General Skating Chat

[monchan]

11 hours ago, yuzuangel said:

What a random draw!!

 

 

They have planned well up to Beijing .

Yuzu has completely messed up their big picture in PC that now they have to be extra careful leading to Beijing . Make sure no underdog can sneak into their plan 

[Old Cat Lady]

Hopefully the Finnish judge is the one from Helsinki last year to help balance out the US judge.

 

I was just about to say that it's irrelevant that the JPN judge isn't on the panel since they normally just hurt their own skaters anyway, but it seems like at least a couple JPN judge have started playing the game this year so that could be really hurtful.

 

Not that I condone blatant bias, but if ISU isn't going to do anything to correct it, I"d like the bias to at least be balanced.  At least there's no Mexican judge - they might as well be called U.S. judge #2.

[shanshani]

55 minutes ago, Old Cat Lady said:

Hopefully the Finnish judge is the one from Helsinki last year to help balance out the US judge.

 

I was just about to say that it's irrelevant that the JPN judge isn't on the panel since they normally just hurt their own skaters anyway, but it seems like at least a couple JPN judge have started playing the game this year so that could be really hurtful.

 

Not that I condone blatant bias, but if ISU isn't going to do anything to correct it, I"d like the bias to at least be balanced.  At least there's no Mexican judge - they might as well be called U.S. judge #2.

JPN judges play the game less than the other big feds, but there are still a substantial number of biased Japanese judges. Whether they would have been assigned is another question though.

 

I actually didn't find any evidence that Mexican judges are biased in favor of US skaters in my judge bias project. I haven't posted the document where I switched around the nationalities of judges yet, but I finished about 75% of it, including both Mexican judges, and they scored US skaters and non-US skaters about the same on average.

 

Regardless, I really think the ISU should have a policy where they either have the judges of all top competitors on the judging panel or none. The fact that one medal contender would get a friendly judge but not others will rightly make people doubt the objectivity of the panel, especially when so many judges are demonstrably biased.

[sallycinnamon]

The 2020/21 Junior Grand Prix Calendar has been published in the ISU Communication No 2289:

 

Date	Location
August 26 - 29	Richmond, Canada (+ Pairs)
September 2 - 5	Kosice, Slovakia (+ Pairs)
September 9 - 12	Budapest, Hungary
September 16 - 19	Shinyokohama, Japan
September 23 - 26	Ostrava, Czech Republic (+ Pairs)
September 30 - October 3	Tashkent, Uzbekistan (+ Pairs)
October 7 - 10	Ljubljana, Slovenia

 

 

In other news, the ISU Council established a working group to consider improvements for the judging of Program Components and it consists of Paolo Pizzocari (ITA), Leanna Caron (CAN), Alla Shekhovtsova (RUS) and Karen Wolanchuk (USA).

[SparkleSalad]

 

39 minutes ago, sallycinnamon said:

In other news, the ISU Council established a working group to consider improvements for the judging of Program Components and it consists of Paolo Pizzocari (ITA), Leanna Caron (CAN), Alla Shekhovtsova (RUS) and Karen Wolanchuk (USA).

 

Nice to see the ISU still has a sense of humour.

[Paskud]

39 minutes ago, sallycinnamon said:

In other news, the ISU Council established a working group to consider improvements for the judging of Program Components and it consists of Paolo Pizzocari (ITA), Leanna Caron (CAN), Alla Shekhovtsova (RUS) and Karen Wolanchuk (USA).

And what this group is supposed to do?

[yuzuangel]

 

Does anyone know why some elements that SHOULD have 0 GOE (after dropping the highest and lowest scores) get something other than 0 GOE?

[shanshani]

7 hours ago, yuzuangel said:

 

Does anyone know why some elements that SHOULD have 0 GOE (after dropping the highest and lowest scores) get something other than 0 GOE?

good question. rounding error? glitch in software? wouldn't surprise me if the ISU's scores have been slightly off the whole time and no one's noticed  I've definitely seen medals decided on margins smaller than 0.06 (JGPF last year had some 0.01-0.03 victories iirc)

[Kadova]

On 9/16/2019 at 7:14 PM, Yuzurella said:

 

That would be an ideal solution. Add to that cameras in every corner of the rink, better technology for the judges to review jumps and such as well as split TES and PCS panel.

Oh, and naturally judges being trained, appointed and hired by an independent international board. This way, figure skating judging would become fair, accurate, accountable, reliable and transparent.

The question is, do the organizations and people that are in power actually want that to happen?

All of this needs money to be implemented. Do I need to say more ?

[sallycinnamon]

On 10/18/2019 at 5:54 PM, Paskud said:

And what this group is supposed to do?

 

Apparently they'll consider to reduce the categories of components.

 

Quote from an article on TASS that asked Shekovtsova about the working group. https://tass.ru/sport/7034236

 

Quote

Increasing the effectiveness of the existing judging system in figure skating and reducing the number of evaluation components will become the main focus of the new working group created in the International Skating Union -  Alla Shekhovtsova told TASS, who is one of the members of the group.

 

The decision to create the group was made following an ISU council meeting held on October 11-12 in Geneva. It included Russian Shekhovtsova, as well as Italian Paolo Pizzocari, Canadian Leanna Caron and American Karen Volanchuk. Shekhovtsova is a former ice dance, an international judge who also worked at the Olympic Games and ISU Championships and she has the title of Master of Sports of the USSR (1979).

“The group was created to analyze the existing judging system of components and to develop proposals for its improvement. It is no secret that the judge must evaluate too many criteria during the competition and it does not always work efficiently. The main idea is to reduce the number of evaluated components, not having lost in quality, "said Shekhovtsova.

 

In the modern judging system, skaters are rated for technique and overall impression. The second mark is set for five components - the basic technique (purity, confidence, accuracy), transitions (continuity of movement, transition from element to element), performance (expressiveness, posture, purity of movements, personality, synchronism in pair skating), composition (conveying ideas , visions, moods) and interpretation of music.

 

“A few years ago, technical committees made an attempt of this kind and put forward some ideas for discussion, but for a number of reasons there were no drastic changes. At that time, we decided to limit ourselves to finalizing the wording of the criteria, which affected the quality of understanding of all the nuances, but did not solve the processing problem too a large amount of information. Leanna Caron made a great contribution to the refinement of these formulations, "Shekhovtsova said.

 

“At that time, Paolo Pizzocari’s proposal was to reduce the number of components to four. At the heart of my even more radical proposal was the idea of regrouping the existing evaluation criteria to three: the first should evaluate the quality of skating, the second: the quality of program, third: how the program was executed in emotionally and musically, ” explained the specialist.

 

My guess is that Shekvotsova's proposal (with the power of her federation behind her) will have a bigger chance to go through the voting process than Pizzocari's. So I find it possible that there'll be three components later: quality of skating, quality of program, and performance/execution.

[Sombreuil]

All of which will be meaningless because even if they attempt to define what they mean by those three components in order to reduce subjective scoring the judges will continue to do exactly as they like and there is no sanction for it unless it’s so crassly blatant that even ISU cannot ignore it.  Problem lies in the personnel not the system.

[sallycinnamon]

7 minutes ago, Sombreuil said:

All of which will be meaningless because even if they attempt to define what they mean by those three components in order to reduce subjective scoring the judges will continue to do exactly as they like and there is no sanction for it unless it’s so crassly blatant that even ISU cannot ignore it.  Problem lies in the personnel not the system.

 

Exactly. The rules themselves aren't the problem, political games/bias, the judges being dependent from their federations, the lack of sufficient training of the judges and the lack of accountability in the sport are the problem.

[SparkleSalad]

They’re already struggling to fill seats when the skaters this will benefit compete so good luck to the ISU not going bankrupt when Yuzu retires. 

[Paskud]

4 hours ago, sallycinnamon said:

 

Apparently they'll consider to reduce the categories of components.

 

Quote from an article on TASS that asked Shekovtsova about the working group. https://tass.ru/sport/7034236

 

 

My guess is that Shekvotsova's proposal (with the power of her federation behind her) will have a bigger chance to go through the voting process than Pizzocari's. So I find it possible that there'll be three components later: quality of skating, quality of program, and performance/execution.

And mistery solved.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

[SparkleSalad]

🙃