To me the important question is not "reputation" -- that will always be with us. Skaters who skate well will acquire a reputation for skating well.
Yup.
ut besides the issue of subjectivity in scoring program components, there is also the matter of whether technical miscues on elements should rightly detract from whole program categories like skating skills and choreography. In Chan's three Grand Prix appearances, plus Four Continents, his TES ranged from 72.30 (Eric Bompard -- several major errors) to 95.83 (4CC -- virtually flawless). But there was only a 5 point swing in the PCSs, in four performancances of fairly wide overall quality.
Is this the way we want the CoP to work?
I think it can be argued both ways. We can say, yes, the technical elements are completely separate from the components. A skater might fall on every jump but still interpret the heck out of the music.
Or, we can say the the elements are an integral part of the program. The program cannot be considered outstanding if it is flawed by faulty technique on the highlight elements.
I would argue on the side of the former approach -- that components should be judged independently from the elements.
Actually, I don't think it's completely an either/or choice -- I think there is a middle ground within which the success of the elements can and should indeed affect the component scores to the degree that they actually affect the judges' perceptions of how well the skater performed on each of the criteria for each of the components on that particular occasion.
I just don't think that there is a direct and inevitable correlation between the number of grossly visible errors and the quality of the overall performance, even for the same skater and the same program. Let the judges judge
this performance, not the skater's reputation, and not some predetermined template for how much to reduce the score that the judge would otherwise give that performance on each component based on specific kinds of errors (and not other kinds of errors).
For example (judged under 6.0, so the actual scores would be meaningless, but the principle is the same), I competed my program twice in the past couple months.
The first time I landed all the jumps successfully, although some of the landings were not as strong as they should be (-1). There were some little problems with a spin and a step that would have been invisible to a casual observer. But a lot of the time I was just focused on skating clean and not presenting or interpreting the program as well as I could.
The second time I had a disruptive (non-fall) error on my opening jump combination (-2 or -3), and a shakier landing that the last time on the second jump (-1 or -2). Casual observers would have noticed these errors. But after that I relaxed and
performed the rest of the program better.
So even though there were more obvious mistakes in the second performance, I think that performance also would have deserved higher component scores, especially interpretation.
