PR Campaign for Fair Scoring

[senemgencer]

Dear Yuzuru fans,

 

To repeat what I thought could be some steps/strategies to put pressure on ISU about the issue of fair scoring:

 

* First step must be to include in Olympic Commitee in every communication made on social media.

* Secondly, unfair scoring is not only recent, there is a whole book about it:  The Second Mark. Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold. We can use lots of content from the book to justify that ISU judges have been biased and corrupted especially when it comes to Olympics and that we do not want the history to repeat. And yes, no mention of Yuzuru here, the  focus should be demanding that unbaised judges should be removed from judges panels.

* How can we define unfair or biased judges? One way is to identify those who have continiously overscored skaters from their own country. We have Martina Frammentino who has done excessive research and statistical analysis on this matter. Those stats can be used.

We can question why certain jumps /spins etc have been scored differently for every skater whereas the rules for scoring are very explicit: for example let's ask why a certain female skater's 3F was scored lower when a very similar 3F performed by another skater was scored higher. Or why Jason Brown's that element was scored lower than say Yuzuru's when it was executed almost the same?

"It is very difficult to make a 100% fair judgement with human eye, so while understand and appreciate judges' efforts, we suggest the use of AI technologies to minimise such errors" This is a desruptive statement which will frustrate both ISU and judges. We can even go as far as saying that there are studies made on this matter and prove that it is only a matter of months to prepare a very efficient scoring algorithm that will eliminate all questions.

* The core of the strategy is to publicly say "Judging in Figure skating has been historically biased and unfair. There are many FS fans who believe that this is still the case. This will  be harmful for the future of FS.  We want to start a discussion about the ways to implement the best methods for a fairly judged Olympics. "

* The hidden message is "Don't you think that we are not aware of what you are doing. We are very frustrated and we will raise our voices louder if you don't change: either the way you score certain skaters or the way you do the scoring."

 

Maybe we can think of other ways. I am prepared to reach some skaters who have competed at international level and someone who is at the Board of Art On Ice which is held in Switzerland for comments 

 

[Whoopiewoop]

Hi senemgencer,

 

If I knew there was a way in which this situation could be fixed, I would be one of the first ones to "get up and scream murder". But I don't think there is. 

 

The ISU, the IOC... they are both in it together. The IOC won't do anything in this case. Just like they haven't done anything after Sochi 2014 with all the fiasco that went down when it was a whole federation complaining officially against the corrupt judging.

 

I placed this question on Twitter once, and had the audacity to '@' Martina (and Max Ambesi) whom you mentioned in your post because I felt brave to see what they thought. Martina pretty much said it was a lost cause and I have to agree with her. I thought about hashtags, just to get the word out there to see if the big news outlets would catch onto it and start their investigation.

 

The request to have judges provide reports (justifications for their scoring) was once put out there I believe, but it got shot down immediately. I also believe that if they were to implement this, would require putting the judges on a payroll as part-time (if not full-time) workers since they will need quite a bit of time to write these reports rather than just sit there at the side of the rink and look pretty.

 

A petition is not gonna make it. Someone already big enough in sports journalism has to start getting involved in this subject for it to start rolling. But who? Forget any US journalist, they all are living for the current hype of their skater and a report like this one would just harm them. Canada? I'm gonna go with the cliche and say that they are too nice  . Lol at Russia.

 

 

Maybe we can call up Netflix and tell them we have material. Everyone knows Netflix loves its scandals. 

 

 

 

 

[senemgencer]

@Whoopiewoop thanks a lot for the comments.

 

Have you heard of the Gallipoli war? and how the Turkish army (which consisted mainly of minor year old peasants) fought back (and won) against the British Empire and Franced armies combined? We should fight like that. Nothing is a lost case, ISU wins only because they think that noone can stand against them and people keep on coming onto them either individually or in very small groups. Crowded and unity are the key words here. Martina is a good stats person, I love her articles, but she is not the kind of person who likes to lead. So of course she will say that it is a lost cause, because she has never tried. By the way, I am a Campaign Manager by profession, so trust me you can beat any company or an organisation nowadays by implementing correct tactics. 

 

We can start with the Italian media, Japanese media, German media, Turkish media, Swiss media, CHINESE media (where Yuzuru is very popular, for instance).... any media you can think of. They would love the story of Don Quixiotes uniting against the windmills and the narrative is simple "We want fair scoring and there is a way"

 

What may come out of this, is exactly what came out of Gallipoli: the enemy will lose power and step back. I am not expacting ISU to adapt AI in the next 3-5 years realistically speaking, but our REAL aim is to create so much noise that they will feel obliged to do their job properly, at least for the next few seasons. Look what happened with European Super League. Look how greedy and evil those super rich bosses look now when spectators refused to be a part of their greedy game. 

 

What happened at Sochi is why we have to act NOW. Once the damage is done, you can't take it back (although it also happened once at Salt Lake, if you remember, but it is whole a different story), but we can have an impact with if a PR campaign that starts early. Can we be that powerful? Maybe not. But unless we try, we can never know. They keep saying that Yuzuru has a massive fanbase who follow him everywhere. It is time to prove it then. 

[Olive]

Ok I registered  just to be able to post. Longtime lurker, just nerver had anything to say.

 

This is essential. Some thing needs to be done.

 

First caveat.

Who ever get's involved with get punished hard by the ISU if they can, so it is important that the people involved can't be linked to a skater or a country. Remember when some people created a new skating league after the 2002 salt lake city scandal: they got banned for life from the ISU. Even child molesters are not as severly punished by them. They will view interventions as high treason. It has to be either impossible or untenable for them to retaliate.

 

now my idea: make a comitee that can be held accountable to make fair scores. The more transparent and the higher profile the better. If this commitee can get enough credibility they can hand out there own ranking that has to be justified. Even better would be able to raise prize money. The ISU  can go an do their own circus and get blatantly exposed, the athletes could get the recognition they deserve. The care would need to go in avoiding biasses as much as possible so that it does not become a popularity contest. There are skaters that I don't enjoy do watch, they still deserve to win if they are the best that day.

[shanshani]

if I could make my contribution

 

I've been working on building a queryable database for judges scores. it's not done (specifically it's missing pairs/dance for 2021 worlds/nearly all of the senior Bs/wtt) but it has all major senior international competitions (with international panels--so not the weird GPs this season) since the start of this quad (2018-2019 season) other than the aforementioned. if anyone is interested, here's what I have so far: odb format, sql format

 

unfortunately it requires a bit of technical know-how to work with, but if you know how to write database queries, there's enough data that you can see some pretty interesting things. for example, here's the output of a query I ran on how Russian judges have scored the top 10 ladies in the past quad. (Point_bias is just how many points they scored a skater above/below the judges' average in a segment, averaged across all segments that the judge judged. Positive points means a judge gave the skater that many more points on average per program, negative means fewer points.)

 

 

as you can see, the russian judges are...very consistently biased in favor of russian skaters and against their competitors

 

you can write all kinds of queries for other stuff as well. for example, I wrote another query for a list of which judges have historically been friendly to Yuzu and which haven't (go swedish judges lmao), another that calculates the historical national bias level of each judge, another that looks at how judges from former soviet bloc countries score russian skaters, and so on--you can pretty much answer any objectively quantifiable question about the judging you can think of with the right query (well, as long as it's at the overall score level anyway--the database doesn't contain the GOE/PCS breakdowns)

 

anyway, I'm hoping to get the rest of the data in some time this month, and then make a user-friendly way for other people to query the database that doesn't require learning SQL (though it's not as scary as it sounds! I learned it through this project)

[vd_turnan]

The only way things can possibly change is to catch judges being corrupt in the act. Or to completely get rid of them. Judges were always corrupt and everyone knows, including ISU and IOC. It's only when it gets out with proof that they make some changes (nothing too big, enough to satisfy the masses for a while and at the same time allow them to go on with making the arrangements they need). Or maybe have judges grow a counsciousness 😂. I'm afraid for pressure for fair scoring to work, ISU would need to first care about this issue. Pressure from fans cannot compete with pressure from the federations that pay good money.

[Dreamer]

On 4/26/2021 at 6:20 PM, vd_turnan said:

The only way things can possibly change is to catch judges being corrupt in the act. Or to completely get rid of them. Judges were always corrupt and everyone knows, including ISU and IOC. It's only when it gets out with proof that they make some changes (nothing too big, enough to satisfy the masses for a while and at the same time allow them to go on with making the arrangements they need). Or maybe have judges grow a counsciousness 😂. I'm afraid for pressure for fair scoring to work, ISU would need to first care about this issue. Pressure from fans cannot compete with pressure from the federations that pay good money.

It is the $$ from networks like NBC that they care about.  Which is why they had the crazy schedule for FS at PC Olympics for men: it was scheduled for NBC programming