Why does starting order/grouping affect PCS?

[Joekaz]

Still, skating has always relied on the integrity and competence of the judges, the feds and the ISU officials. If anything it has gotten better with introduction of IJS. It can continue to get better, but it will never become perfect, and it will never become perfectly objective.

And if it did become a sport of measuring tricks that skaters can execute on ice without caring about the quality of edges, it wouldn't be figure skating at all, it would be something else. If there were no programs and no value to performance quality, it might still be figure skating, but it would become a lot less interesting.

What makes you think they actually care about the qualities you mention? And the judging has gotten better? We have been watching 2 different things my friend. I said nothing about not caring about the finer aspects of skating. I started this conversation by critisizing the current trend of over emphasis on speed and length in scoring in the women's competition over the finer points. But, somehow you have totally misinterpreted what I was saying because I blamed the judges and ISU for this trend. While I think they should use available technology for jump rotations, the rest can still be handled by good judging. But ridiculous overscoring in PCS and GOE on selected skaters must end or their is no point to competition. The recent Japanese Nationals is a good example. The top four senior women(2nd place was a junior , so we will omit her)are all highly talented and skate similar content. They all skated very well and it should have been a very close event. Instead, the only one that did not do a 3/3 combo in the LP won the event by 20 points, solely based on ridiculously inflated PCS and GOE. No, things are not getting better.

 

[Mathman]

Here's my two cents.

1. About speed, I think that variation in speed has always been more highly regarded that just straight line velocity. Especially with regard to Program Components. a skater who can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds, then turn on a dime, is very impressive. Although, referring to the original question on this thread, it is cool to note the increase in speed when the last group takes the ice for warm-ups, especially for the live (as opposed to TV) audience.

2. About the tendency to spread out the PCSs at the top even when all the skaters are fairly close in performance ability, I can understand why this happens. All the skaters are good, but when it comes to awarding medals we have to distinguish between a skater who is really, really, really, really good form one who is really, really, really good. Otherwise, the effect of PCSs would be the same as if this scoring cartegory were disposed of altogether, with every skater getting a 0. I don't think it is possible to avoid the issue of comparing one skater against another, regardless of the desirability of having objective standards.

 

[gkelly]

Here's my two cents.

1. About speed, I think that variation in speed has always been more highly regarded that just straight line velocity. Especially with regard to Program Components. a skater who can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds, then turn on a dime, is very impressive. Although, referring to the original question on this thread, it is cool to note the increase in speed when the last group takes the ice for warm-ups, especially for the live (as opposed to TV) audience.

I remember the first live competition I attended. There were three warmup groups. During the resurface, I wondered whether the leader after the second group could actually win -- the skater was elegant and musical with good lines and strong spins, and the jump content was comparable to what the medalists could be expected to include at that time.

As soon as the final group came out for their warmup, I saw why that skater would not be a medal contender after all. The level of speed/ice coverage/power among the final group skaters was just that much stronger that it was very obvious to me as a newbie fan.

If I'd watched the same competition on video (assuming US TV at the time had actually shown more than the final group), I might have had a very different impression.

 

[Anna K.]

I'm not sure that individual programs are becoming simpler season by season. Definitely if you compared a representative program from the 1990s with one from the 2020s, there will be more going on in the latter. (With exceptions in both directions -- the most complex 6.0 programs will have more content than the simplest IJS programs, but on average, IJS programs are more complex.)

What is true is that IJS has standardized what gets rewarded such that everyone tries to do the things it rewards that are most straightforward to achieve, and to leave out skills that are no longer rewarded and even penalized by IJS rules. So what has happened is that IJS programs become more similar to each other in any given year, making the range of creativity across a whole field more uniform than under 6.0.

This is actually what I meant. I meant that programs become more similar, hence simpler for an eye, but I should have known better than using a word "simple" when talking about figure skating. There is nothing simple about figure skating in the past or now.

Regardless, the comparison made by you is very interesting. I recently did one myself; I watched back-to-back Toller Cranston's Firebird program and Deniss Vasiljevs' Firebird from the recent Music on Ice show. Neither program suffered from the comparison; just, they had their "wow factors" in different program aspects. For Deniss, it was his skating skills and musical sensitivity, for Toller it was the use of his entire body to do choreographic elements, including different types of jumps, not just rotation jumps. Both suited the music which was also different. Neither program used the original Stravinsky's arrangement. For Toller, it was a disco mix. For Deniss, it was a live piano fantasy. It can't say that either program felt more difficult, or more complicated, or more attractive than the other. They were just different.

The overall skill level today is apparently of higher difficulty than it used to be in the past, but artistically I guess it's just something different.