shanshani

yay i'm finally finished with compiling my grand prix event judging data. Special thanks to @WinForPooh for her help! Here's a preview of the judges datasheet I'm putting together. Currently doesn't have very many judges and only has data from GP events, but I'm going to keep adding stuff this week and next. relatedly, I'm going to have an conniption fit the next time I see Olga Kozhemyakina on a judging panel. she has horrible bias statistics but she keeps getting judging assignments. and it turns out that Deborah Currie, the US men's judge a lot of us were side-eyeing at Rostelecom is pretty bad too.

Yeah, there is absolutely zero chance Canadian media would find out before anyone else. They're just jumping the gun on Yuzu's withdrawal notice because Keegan is first alternate.

Yeah, I do feel like there's a lot of well, orientalism, when it comes to Western or at least Angloamerican coverage of Yuzu. Like, he's often covered more as a curiosity than a serious athlete. I think a lot of things contribute to it--one, a lot of people in the Angloamerican cultural sphere don't take figure skating, especially male figure skating, seriously as a sport because tbh a lot of the West has a kind of screwed up conception of masculinity and also a narrow conception of what counts as a sport. Second, Yuzu himself doesn't fit people's stereotypes of what an elite athlete looks like, both because of his race (even Asian American athletes in popular sports get kind of racist coverage sometimes) and his appearance, but he does fit people's stereotypes of "pretty Asian idol boy", so that's the lens they see him through. Third, treating him as a curiosity plays into the "Japanese people are so weird' trope that comes up every time there's an off-beat story about Japan. Russian coverage doesn't have that, because even though I'm sure they have their own problems with gender and race stereotypes, they take figure skating seriously as a sport.

I would also like to add that it's possible for CBC to be a great organization overall yet have messed up on this one issue. I mean, it's a giant organization, it's going to make mistakes every once in a while. (As an American citizen, I would certainly trade some of our news organizations for it aaaand that's all I'm gonna say about that lol.)

Under spoilers so as not to reignite the Seimei girl/CBC debate

It's sure...different...seeing Yuzu upheld as a paragon of traditional masculinity in English language media...the gender politics surrounding Yuzu are so weird sometimes, I'm glad Yuzu himself seems completely removed from it. tbh, I find it off-putting that an actual newspaper published an editorial opining about Yuzu's decisions. It's one thing when fans give their opinions on forums, but lending an opinion the weight of a legitimate publication just seems invasive and overbearing At the end of the day they're his personal decisions, and it's not like he's a kid. He's an adult and has been for some time, and is allowed to set his own priorities

off-ice hydroblade Yuzuru is making me feel things

I have my RFO edge now, yay. LFO is still a work in progress (need to practice more left foot gliding/right foot t-pushes) but starting to get there. Amusingly, this has led to me being able to power pulls (on my right foot--not for very long, but still!) before being able to do slaloms. Pretty sure the normal way is to learn the two foot version of a skill before the one foot version Speaking of acquiring skills in the wrong order, I still can't do a real snowplow stop I swear I've gotten worse at them because half the time I try I accelerate instead. Also I tried two-foot turns today but mostly failed too because I couldn't get all the way around (I think I'm a little psychologically blocked from putting in the force need). The one time I did get 180 degrees I think I did a one foot turn by accident. Honestly, one foot seems easier to turn on than two feet. Well, my rink finally found me a coach, so hopefully I will acquire all the little basic skills I missed just fooling around. Specifically, I need to get better at stopping quite badly. Otherwise, I fear for the little kids at my rink and their habit of not watching where they're going.

I don't but I'm going to take this opportunity to praise Yuzu's 4S. Because it's the best 4S--this isn't even bias speaking. I think you could argue about who has the best 4T but no one has a 4S nearly as good as Yuzu's. Between the height, the limited PR compared to all the other 4S, the running edge out, and how easy and effortless he makes the jump look, I actually think it's his second best jump after 3A (maybe 1st best jump this season because his 3A is suffering from 4A training).

I project around 111 SP and 219 FS for a clean skate from Yuzu, assuming he can hit an average of +4 GOE per element and 9.75 per PCS category. Which, based on the GOE for his 4Ss, should be totally doable? And if he can manage a good number of +5s, especially on the big jumps, he should be able to exceed that. For Shoma, projecting an average of +3.5 GOE per element and 9.5 per PC category should score 109 in the SP and 214 in the FS. So basically, if Yuzu can keep a 0.5 GOE and 0.25 PCS lead raw per element/category, it should be more than enough to beat Shoma. It does depend a little too much on the judges for my liking, but on the other hand Yuzu doesn't have to be thaaat far ahead. Even if you bump up Shoma's average GOE to 3.75, Yuzu's still ahead. Their BV is veryyyy close right now so it doesn't take that much to edge him out, and I don't think Shoma is planning any upgrades? Unlike Nathan, who probably is.

Not sure if this has been posted since I don't follow this thread that closely. Ghislain using a video of Yuzu's H&L to teach Rika Kihara and Shu Nakamura 4S:

If they both skate clean, it'll come down to the particular scores on the elements on the day. Imo, Yuzu should still be winning on the average quality of the elements, but judges have really gone crazy with Shoma's GOE scores. I wouldn't take early scores to be too indicative though. Yuzu's jumps have been pretty meh so far this season on average (he's only done a senior B and a GP so far, after all--we should be grateful he's landing them ) and he hasn't skated against Shoma yet--so who knows how Shoma's GOE holds up when he has actual competition.

I hope it's ok if I repost this here--this thread has more readers than General Skate Chat and it's of general Yuzuru-related interest as well: I've been compiling judge's scores for some of the competitions this season (the ambition is to do it for all senior international competitions and maybe even some junior competitions, but it's a slow and tedious process) and running some numbers in order to determine how the judges scored various skaters relative to other skaters and particularly whether they overscored skaters from their own country versus skaters from other countries. I first calculated how much a judge's scores different from that of their fellow judges (that's the first table of numbers you see--eg. -11 means 11 points lower than other judges). From this, I calculate a value (which I have temporarily named "DELTA") which indicates how much more favorably a judge judged skaters from their country versus skaters from other countries--a delta of 5 in total score means that a judge scored their own skaters 5 points higher than how they scored other skaters, adjusted for the average score the skater got from the other judges. Anyway, I've done this with 3 competitions so far (Autumn Classic, Ondrej Nepala, and GP Helsinki), which is enough that I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the results (after all, some of the judges who judged there are judging upcoming competitions). I did the whole competition at each event, so you can see the scoring for each discipline (scroll to the right) and I also looked at raw GOE and PCS in addition to point total. Autumn Classic Ondrej Nepala GP Finland (working on Skate America now) These spreadsheet also show how much higher or lower a particular judge judged a particular skater, so I think it's also useful if you want to take a look at how some judges score particular skaters. Also, it shows the average amount a judge deviated from the rest of the judging panel, so you can also tell which judges are harsher and which are nicer. At some point I want to compile all the data so that it's sorted by judge so you can look at their judging record across competitions this season as a whole, but there's still so much work to do and I have a job and other hobbies Which leads me to my next question--would anyone be interested in helping? I have templates for all the formulas, so all you have to do is go to the "protocols" page and copy numbers from skatingscores.com into the relevant boxes. It's a little tedious, but you can do it while watching tv and it would be immensely useful hopefully not just for me but also for the figure skating community to get a better sense of judges and judging. (Alternately, if anyone knows how to program a web scraper, that would make life so much easier for me) Points of interest as it relates to Yuzu in particular: GP Finland men's judging was pretty dodgy overall--4/9 judges had some pretty strong nationalistic bias numbers, including the Japanese judge Yoshioka (Yuzu finally benefits from biased judging!--lol. Actually the ACI Japanese judge Ando was also pretty pro-Yuzu). In a reversal of the usual order of things (most US judges are terrible), US judge Wendy Enzmann was actually harsher on US skaters than other skaters on average in men's. But among all the judges I've been paying attention to, she's actually probably the fairest and least biased. Odhran Allen, the Irish judge everyone was complaining about at ACI for giving Yuzu only +1 on his 3A in the short is a super harsh judge overall. On the other hand, Doug Williams, the US judge at ACI mostly gave pretty average scores, except he had it in for four men: Yuzu, Junhwan, Julian Yee, and Yamato Rowe from the Philippines (and also loved the Dodd brothers for some reason.) scoring them 10 points or more below the other judges.

I've been compiling judge's scores for some of the competitions this season (the ambition is to do it for all senior international competitions and maybe even some junior competitions, but it's a slow and tedious process) and running some numbers in order to determine how the judges scored various skaters relative to other skaters and particularly whether they overscored skaters from their own country versus skaters from other countries. I first calculated how much a judge's scores different from that of their fellow judges (that's the first table of numbers you see--eg. -11 means 11 points lower than other judges). From this, I calculate a value (which I have temporarily named "DELTA") which indicates how much more favorably a judge judged skaters from their country versus skaters from other countries--a delta of 5 in total score means that a judge scored their own skaters 5 points higher than how they scored other skaters, adjusted for the average score the skater got from the other judges. Anyway, I've done this with 3 competitions so far (Autumn Classic, Ondrej Nepala, and GP Helsinki), which is enough that I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the results (after all, some of the judges who judged there are judging upcoming competitions). I did the whole competition at each event, so you can see the scoring for each discipline (scroll to the right) and I also looked at raw GOE and PCS in addition to point total. Autumn Classic Ondrej Nepala GP Finland GP USA GP Japan (work in progress) These spreadsheet also show how much higher or lower a particular judge judged a particular skater, so I think it's also useful if you want to take a look at how some judges score particular skaters. Also, it shows the average amount a judge deviated from the rest of the judging panel, so you can also tell which judges are harsher and which are nicer. At some point I want to compile all the data so that it's sorted by judge so you can look at their judging record across competitions this season as a whole, but there's still so much work to do and I have a job and other hobbies Which leads me to my next question--would anyone be interested in helping? I have templates for all the formulas, so all you have to do is go to the "protocols" page and copy numbers from skatingscores.com into the relevant boxes. It's a little tedious, but you can do it while watching tv and it would be immensely useful hopefully not just for me but also for the figure skating community to get a better sense of judges and judging. (Alternately, if anyone knows how to program a web scraper, that would make life so much easier for me)

I think they mean they've never both been clean at the same competition (Nate bombed 2017 Worlds).

This looks really nice! Kudos everyone involved!

But why crown a lady but refuse to crown a man? It just doesn't make any sense Not that judges should be crowning anybody. Sure, I don't mean to complain about Yuzu's scores or anything. It's just so weird that the attitude towards men's scoring and women's scoring seems so totally different. Like, objectively, Alina's Helsinki performance was not a good performance for her, yet she still averaged 9/10 raw PCS--not much lower than she usually gets and certainly higher than other ladies, even though Yuzu was similarly messy and took a fairly large PCS hit out of what he normally gets, putting him around the same level as Nathan Chen. Is it just because her choreography has a bunch of transitions, even if she didn't perform it well? But then why doesn't number of transitions seem to matter as much in men's? There should be an actual rubric for PCS because right now it's extremely confusing.

Yeah, but some people justify her PCS with her status as reigning OGM. Which, I mean, I guess that might explain it because so much of PCS is in actuality reputation-based rather than reality-based, but that doesn't explain why Yuzu's PCS have gone down when other men haven't dropped very much at all. (Also, the gap in PCS between Nathan, Shoma, and Yuzu right now is less than the score gap between a single well executed versus so-so quad, so it's basically irrelevant to placements between the three now ) I guess it's just the rule about high PCS only if you're clean--but that seems to disproportionately punish skaters who have maxed-out PCS whereas skaters who haven't don't seem to take the same PCS hit when they're messy, unless they also don't have a reputation/belong to a strong federation. Well, I guess dodgy judging isn't new.

So I keep seeing that Alina's PCS should go up because she's the reigning Olympic gold medalist, but Yuzu's also the reigning Olympic gold medalist, and this hasn't happened to him? In fact his PCS has dropped. I don't think people's PCS should go up because of their gold medalist status, but uh, isn't it kind of strange that the expectation in women's is totally different than the expectation in men's?

I would also like HK as an option since it's where I currently live. Since HK skaters compete under the HK flag, I think it makes sense to have it be an option in the context of a figure skating forum ^^ OT: I have Yuzu withdrawal already--how did I even survive the off season?

*refrains from ranting about how [Admin edit: Please refrain from starting political debates.] 2. Hating on random athletes and celebrities is not the appropriate way to adjudicate those issues and in fact trivializes and debases them because at a certain point it's just an excuse to hate* Ahem...anyway. I don't think there's anything non-Korean speakers can do. [Admin edit: Please don't generalize groups of FS fans.], what else is new. I'm glad Chinese internet likes Yuzu--tbh like 90% of my Chinese reading practice is reading threads about figure skating, so if there was Yuzu-hatred everywhere, my Chinese literacy would probably decay to nothing. Edit: though it's important to note that not all Koreans are like this, just an unfortunately loud subset. There are Korean Yuzu fans too

I'm just going to assume Finnish has some weird vowel/declension rules because the alternative is too to contemplate

Sometimes I wonder if his replies about Pooh going back to the forest are his way of politely saying he's fed up with that question. Because the rest of us sure are

His average raw GOE is -2.71, but the protocol reports the actual points, not the average of the raw judges scores. So you need to multiply the bv of 4Lo< by 27.1% to calculate the GOE

I decided to watch Yuzu's junior programs for some reason and boy did this commentary age well. B.Esp uncles are like oracles here