kemisha said:
There has been speculation in various places that the announcers from CBC and ESPN were precluded from criticizing the scoring system, judges, etc. during their broadcasts. (Perhaps as a trade-off for being able to use the ISU official feed?)
Is this just "speculation," or does someone actually have some information about this? I would think that it is the television networks that call the shots, not the ISU. Money talks, bs walks. I cannot imagine any network executive agreeing to such a thing. In any case, you will not find much criticism of the CoP by Canadian commentators -- the Canadian federation essentially wrote the CoP and was its most enthusiastic proponent.
I have been searching and searching the ladies SP scores (trying to find some way to say that Michelle should have won, LOL). You can check them out at the ISU site.
http://www.isufs.org/results/wc2005/WC05_Ladies_SP_Scores.pdf
In the tech scores,
Irina's program had a base value of
29.8, which she raised by a total of
2.7 points on the GOE. She got the biggest positive GOE on her layback spin (level 3) and her double Axel. This balanced the correctly given negative GOE on her opening combination, where she flipped around awkwardly between the two jumps, and on her final combination spin.
Sasha had a base value of
29.5. Her total GOE was
2.79. Like Irina she got big positive GOE on her triple Axel and on her spins, which balanced the negative GOE on her triple flip.
Michelle had the lowest base mark of the top four ladies at
28.8. For her clean program she got no negative GOEs (except a -0.04 (?) on her first spin), and a total of
+2.40 GOE overall. I cannot find fault with these scores. She skated every element well, but did not do anything out of the ordinary, like unusual jump entrances or spin positions, that rack up the by +2's and +3's. She did get some +2's for her footwork sequence -- well deserved, IMHO.
Carolina had the most difficult program, with a base mark of
30.0, thanks to her combination 3F/3T (9.5 + 1.0 GOE). Her total GOE was also the highest, at
3.14. She got positive GOE on every element, except a 0 on her final spin.
All of these scores were in the same ballpark, with the order Kostner, Slutskaya, Cohen, Kwan. So it came down to the component scores. Although there are supposedly criteria for what constitutes superior "skating skills" or "interpretation," in practice the judges seem to use these marks in the same way that they used the second mark in the ordinal system: to rank the skaters in the order which the judges felt they deserved.
Carolina dropped from first to fourth, presumably because her presentation skills were not as mature as those of the other three. Slutskaya, Sasha and Kwan all brought different strengths and weaknesses to the table, and Irina ended up edging out Sasha by 26 hundredths of a point, with Michelle third, only 1.06 points behind Sasha (Sasha also had a 1.0 time deduction).
Where both Michelle and Carolina lost ground to Irina and Sasha was in the category "Transitions and Linking Footwork," which I can't really dispute.
Well, if I were a judge I would have given Michelle a few more points for her general Kwanliness, but hey -- what are you going to do?
Mathman
