SP and FS replaced by Technical and Artistic programs?

[Mathman]

I for one think a skater like Yuzu can compete with the likes of Jason Brown utilizing his current ability to dazzle a crowd in an artistic program....whatever that means. Maybe that Is controversial but I believe it. YMMV

I don't think that's controversial at all. Nathan Chen has the edge over Brown, too. Even taking to heart your warning that past results can't predict what will happen with a new system -- still, the system isn't THAT different. There will still be jumps in the Artistic Program (I predict 4, allowing one quad). Hanyu and Chen already get about the same PCSs as Jason, if not higher, so I would not expect the 40%-60% thing to have much of an effect.

 

[gkelly]

The "balance checks" is the issuing I'm having because instead of encouraging technically-deficient skaters to improve their firepower, it holds back technically-superior skaters in order to level the playing field.

Imagine the following situation:

There are 10 or more top skaters who can all do pretty much the same jumps, with small enough differences in their nonjumping skills that the results are generally determined by who skates cleanest on the day and who makes the most mistakes. When most of them skate clean, it's pretty much a tossup how the results will come -- in 6.0 days, the ordinals would have been all mixed up.

Now the governing body says "We have a pretty even playing field at the top of the sport. We want to really challenge these top skaters to push the sport forward. Which direction(s) should we encourage them to push it?"

In that case, we wouldn't be talking about holding back skaters who are currently leading, but about choosing one or more areas of emphasis to encourage further development.

Any or all of those skaters would have the opportunity to push their own limits in those encouraged directions. The decisions about what to push would not be about which of today's skaters we want to favor, but rather what kind of improvements and advances we want to encourage in the next generation.

So then they make some decisions, rewrite some rules, and skaters start to adapt their training to take advantage of the new incentives.

After a few years, it becomes clear that some areas for advancement available to anybody who puts in the hard work.

Others are disproportionately easier for some body types to take advantage or and too challenging for others, narrowing the percentage of developing skaters worldwide who have the potential to advance in that direction.

Or it may turn out that some opportunities for maximizing points favor skills that don't actually have much to do with actual skating (edges on ice) but more with what happens in the air or in the upper body, etc.

So then the governing body asks itself "Did we really want the sport to become so dependent on skating-adjacent skills compared to the actual skating skills? Did we want one kind of skating-adjacent skill to become so much more important and a different kind of skating-adjacent skill to become so much less important than when we made the last round of big changes? Maybe we'd better recalibrate to rebalance the rewards for all the important skills against each other, starting with a higher ceiling on the skills that the recent rules have most incentivized and adding new incentives to get the other important skills to catch up."

Not regressing in the areas where so much progress has been made, but rather encouraging progress in the relatively neglected areas to restore a sense of balance at the much higher level established in the area that jumped (no pun intended) so far ahead of other areas.

Yes, skating is a qualitative sport, but what we're talking about is shifting the needle from quantitative certainties (base value for elements) to subjective whims of judges who are subject to bias and politics (thus amending their PCS).

What's to stop a judge from giving Brown a 10 for an artistic program riddled with errors because his skating quality is still better than Boyang Jin.

Under the current rules, caps that explicitly forbid scores above 9.5 or 9.0 for programs with one or more serious errors.

Rules/guidelines with even stricter PCS punishments for certain kinds of errors than those already on the books could be introduced if necessary.

 

[PyeongChang2018]

One thing is clear for an open-ended scoring system. For skaters and their coaches, it's about the points, not the performance.

 

[Elucidus]

After some thought I realized what bothers me most in that Bianchetti idea (maybe I already said something like that before - can't remember now). The whole idea reminds me of an idea to split, for example, a soccer to two different disciplines:
1) competition to determine who runs faster on the field
2) competition to determine who can make more accurate penalty shoots
For any soccer fan it would be ridiculous and completely ruin any enjoyment he can get from this sport. Indeed, the whole purpose of soccer is combination of these abilities, teamwork. It's very exact analogy to what Bianchetti wants to do with fs. Instead of having combination of as high as possible artistry mixed with as high as possible athletic abilities combined in one performance as the ideal to which everybody should strive to - they want to put artificial ceiling in each program at one or another facet of figure skating - thus instead of potential masterpiece making two incomplete husks of what it can be. What I mean that this 4:6 and 6:4 ratio is defective by design. If the whole idea is a balance of a particular performance - why doing any other ratio instead of 5:5? What's the point? The end result would be that in technical program skaters will have perfect excuse to be half assed about their performance and focus mostly on jumps - while in artistic program they will have excuse to be as much negligent in relation to jumps. Therefore instead of two balanced programs we will have two half assed, inbalanced programs - moreover, skaters will train them to be that way. The main issue is that instead of encouraging skaters to fix their weak sides this rule will push skaters to be more lazy and negligent - i.e. we will see more shorts with Orzell/Samarin choreo style etc. Can this make this sport more enjoyable to watch? Definitely not.

Not regressing in the areas where so much progress has been made, but rather encouraging progress in the relatively neglected areas to restore a sense of balance at the much higher level established in the area that jumped (no pun intended) so far ahead of other areas.

It's all sounds well and dandy but.. the problem is that there isn't any significant problem with current balance now. I can't understand how people can complain so much about jumping dominance with Brown and Kostornaia being so successful now? If anything - on the contrary it should show that something wrong with TES side of scoring - as having quadless Brown with popped jumps winning over quite artistic skaters with multiple landed quads is ridiculous. It turns competitions with such skaters in judging farce already. Look, Brown is inbalanced skater - you can't call him "whole package". Because he can't master complex jumps. But instead of striving to be the true balanced skater like Yuzu - who can combine both artistry and complex jumps in one performance - new system won't push such skaters to learn such jumps at all - they wouldn't need them to win. Why so many people consider current rules inbalanced? Because their favorite skaters can't be truly balanced - they are relatively weak in TES area - therefore they want to reshape the definition of "balance" to a state with more favor to PCS/less complex elements.
In fact, "sense of balance" presumably needed to be "restored" is false perception. It wasn't ruined in first place. Maybe it isn't noticeable from inside our time - but from outside glance, if you look at old times performances - you will see that PCS side of skating progressed immensely. So much so that I am willing to claim that we passed many "quads revolutions" in artistry while not even noticing them. Moreover, for last 20 years jumps weren't progressed as much except adding one extra rotation to them. All in all I want to say that PCS side of fs does not need any extra push - it's fine as it is now. One can see steady progress there - especially if you watch young generations of skaters in countries with very high competition. They don't have any other way to be on top as being both extremely artistic and technical - else they will lose to their rivals. That the thing that is pushing the sport forward in all areas - high competition. Not some makeshift rules trying to resurrect absolutely dead patient known as European ladies skating. It looks extremely tacky.
Instead, I would change second half bonus to 1:2 in SP and 3:4 in FP - as current jump layouts are very similar - but it's another question.