 1 point deduction for a fall was mandated and I sincerely believe it was this LP that lead directly to that rule.

 

[Mathman]

^ Thanks for the first-hand view.

My impression at the time was that in the first year of the CoP the judges were pretty much at sea about what the program components were supposed to be about. Sasha was real pretty, so she got a good "second mark.

 

[Olympia]

Her basic skating was also an issue for me. I sat in the first row and I could clearly hear her scratching past me so the judges had to have heard it too. Watching and listening to her in warm-up was in stark contrast to Shizuka who has some of the cleanest, quietest edges ever. It was a treat just to watch her stroke around the ice. I figured Sasha would win the gold because she had a huge lead after the SP, but I didn’t expect her to win the LP, especially after Shizuka nailed her 3Z/3T.

The more I hear about what Shizuka's good at, the happier I am that she's always been among my favorite skaters. In the early days of watching her, I didn't even understand half of what I was seeing. I just knew, maybe on some instinctual level, that she was amazing.

 

[Dragonlady]

My impression at the time was that in the first year of the CoP the judges were pretty much at sea about what the program components were supposed to be about. Sasha was real pretty, so she got a good "second mark.

I thought the judges were only watching Sasha from the knees up and were completely ignoring her feet, especially her scratchy stroking. The wobbling from edge to edge on the flutz and flip take-off was, quite frankly, scary. At least in the SP she had speed going in her favour she was able to rotate and land the jumps, but in the LP the lack of speed or attack did her in.

I'll freely admit that the feet are the first thing I look at in a skater. Adrian Chew once said I have an "edge fetish". If the feet are good, I'll enjoy the skater. It's why I liked Sarah Hughes, because aside from the flutz, Sarah had lovely feet. From the knees up, she had posture issues and lacked great lines, things Sasha excelled at.

 

[spikydurian]

Maybe your husband needs some medication to help improve his patience, in addition to an understanding of what dramatic build-up is. Rewarding a skater for doing as many movements as possible, when it does not go with the music, is the same as rewarding a filmmaker for cutting every 3 seconds within the scene just because they can. Just because you can add more, that doesn't mean it produces a greater effect. Sometimes it detracts, in fact. If you stop to think about it, this is the same as the Canadian criticism of so many Russian costumes. It's something that everyone in fashion is aware of; intricately sewing tons of feathers and sparkly pieces onto a dress maybe be extremely difficult, but that doesn't mean the dress is something anyone wants to wear.

Attention spans around the World have likely dropped as a result of how modern media is handled, people have been trained to become restless at slow pacing of television/film, and such is sadly the case with how figure skating is evolving as a result of how the CoP is being handled. Obviously stalking jumps too much is a bad thing but that doesn't mean there isn't a time and a place for simplicity and for relatively long approaches into jumps, with nothing but simple movements leading up to it. It all comes down to the music and the character of the program. In film, sometimes you want quick cuts and sometimes you want long cuts. It's no different in figure skating. If we only reward tons of transitions in programs, then the sport is losing much of what makes it special and losing a vast amount of potential variety. Who wants to watch nothing but action films, if you are an adult of non-retarded intelligence?

:scratch: what are you trying to say? Sorry, I have attention deficit syndrome .... can you make the above shorter? Thanks.

 

[Dragonlady]

The more I hear about what Shizuka's good at, the happier I am that she's always been among my favorite skaters. In the early days of watching her, I didn't even understand half of what I was seeing. I just knew, maybe on some instinctual level, that she was amazing.

Sometimes I watch skating with people with absolutely no knowledge of the sport and with few exceptions, they always pick out the best skaters as their favourites. I do think that the quality often jumps right off the ice and you don't need a deep knowledge of technique to spot it.