Under the 6.0 system, the short program and the long program each had its own special role to play. In the short program you had to score well enough to "make the finals" -- that is, to put yourself in a position where you can skate for the championship in the long.
But then, no matter how well positioned you were, you still had to skate for the championship.
In other words, if you wanted to be champion you had to go out and skate a good short and then you had to go out and skate a good long.
It depends which version of 6.0 we're talking about. But even leaving out all of the era with school figures, especially the part without factored placements, from 1999 to 2004 under 6.0 the qualifying rounds at ISU championships (i.e., singles events at Worlds and Junior Worlds, and sometimes Europeans) counted toward the final results, meaning that the long program counted only 1/2 of the total score and not 2/3.
So that meant that sometimes more than 3 skaters controlled their own destiny, and sometimes only 2; in theory sometimes only 1.
If you were 3rd or 4th after the short but not in control of your destiny, yes you could win, and you had to skate for it, but you might blow away the rest of the field and still not win depending what order the others finished in.
If you won both your qual round and the SP and the person who was 2nd in the SP had not won the other qual round, then you were in sole command of destiny and guaranteed the gold medal with a 2nd place in the free skate. Plushenko was in that position at 2001 Worlds. Of course he did go out and win free skate as well. But he did have enough of a factored placements lead that he couldn't be beaten overall if he skated reasonably well for him.
Under CoP scoring, a point is a point, whenever and however you score it. There is, in fact, no rational reason, only tradition, for having a two-part competition at all.
This is largely true, but less because of the add-up-points approach to combining results from the two phases and more because of the introduction of so many required elements and limits repeated elements in the so-called free program.
Under 6.0, it seems like falls were more severely penalized. Those who won never fell in the long program unless everyone else did, too (Kristi Yamaguchi is one example I can think of).
Not strictly true. But most of the counterexamples I can think of are from national or GP events, maybe Europeans, or even less important than those. I can't think of examples at Worlds or Olympics. Mistakes in the LP, yes, but not flat-out falls.
There has always been a problem of fallers being held up in the short program. I remember Ina and Dungjen (IIRC) skating clean but coming in behind a falling Russian team in the Olympics one year (1998, I believe). The Russians were the favorites, and did medal despite their fall. So did Evgeni Plushenko. He fell but was kept in 4th in '02. I believe they skated clean in the long program.
And in those cases almost everything else they did in their short programs, aside from the element they fell on, was superior to the performances that they beat.
Often the commentators tended to give the impression that all the top skaters started from a base mark of 6.0 and got deductions for obvious errors, but that was never true. The judges set base marks based on what the skaters did and how well they did it, deductions for errors applied only to short programs, and not all errors requiring deductions were obvious to most viewers (and commentators rarely pointed out the more subtle ones).
There was never a written rule that performances without falls should automatically score higher than performances with falls. Quite the opposite, in fact -- there was a written rule that a fall was no bar to winning.
As a rule of thumb, it was certainly more common for winning performances to be cleaner than the ones they beat, for skaters to lose points when they fell and often to lose expected placements. So if fans operated on the belief that performances with falls should place behind those without falls, and only watched a few top competitors in each event, usually this belief would be borne out by the official results.
But not always. Sometimes judges believed that the skater with the fall was just better and gave them higher scores. In short programs, that might mean starting with a high enough Required Elements base mark and a high enough Presentation mark that even after the mandatory deduction the total was still higher than the total of a rival who had skated clean but with less content or less quality overall. And if a majority of judges thought so, the skater with the fall would come out ahead.
The "problem" wasn't so much that skaters who fell were held up unfairly by the judges, but that fans often didn't have enough knowledge of what else the judges were looking at to understand why it was equally or more fair for the skater with the fall to earn higher scores.
With COP, someone can fall more than once in the short and still be in the running, and fall again in the long and still get a gold or silver.
That could be true under 6.0 as well in a competition with a weak enough field that two falls in the short might still be good enough for 2nd or 3rd place in the short. In fact, that's a bigger theoretical problem with the flattened out margins of victory in 6.0 scoring.
Under 6.0 if a skater falls twice in the short and is 2nd or 3rd going into the free skate, behind a skater who skated clean with good content and quality, in the free he only needs to be a tiny bit better than the leader to win the whole thing. In IJS, a skater who fell twice in the short and is 2nd or 3rd going into the free behind a skater who skated clean with good content and quality, he will be many points behind the leader and will need to be much better in the free to pass the leader.
Some multiple mistake-filled performances have won top medals. I won't get more specific, but there's one from last year that was infamous. Under 6.0, if someone fell or even made a visible mistake in the long and someone in the top 3 was clean, you knew it was pretty much over. Michelle in 2002, Brian Orser in 1988, etc. That's why everyone thought the Sale and Peltier should've won.
Not everyone. All of those were contested events with mixed ordinals. It so happened that the cleaner performances ended up winning, but there were valid why the long program results weren't unanimous. If you "knew" the event was pretty much over when someone made smaller mistakes as in the Orser and Berezhnaya/Sikhuarulidze examples, then your knowledge was incomplete.
For better or for worse, this sport is complicated enough that there aren't always clearcut winners, and not even a fall much less a smaller mistake necessarily makes it more clearcut.
Here's an easy suggestion: If there is ever again a program where there are no falls, and no hands or feet down, they get a 50 point bonus in the long and 25 in the short.
Ha, that would make it more valuable to do no risky elements, in some cases no elements, or at least no jumps, at all. Most skaters (aside from the top men) do not earn that many points for their jump content in their short or long programs respectively.
The thing is, in order to play it safe at a major event you need a big lead out of the SP and to be skating towards the end of the final group and have people skate poorly. That doesn't happen too frequently at that level. So the bottom line is that I agree with your contention that it's not a major issue with the system if you're concerned about the Olympics/ISU championships. It does happen occasionally on the GP circuit - Brezina at SA comes to mind. But it's not that easy to build up a big lead in the SP, so if a skater manages it, I don't mind a cautious skate so long as it's quality skating.
Agreed.
Skaters will be more strategic at the big championships, and they will face stiffer competition. At GP events, some top skaters are more interested in getting mileage on their programs than in getting another GP gold medal. And there may really only be one "top" (world medal-level) skater in the event, depending how the seeding worked out and who retired and or withdrew. In which case it would not be surprising, with any judging system, for the expected leader to lead and maintain that lead even with mistakes or watered-down content. At Worlds they probably can't afford it.
What about a real contender falling far behind after the SP? Some of them rally back in the LP to medal or even win the event which would be impossible under 6.0. Should a medal be lost as decided by the SP?
It has happened (medaling more often than winning gold) under both systems.
With IJS, you just have to have a larger gap between you and the next-best skater in the LP than that skater had over you in the short. I'd like to see some tweaks to the respective program requirements and/or PCS factors to make this more likely.
With 6.0 and factored placements, you need to win the long program and have all the skaters who were ahead of you in the short finish in just the right order. Which can lead to paradoxes.
Now that's a format that is both exciting and fair.
