This is such a level-headed and fair analysis of the current Yuzu and figure skating situation. Alice (the-real-xmonster) puts things in perspective and takes a pragmatic approach to this entire issue.
She's absolutely right. No matter how unfair we think the judging is or how corrupt the ISU and their system are, things right now are the way they are. I have no doubt that Yuzu thinks the same way. He now has to make the best out of this situation. And we should do that, too.
What we can do now is to keep on supporting Yuzu as best as we can, sending him our love and gratitude. I trust that everything will be alright. I trust that Yuzu will make it.
http://the-real-xmonster.tumblr.com/post/183708979759/whats-next-for-yuzu-hello-girlsguys-apologize
the-real-xmonster
What’s Next for Yuzu?
Hello girls/guys, apologize for suddenly going MIA this past weekend - I was out of town and didn’t bring my laptop with me. I’ve got tons of questions sitting in my inbox about the men’s event (as well as leftovers about the ladies’), which I’ll try to get to in the next couple of days. First, though, in this post I’d like to put together some general thoughts regarding our beloved Yuzu.
What Happened
The margin of 22.45 points between Nathan and Yuzu sounds awful on paper, but it could be accounted for in a fairly straightforward manner using the 2 jumping mistakes that Yuzu had: the popped 4S in the SP and the UR 4S in the LP. If Yuzu had landed those 2 Salchows properly, all else being equal, he could have won. That’s not my crazy Hanyu fan persona talking, it’s math.
His (relatively) clean Otonal SP was awarded 110.53 at Rostelecom Cup so that mistake in the SP in Saitama cost him upward of 15 points - 14 of which was because of the missing element itself, and the rest because of the reduction in PCS it induced (and I’d be the first to admit that it should’ve cost him even more had the judges strictly followed the ISU recommendation on PCS for programs containing a serious error).
His clean 4S in the LP at GP Helsinki was awarded 13.44 points, so the UR in Saitama cost him about 7.5 points.
(at least) 15.00 + 7.5 = 22.5, which is enough to cover the margin and allow Yuzu to win, and that’s before we account for the fact that a cleaner LP would’ve easily netted him more than 95.84 in PCS.
I’m not throwing these numbers out here to kick off a game of what-ifs. I’m doing this only to show you that the hot take of “Yuzu couldn’t have won even if he had skated cleanly” is bullshit. You don’t have to swallow it from anyone, not even Yuzu himself.
Do I think that the margin of victory should’ve been narrower than 22.45? Yes, I unequivocally do, not because I think Yuzu was underscored (I do not think so) but because I can poke a bunch of holes in the scores Nathan got. +4/+5 for his quads/3As were excessive, mainly because he didn’t have much in the way of creative entries, his landings were still a pain point because of the lack of flow, and while the size of his jumps on average was acceptable, it wasn’t outstanding. His LP ChSq was still blink-and-you-miss-it. His edgework and control have improved this past year, but were still not enough to justify +4/+5 on his StSq and +9 for his SS. His transition or lack thereof (and that’s not only my opinion but reportedly his coach’s too) should’ve resulted in a TR score well below 9. The list goes on.
What We Can Do
Trigger Warning: the stuff you’re about to read is not rosy.
A few people have been asking me what we, as fans, could do to let the ISU know what we think of their arbitrary judging practice. My answer is: we can make as much noise as we have time for on social media and we can reach out to them directly. For the latter purpose, yes, they have a Contact Us page on their official website. Select Figure Skating from the dropdown list and unleash on them your choice message. Only remember, if you will, to keep your arguments logical and your tone civilized. Much more likely than not, they’d go silent for weeks before replying to you with a polite little piece of mail saying your concern has been duly noted and will be looked into. (Why do I know that? Because I sent them just such a message after the disaster that was the score Mao received for her free skate at Sochi 5 years ago.)
I would advise you to keep trying and at the same time I would advise you not to have your hope up that it will do much good. Sporting governing bodies for the most part are not known for either their responsiveness or their tendency to eventually honoring fans’ wishes. Accountability and transparency are concepts as foreign to them as a double Axel is to Yuzuru Hanyu. It took, for example, an FBI investigation and brazen corruption in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars for some changes to be done to FIFA. Considering the scale of the ISU and its weight on the public’s mind relative to FIFA, I can’t imagine any such drastic thing is going to happen to it anytime soon. In fact, the last time a major change was introduced to figure skating was 15 years ago with the establishment of the Code of Points, and back then it took an Olympic-scale scandal involving blatant misconduct to bring about the changes. What happened in Saitama last week was nowhere near as grave (at least I haven’t seen any evidence of anything more nefarious than your garden variety judging biases / irrationality) so to hope that we could leverage it to change the ISU’s way forward is close to magical thinking.
So let me tell you what will, in all likelihood, happen next season. Provided that he continues landing his quads regularly enough, Nathan’s PCS is not going to go down from 94-95, on the contrary it will go on to increase since he’s now a 2-time World champion and generally speaking the number or World titles one has tend to correlate positively with one’s PCS. He has no reason to regress on the base value of his layout either, so a back-to-back clean Nathan is going to score in the 320+ range. You don’t have to like it and it’s completely within your rights to be mad about it / keep writing to the ISU about it, but unless and until any material change is forthcoming, you’ve got to accept that as the baseline of your expectation.
Which brings me to the next and last section of this wall of text:
What Yuzu Can Do
If there’s anything I’m sure of about Yuzu’s personality, it’s that he is not prone to mere wishfulness, he’s a man of action and he loves to win. I’m also 100% certain that he is capable of logically coming to terms with the reality of the competitive landscape as I’ve described above and of figuring out an action plan for next season.
So if I were Yuzu, I’d reckon that I cannot rely on my PCS alone to carry me to titles so in order to stay ahead of the field I’d need to up my TES. Now, if the last week in Saitama has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t rely on getting decisively higher GOEs either. So what do I do? The natural conclusion is that I need to increase my BV, which means adding more quads, which, under the revised Zayak rule, means adding more variety of quads (with the way the new SOV scales according to an element’s BV, doing this would help maximizing my GOE potential too). Hence, you heard Yuzu’s take that next season he needs to aim for 4A, 4Lz, and possibly 4F. Some people have asked if I thought Yuzu was just being reckless when he stated that - I don’t think so, I believe he’s smart enough to have thought about it and arrived at the logical conclusion.
As a side note, I also believe Yuzu is smart and self-aware enough to, once the disappointment has cooled off, understand that it’s not because he’s lacking something or he didn’t work hard enough or his skating somehow had gotten worse, it’s just, matter-of-factly, how the system currently works and thus there are extra steps involved in regaining his World title.
I guess what I’m trying to say with this extremely very long note is, yes, it was disappointing, yes, the magnitude of the loss, on paper at least, was hard to swallow, and yes, things could have turned out differently had Yuzu been injury-free and able to compete in his top form, but don’t let all that frustration make you forget to appreciate the miracle he conjured (normal people don’t just take half a season off because of a serious injury and then come back to win a Silver medal at Worlds) or to celebrate the fact that he’s staying and he’s still hungry for success. If Yuzu himself can continue loving this sport enough and being hopeful enough to stay, you should be able to do the same without giving way to bitterness - that, I think, is the least of what we can do for him. After all, if, as Yuzu said, he is coming home, we’d need to be there to warmly welcome him back, right?
