thvudragon said:
It's also called discrimination, or what I like to call "Affirmative Action for Figure Skating". The idea in itself does the opposite of its intention. Look at the breakdown of federations and continents.
NA - 3 federations
Asia - 3 federations
Europe - dozens (lol, i'm not going to count, but the number is more than 5x more than the others)
Here lies the question which you did not answer. Why should callers from NA or Asia have more a chance of being chosen than someone from Europe, just because they happen to be from NA or Asia? Where's the fairness when you're blatantly discriminating against European callers?
Your idea also doesn't take account that there are federations in Africa and Australia, and that a future controller/specialist may come from one of those continents.
ITA. It may seem a simple solution to the rumours of "bloc judging" to say 1 NA, 1 Asian and 1 European judge, but when you look at how many different federations are in Europe, not to mention the fact that you're excluding Australia and others, it's not actually fair at all. I don't know how it should be worked out, but it's not fair to say that some judges should have a much better chance of selection than others. And Europe is such a diverse *continent* anyway. Judges from Europe constantly prove that they don't hold up other European skaters, just because of the same continent. You will probably always see a certain amount of national bias (from judges of *all* nationalities), maybe preference in style (again though, style varies enormously even within one nation, never mind a whole continent), but "continent bias" really is a bit ridiculous.
Back to the original topic - I read the interview in question, and I think Piseev's main concern is not the difficulty of getting judges to hold up Russian skaters
but moreso concern over Worlds in Moscow being used as the first Worlds with COP, still an experimental system. I think he's got a valid point. It's only been used for one season, and even then it was not in the major competitions of Euros or Worlds etc, where the stakes are much higher than in the GP. And all through the "experiment", it's had several problems, things that clearly need to be worked out and altered. While COP may have had some great results (e.g. skaters working more on different aspects of their skating), it's still not ready. The problems that have already surfaced (the level 4 element in dance, Plushenko's loss at the GPF, the wrong scores, etc) may have been dealt with/changed already, but there are probably still lots more that haven't come out yet, and will only surface with more testing.
Piseev, to me, has a valid concern about using COP at Worlds in Moscow next year, when there's every chance that a problem like those that have already happened could easily happen again. And maybe the fact that Russian skaters are at the top could actually make the situation more concerning, because if a situation happened where a deserving Russian skater didn't win because of a COP glitch that hadn't been worked out, then it wouldn't go down very well, especially with the audiences. Not to mention the fact that Moscow Worlds is the qualifier for the next Olympics! A glitch in COP could effectively mean a country ends up with only 2 spots instead of 3, or only 1 instead of 2.
