General Skating Chat

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

7 分, Murieleirumさんが言いました:

 

There is a thing called competitive eating c: And chili eating contests. 

 

Shit. I can't do those. I got severe indigestion from simply consuming a slightly greasy overly expensive gourmet donut the other day. But I sweated buckets while suffering the consequences of my life choices that day. >_<

[hoodie axel]

14 minutes ago, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

Hmm, I find FS 100% sport. Being artistic doesn't make it less of one. If anything, it makes it more. And I include ID in this category, only in lesser value compared to other disciplines within the FS sphere. 

 

There isn't a "less" or "more" for me. It's 50% sport and 50% art. I don't think even if it were art on top of sport makes it more of a sport than other sports, either. The training is completely different.

[Murieleirum]

3 minutes ago, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

 

Shit. I can't do those. I got severe indigestion from simply consuming a slightly greasy overly expensive gourmet donut the other day. Guess I'm.not.good for anything but posting unwanted and unpopular opinions on forums, lol, if that can be considered as good for something. >_<

 

I could never write so many long posts so often as you do! That definitely looks like a sport to me xD  

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

20 時間前, hoodie axelさんが言いました:

There isn't a "less" or "more" for me. It's 50% sport and 50% art. I don't think art on top of sport makes it more of a sport than other sports, either. The training is completely different.

 

I guess I don't think it's more than other sports either when it comes down to it, but I do think what it is makes it more than merely a sport. Perhaps we're looking at it the same way but from different perspective and scale.

[hoodie axel]

39 minutes ago, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

I get that ballet perhaps wouldn't be suited to competition because...well, to my very limited knowledge, I don't think ballet itself does competitions.

https://yagp.org/

 

There are several others.

[KatjaThera]

Hmm thinking about what makes something a sport to me, I think anything that requires a higher level of physical fitness than is required for average, day to day life, has the potential to be a sport, to me. I'm not entirely sure about the definition of sport that the IOC has for example or why things like wife carrying or car pulling aren't sports, even though there are competitions for it. (I think one requirement is that there have to be enough people doing it and also there have to be formal request for a sport to be included in the Olympics. But no real idea).

 

Going by that personal definition, I can't argue Ice Dance is not a sport, when looking at the level of physical fitness that ice dancers have. The guys, but also the ladies. It's definitely not something some regular person walking down the street can do. Admittedly, the same can be said about ballet and dance and so on. But as long as those are the requirements, I will respect them just like all other athletes. (Then again, I'm an F1 fan and consider F1 drivers to be athletes, simply because of the level of fitness required to withstand the G forces that occur in the cars, so maybe my opinion is skewed lol)

 

That said, I did watch ice dance live at NHK last year and I had no idea why each pair got the scores they did. All I knew was that when Scott and Tessa took the ice, they were on a completely different level. Though I'm not sure it had much to do with the technicality of what they were doing, but they were so in sync and had so much chemistry and passion and spectacular moments, it was impossible not to like them. (And I actually was far from a fan before that.) So my own judging of the ice dancing I saw had little to do with technical stuff and more to do with general impression.

 

Anyway, sport or no sport, what makes figure skating, as a whole, really great and special to me, is that you have these people do incredibly difficult things - that most normal people would probably break their necks if they tried without the years of preparation - but make them look much easier than they are and, even more so, make it look beautiful, also adding music and beautiful costumes - and I think that's what disguises it and makes people think if it looks easy and pretty, then it must be easy and frivolous, hence it's not a sport; I'd like each person claiming it's not a sport to take on any of these skaters in any regular athletic activity and I'm quite sure they'd have no chance of beating them - and not only that, but they do it while balancing on thin bits of - sharp! - metal on slippery ice (that's also why, when someone said ballet dancers don't have the advantage of picking up speed when doing jumps, that's true, but they also don't have to land on a thin blade of metal, that can easily slip on the ice, at the slightest tilt the wrong way; so, IMO, each discipline has its own difficulties). It boggles the mind that there are people who don't find this impressive...

[MajaHled]

I think a lot of differences of opinion on this subject (not just here, other discussions I've seen on this as well) come from the fact that some people think that the more something is a sport, the less it is art and vice versa. So someone might think that FS is 50% sport and 50% art and someone else might think that it's 60% sport and 40% art, for example. What I think is that it's both 100% sport and 100% art, that the two sides don't necessarily go against each other or limit each other. On the contrary, I think the ideal should be that the more someone excels at the technical side, the better their "artistic" side becomes. Sure, some people might be better or worse at it, but that goes for all other forms of art and sport. But in the end what is or isn't sport is subjective and what is or isn't art is even more subjective, so I can see why there are so many diverging opinions on this.

[SSS]

So there is no layout talk this season love and peace after olympics 

[hoodie axel]

Are there 3 competitions this week? Or 4? I'll be missing all of them, so it will be helpful to know how many vids I'd need to pull.

[EisElle]

9 minutes ago, hoodie axel said:

Are there 3 competitions this week? Or 4? I'll be missing all of them, so it will be helpful to know how many vids I'd need to pull.

I know about 3 - US classic, Lombardia Trophy and JGP Richmond -, idk if there are others too...

But JGP is the one with more entries. IIRC for the others there may be around 10-15 people per discipline,  on average... (and US classic also has Jr and novice)

 

 

[Forcefield]

Okay, time to revive this thread since ACI is over. More analyzing of scores.

 

Anyway, I know this Youtuber is infamous among fs fans, nonetheless she/he did this video very quickly including the protocols which I think is very interesting to see together; wish more talented fans could do this for several skaters with just the skates and scores

Edit: Also, the music was changed to avoid CR

 

 

[shanshani]

In light of dodgy scoring at ACI, I've decided to start compiling scores for all international competitions this season in order to see if I can detect judging bias. I did this before for the men's free for GP, 4CC, Euro, Worlds and Olys for the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 season, so I remember a lot of the judges' names--including ones who are awful, who I am pleased (/sarcasm) to see on judging panels once more this season. 

[shanshani]

US Classic, why you gotta be different? Why can't you format your protocol pages like everyone else? Why are you making my life pointlessly difficult? 

[Neenah]

42 minutes ago, shanshani said:

US Classic, why you gotta be different? Why can't you format your protocol pages like everyone else? Why are you making my life pointlessly difficult? 

You can use http://skatingscores.com . They have all the scores in the same format and you can also check the individual judges scores

[shanshani]

On 9/24/2018 at 5:09 AM, Neenah said:

You can use http://skatingscores.com . They have all the scores in the same format and you can also check the individual judges scores

The main thing was that I need to download the pdfs so I can work on the plane ride home. But yeah, I'll use skating scores otherwise. 

Fun fact: Doug Williams (J2, USA), scored Yuzu more than 16 points below the average of the other judges between the SP and the FS. He also scored him an average of 0.5 points lower than the other judges per PCS category, and an average of 0.8 points lower per element in GOE. Edit: He also whacked Junhwan pretty hard, scoring him an average of 11 points below the other judges. He also hates Julian Zhi Jie Yi for some reason, scoring him over 20 points below the other judges...and whereas he is basically in line with judges' averages on Jason Brown and Roman Sadovsky. Haven't looked at other skaters yet, but uh...this is a weird and disturbing pattern of massively underscoring Asian skaters. Hopefully it doesn't continue. 

-edit: Eh I'm going to reserve judgment on Odhran Allen for now. He may just be a harsh judge. Will update-

Update: Odhran Allen is just a tough judge--while he did underscore Yuzu by a little more than he underscored other skaters on average (and underscored the Irish skaters less than he underscored other skaters on average), he underscored several skaters by 10+ points and almost all skaters relative to other judges. Williams', on the other hand, was quite close to other judges for most skaters, deviating by 10+ points in only the following cases: Yuzuru Hanyu (-16.27), Junhwan Cha (-11.34), Julian Zhi Jie Yi (-20.66), Yamato Rowe (-10.36) on the negative side (it's...sure a weird coincidence that they're all Asian), and Andrew Dodd (+12.55) and Jordan Dodd (+11.8) on the positive side. The rest of his score deviations were no larger than 6.5.