What I don't get is how can one not be sympathetic with Trusova. For goodness sake! The girl did 5 QUADS IN LADIES at the Olympics Final! One quad is already incredible, but FIVE?!! Pity about the 3A but that was designed for combo!! It is a monumental and historic achievement however she did it. It is still a sporting event at end of the day. no? Instead, now we are blaming her for daring to show she is upset rather than be celebrating on what she did.
How can one even equate this achievement purely in terms of rotation points differences under the already outdated COP system makes no sense, when the COP was never designed to reward ladies for quads in the first place? I think she had been rewarded the quads bonus in PCS that you often see given to the men's quadsful but half-empty programs, so I can understand her PCS boost in that respect.
COP should have room to allow people to pick a strategy to maximize their strength. One should be allowed to make these choices even when it may suffer in other areas. Just like when Carolina Kostner can choose to compete through PCS (when PCS made sense before the Russian hostage takeover since 2009-2010), you'd likely to see her picking slower but interesting pacing rhythmic music with likely lower technical content so she can focus on fully delivering the choreographic performances and going clean for extra PCS boost. Yuzu, Nathan, Plushenko's quadsful programs have all suffered when they choose to focus on jumps, so it is quite natural part of the sport. There shouldn't be a template formula for success if the judges reward things properly.
In any case, something is seriously screwed up with COP in practice, particularly the tendency for judges to prejudge and subconsciously earmark skaters for pre-ranking and benchmarking their scoring potential based on inflated scoring events put up by powerfeds. We have seen a number of great ladies given their career-best today going relatively clean but not nearly given an equal amount of inflation or clean bonus had they been skating for a power federation like Russia or the US. Yet skaters who had been pre-anointed as potential podium skaters can go splatt and still get their PCS cushion however they skate. There are many unfair aspects to this sport, but this has to be the most unfair of all. No matter what the ladies did on the day, going clean or going splatt, under the current judging system, they rarely make big differences in the scoring range other than 1 or 2 placement differences despite their performance saying otherwise on the day. And of course you have the judging selection and anonymity issue, but enough of that.
