wingman

Thank you for sharing! I teared up watching that video. It's so true. Kudos to Yuzu for being so brave to speak up. I hope his supporters will start a conversation regarding injuries and toxic stoicism in sports.

What's this thing about him shutting Hashimoto? I'd love to know The upside of it is that we know he's pure, self-made, he fought for everything he got with tooth and nails, and that's why we love him so much. Propped-up pets can't replace, won't replace him, EVER. And I'm sure that he has and will continue to inspire generations of beautiful skaters. Hopefully at some point, JSF leadership will change. Japan Judo Fed was really toxic for a while, and then they overhauled the leadership and it got much better. And talking about traditions - Judo is one of the most traditional, hierarchical, macho thing possible, and I was very happy to see that changes are possible. Just got to hope.

Yeah, I've had a negative impression of Fernandez ever since I watched his Inform Robinson interview (I think there's English subtitle available? I speak some Spanish so it was ok to follow). It was overly dramatized, but also, Javi was dropping shades like "if there's an issue between me and Hanyu, it's not from me". Poor Yuzu - but better now than never. At least he has millions of people who love him unconditionally (and also great people like Shizu-chan and Nobu who always speak for all of us).

@kingbanana: try the Planet's video compilation: https://planethanyu.com/topic/265-video-compilation-senior-level-competitions-media-post/

Oh, Yag is a flawed character with ulterior motives, along with many other figure skating "experts". Re: Raf. I had a coach like that (Russian-trained, different sports, but always demeaning to his athletes and says tonnes of unpleasant stuff and does psychologically abuse their athletes to make them stronger). And yes, all that matters is medals and $$$. Raf is a version of Tut. These people aren't worth paying attention to.

Great summary! Much appreciated, and it brought to light things that I didn't know (or read but forgot). Yep. Yag during his competitive time made a lot of headlines for his questionable comments and behavior. So, I don't expect anything from him. (Plus, he hates Plush to the bones, and Yuzu loves Plush so much, so I can only imagine that he can't be too thrilled...) A good athlete and a good human being are two orthogonal things. On Yuzu's Worlds etc. I'm so glad that he's not seen and not making any statements yet. He just needs time to process what happened. We all needed time to process the stuff in the last week, I'm sure it's much harder for him. I hope he'll just take all the time he needs, all the rehab etc, and hopefully, he can enjoy one or two moments of this Olympics.

Next time. There's always a next time with Yuzu, I'm sure of it. I am so glad that he can relax now and avoid that BS press conf. He can just interview with Shuzo, hop on the plane, go back to his den and train for 4A. (While we pour out our love for him). It's just one stepping stone to 4A. The 4A podium is there, within reach. I'm sure he will go for it.

I can't quite decide if it's 4Aq or 4A< LOL. I'm sure Yuzu would want a 4A FULL STOP though. He is SO CLOSE!!! I'm SO HAPPY for him.

Thank you for the translation! It makes a lot of sense. (Coupled with Takeshi Honda's comments, we get the picture that he can do 4A, but he's very much aware of the risk of injuring his ankle). He has come so far. It must be scary to jump something that threatens to take you out for months at a time at each landing. I trust that he's managing it very carefully. Ganbare Yuzu!

LOL, this happen doesn't it, one thread goes on fire forever... Logging off now (got to work tomorrow). Thanks everyone on the Planet for making this place so awesome! I'll definitely stay away from all media BS and just tune in here for news / vids before the Free.

I think Med is aiming for Beijing 2022, in which case she has time and is on good track. As long as she stays competitive w PCS, by just being clean, and staing as a dark horse gor podiums, then once she got the 4S she'll be back in the game again. Thanks for sharing the Plush stuff. 40% to Eteri, I'm not surprised at all. I had a Soviet trained coach in a different sport and it was the same deal... Just the culture.

I'm a bit behind -- what's the Plush to Eteri comment that everyone is on about?

Um, sorry to bring back the ITL topic with an unpopular opinion, but I'm a little surprised at how negative the discussions went here.

I thought about this a bit -- don't they use computer vision to track and predict ball trajectories in baseball and cricket quite a bit? Granted t that the ball has well-defined boundaries, but I think it's not a trivial problem in baseball at all, and they have managed for ages now. Another option is to put a small tracking device on the skaters' boots. Two chips for each boot is enough (one in front and one below) -- and this way we don't need to deal with cameras *at all* They have chips in soccer balls, for example, so clearly the technology is there. Obviously it won't get adapted at competitions immediately, but I think that it can get taken up by amateurs, training, etc, and eventually make it to official competitions? In the long run, this sort of tracking beats cameras + algorithms *for sure*. We really need to think in the long run and have an indisputable technology. (Getting the ISU to adopt it may take as long as getting FIFA to adopt their goal line technology, but it's totally worth it) Btw, athletes might want this to dispute ISU's phantom call, for example. There's totally a market for it.

Great everyone - thanks for initiating this @shanshani! I really think that a crowd-funded project is possible. And just generally looking down the road, if we want to turn this into a serious analysis that can shame the ISU and bring about REAL changes, there are a few things we should consider now: Data collection 1. Where to store these videos 2. Copyrights. (Any lawyers on the planet? Who own these videos? What about events that say "no fan cams allowed"?) And what about broadcasted videos? (Do you think there's a chance that we can get permission to use them? Would be happy to write and ask -- I suspect that short clips from those are OK but not the whole performance) 3. Splicing, tagging and sorting: ideally each video is split into multiple clips, each clip just have 1 second before the jump, the jump, and the second after (say). Then we need to sort the video by *jumps*, with naming convention like jumptype_skater_program_competition, so we will get 4Lo_Hanyu_SP_ACI2019 for example and within that folder we have multiple clips of the same jump. I think step 3 should be done by the video submitter, to minimize our burden. After we collect a giant database, we can think of the second step: methodologies (I still lean towards crowd-funding a Kaggle -- I think it gives great visibility to the problem as well)

Yep that's what I thought too. I bet he will keep Origin. But I hope he will change the short. He got good scores with it, broke WR and all, so it's ok to move on. Origin, on the other hand, wasn't perfect. Plus there's that 4A Gong.. On the bright side, since he'll stuff it with new elements it will look like a new program. So that's still something to look forward to. Tbh Origin looked great on media day last year (and it got some fans too, just not as universal as,say, Seimei imo).

I voted for SC + NHK, but imo SC + COR is likely as well. This reminds me of last year, when we were all too sure that he would do SC + NHK, then the mystery assignment turned out and everyone's jaws dropped... LOL Crazy times.

@Old Cat Lady Yeah yeah, please do prepare something. It's my first worlds, super excited! (Though I'll miss most of it live -- Mexico timezone is just not compatible). Could you give a link to how the scoring etc works too?

I agree with you that one needs to gather all the data into one place. I could write codes to scrape, but if skatingscores already did this, I'd like to ask them for permission and credit them for that work. (Or to ask the ISU directly). However, I would refrain from actively looking for things like "block biases" though. We should always look at the data in the most objective way as possible, free of assumptions and biases, and then just accept whatever the data tell us, regardless of whether that contradict or affirm our beliefs (of course, after making sure that we did not make silly errors in the computations or the modelling step). Otherwise, our brain is very primed to selecting and presenting convenient information that affirms our biases, and we just end up seeing things we already assumed, which I think is worse than not analyzing the data at all. Just by glancing at the nice tables you made, I honestly don't find any conclusive evidence of under or overscoring. eg: if we were to zoom in at Jun's score at GPF: the judges are quite divided on him: JPN + FIN + KOR judges give him huge + scores, while three others are huge -, and two are in between. Should we conclude that one group is biased +, the other is biased -, and the "middle ground" ones are fair? No. We can conclude that there's no clear "majority" view on his skates. Doesn't mean that the + or the - are "wrong" camps. While I totally agree that humans have biases in just about everything (subconscious or conscious), if you think about how these biases manifest, it's pretty hard to uncover, unless if it's fairly blatant. (which in my experience as a statistician, it's not at all obvious from this figure skating dataset). We (the statisticans) also have our own biases. So that's why we need lots of data + an objective analysis method.

@yuzuangel Interesting. Well, I just wrote to them directly asking for permission to use their data. (Not that they own the data, honestly, but I'm ok with giving their some credit for doing the scraping work). We'll see. If they say no, I'll write to the ISU to ask for data. And if not, then I'll scrape. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that a simple collaborative filtering model with a "judge bias" term, together with a low-rank factorization on the performance's attributes would work well. I'm excited.

I agree with you. This plot by itself is meaningless. The correct thing is to plot PCS by some measure of how "clean" they are, eg: PCS by TES, or PCS by total GOE, for example.

Thanks. Let me contact skatingscores.com directly and see what sort of existing data / analysis / model are there. A model I can think of would be able to make statements like this: * it is likely that judge X favors skaters (S1, S2, S3,...) in TS, which all have the following common attribute (A1, A2 etc). That's probably the kind of thing that we want to look for right? With more detailed data we can even say * it is likely that judge X gives high GOE on the Salchow of skaters (S1, S2, S3,...), whose jumps all have the following common attribute: (A1, A2, etc...) So that's why I want to have as detailed data as possible. Though, given how noisy figure skating score is, I think the bias has to rather huge for a statistical model to pick this up.

It's *amazing* that you entered the stuff by hand. Did you just get such data from the ISU pdf protocol? (and did you enter that raw data by hand, or did you have a script to read off the pdf file?) Let me make sure I understood the definitions of the variables: - TES/GOE/PCS diff of judge A on skater B means: * for each skate( short and free) * take judge A's score on skater B's performance (eg: TES), then subtract off the *average* score of the other judges ? That's your raw data, and after wards the other cells are your calculations? I'd like to get *raw* data (ie: no averaging, no extra statistics, as much info recorded as possible). So for example, ideally for me, I want to get the entire ISU protocols in raw format. Previously we had this data before (for old rules / pre 2018-2019 season), but we didn't have the judge's names, so we couldn't do the judge bias analysis. Sorry for these question - it's actually easier for me to work on the raw data directly, as opposed to the averaged stats. I like your analysis very much though, and will definitely check-in with you to get intuition.

This is great! I've been looking for this kind of data in the earlier project with another satellite here. Would you like to collaborate on this? I'd love to analyze this dataset. Some questions: a/ The judge spreadsheet that you uploaded was averaged over all skaters in all competitions that this judge participated in? Are there judges which appeared in multiple competitions? Did you make a distinction between seniors and juniors? b/ Do you have the *raw* data (one judge delta for each performance, with label as to which performance it is)? What's the raw format like? (another spread sheet? Or some database?) I'd like to work with the raw data if possible. (I have a stats background and worked on some collaborative filtering problems before (ie: how Netflix recommends movies to us). This problem has that flavor, so probably the same math would give us interesting insights). @shanshani Please feel free to PM me if you want to talk more about it -- or, we can discuss it openly here and hopefully other techie satellites can join us. I'm excited!

@LeadenMyr That's a great cake! Did you eat it in his honor? I'm inspired!