Mathman said:
2. Lets you see exactly how one skater prevailed over another by showing you a lot of numbers. OK, Irina got 5.2 points for a triple Lutz. But all this is swept away in the avalanche of straight across the board 8.0s in the component scores.
Actually, it does show you how one skater prevailed over another: s/he/they received XYZ for technical content, and the judges used the PCS scores to sink or raise the skater/team. That is transparency. It also lets you see how each judge feels that nearly every skater/team is uniformly good or bad at every possible component group, and just as much better or worse at every possible component group than skater/team on either side of him/her/them in the rankings. It lets you see how when judging skater/team A, the same deductions aren't taken as when judging skater/team B on an element-by-element basis.
It lets you see how the judges can't conceive that Liashenko's 3F, with the flawed entry (long telegraph) and turn out on the landing rates GOE of -3 according to the code, the same as a jump with a fall. (Although the fall really gets a -4, if both feet leave the ice, the -1 is accounted for separately, and isn't "tied" to the element.) I.e., it lets you see how much the judges are judging by "feel." It lets you see that at her best (Euros SP), Slutskaya's skating skills are only .39 better than they are at her worst (Euros LP), even though in the LP, her posture and carriage were noticably more bent and labored, and from eyewitnesses, she was noticeably slower, particularly in the first half of the program.
It lets you see how relunctant the judges are of going out of the -1 to +1 GOE zone, unless there is a fall, and particularly to give out high, deserved scores when they "recognize" low difficulty -- ex: Liashenko's ab fab 3S in her Euros LP, for which not a single judge gave her a +2, despite a blazing, clean entrance, quick rhythmic rotation, height, and nice landing edge and flow-out, or her quite wonderful layback, with beautiful sideways position, fast rotation, and solid centering, for which only four judges gave her +1 -- and how much they compensate for flaws for high-difficulty elements by not scoring them with proper deductions uniformly -- i.e. Slutskaya's multiple travels on all but one of her spins at Euros, because she puts her leg over her head in most of them. It shows the fear of deviating from fellow judges, instead of following the code.
Under ordinals, these things were rather vague, and the criteria changed from competition to competition. Judges could explain their way out of anything. If a judge now says, "I didn't deduct -2 from Slutskaya's spins because they were so fast," the answer is no longer "Okay, well, there you go," it's, "Not according to the rules, you can't." (Although in Cinquanta's Banana Republic, to date, you can do what you will, as long as there's consensus.)
