http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/Cra ... story.htmlBy Cam Cole, Vancouver - February 6, 2010Cracking the skating code
Canadians are racking up the points, but judges can still manipulate new scoring system The Canadian figure skating pairs team (right) of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier were awarded gold medals in 2002 along with the Russian figure skating pair of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze to resolve a judging controversy caused by a French judge who took marks away from the Canadians' near-flawless performance.
Photograph by: Getty Images, Vancouver SunSay what you like about the relative merits of figure skating's old 6.0-based scoring system compared to its supposedly tamper-proof replacement, the Code of Points (COP).
The good news -or, depending on your indignation threshold, the bad news -is that even the modern system, the International Skating Union's forced response to the attempted robbery of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier at the 2002 Winter Olympics, can't legislate judges' personal tastes out of the equation.
And controversy, therefore, will always be a part -arguably a vital part -of figure skating's fabric.
"What other sport is like ours?" Canada's 2008 world men's champion Jeff Buttle asked the other day, without a trace of irony.
"It's a subjective sport. There will always be that uncontrollable factor, and I certainly wouldn't want to take the creative side of skating out. As a skater, you just learn to cope with it however you can. In any judged sport, or any sport with a referee, there is going to be human error."
The controversies, now, just tend to be a little more muted -and much less obvious -than the ones that plagued ice-dancing for years and finally erupted in scandal at Salt Lake City involving the now-infamous French judge, the Canadian pairs team, their Russian rivals, and in the end, gold medals all around.
But even a system as strictly points-based and complex as the COP -one that has allowed
gifted "total" skaters like Buttle and his Canadian successor, Patrick Chan, to thrive by building high scores on footwork and transitions and overall skating skills despite lacking quadruple jumps -leaves room for judgment calls. And though Canadians initially benefited from the new system more than any other nation's skaters, it might have been a temporary condition. The world has caught on, fast.
"I think first of all, we happened to have skaters, at that point in time, who fit the mould really, really well. That was, perhaps, a bit of a fluke, frankly," says Skate Canada's CEO, William Thompson, a former skater, judge and international technical expert.
In Buttle and Chan, in Joannie Rochette, in ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir and pairs skaters Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison, Canada had strong, fast, artistically-skilled competitors who were able to exploit the opportunities afforded by the new scoring system to ring up points like pinball machines all over the ice surface.
All but Buttle -who retired a year ago and is acting as a sort of big brother to Canada's Olympic skaters before joining the Stars On Ice tours of Asia and Canada later this spring -are heading into these games with hopes for medals, some stronger than others. Canada has never before had threats in all four disciplines in an Olympic year.
The irony, said Thompson, is that "if you look back historically, Canadians have been more known for technical jumpforwards than artistic jumpforwards."
From Donald Jackson to Vern Taylor to Brian Orser to Kurt Browning to Elvis Stojko, many of the major advancements in multiple-rotation jumps were pioneered by Canadians.
"But one of the other things that happened was, we as a country believed this [COP] system was going to be in place -so we got the analysis people in place quickly," said Thompson.
"We were fortunate with how well-educated our federation made us about the system," said Buttle, who went from 15th under the old system at the 2003 world championships to a silver medal in 2005, the first year the new format was used at the worlds. "We sat down right from the beginning of that first season and talked about what we needed to be focusing on to maximize our scores."
The COP system, probably to its detriment, is difficult to explain in a few sentences. Everyone understood 6.0, even if they didn't have a clue how the judge arrived at the mark.
At the core of the new code is a technical panel which assigns specific point levels for each element in a skater's program. Judges merely have to add or deduct points from the basic mark for the skater's grade of execution of each element. The computer does the rest.
"One of the biggest challenges judging under the old system," said Thompson, who did, "was if you had a skater who did some elements well and some poorly -maybe land a quad but cheat a triple Axel or some other jumps -you weren't sure what to do with it. Now, because [elements] have a precise amount assigned to them, at the end of the day, the mark is not compromised the way
One of the biggest challenges judging under the old system was if you had a skater who did some elements well and some poorly -maybe land a quad but cheat a triple Axel or some other jumps -you weren't sure what to do with it.
William Thompson Skate Canada CEO
it was under the old system, where you were trying to come up with one mark that encompassed all of it.
"In the old days, really what did the mark mean? It was a guess. Now, you either do it or you don't. The beauty of it is that it's not overburdening the judges with accounting. You just watch it come, you stick in how well they did it, and move on to the next element. And forget about it. You don't have to compare one person to the next. Just mark each [element], and keep on rolling. And you don't do the math yourself, as a judge. The computer does it."
In theory, yes.
But many observers at last year's worlds in Los Angeles were mystified when
Chan, the then 18-year-old phenom whose footwork, transitions and overall skating skills may be unmatched by anyone he'll face at the Olympics, was outpointed in those areas in both the short and long programs by Frenchman Brian Joubert, the former world champion, an accomplished jumper but not gifted with great feet."In all honesty, I don't see how that was possible," said Buttle, who defeated a bitter Joubert to win his world title in Sweden two years ago, and was third to Joubert's sixth at the Turin Olympics. "Joubert may be a better jumper in the sense that he can do the quad, but ... people who don't even watch skating could easily see the difference in quality between Patrick and Brian.
"I hope, I really do hope, that the component scores [in Vancouver] are based on the quality of their components, their ability as a skater, not whether they did the quad."Asked if he could explain the L.A. component scores -basically, the old presentation mark -Thompson said:
"Well, no, I don't think I could. But it's still more a matter of education than it is someone deliberately trying to manipulate," said the Skate Canada boss. "The process of learning to judge presentation is more challenging.
"The other part you have to keep in mind is, there are cultural differences -what is good in one culture may not be good in another. We look at it through a North American bias, but let's not kid ourselves -that is still a type of bias. So we might look at it and say that's a European or a Russian bias, but I think for a long time we've been a little bit holier-than-thou in thinking we don't have one. Everyone else does, but we don't?
"It's never as simple as 'that's clearly wrong.' Maybe it's only clearly wrong according to us."
The Vancouver Olympics will be one more test of a judging system that survived the 2006 Games in Turin relatively unscathed, but emotions are always higher, and so are the number of conspiracy theories, when those five interlocking rings are at centre ice.
From the panel of 12 judges, the computer randomly selects nine whose scores will count. Of those nine scores, the highest and lowest are thrown out, and the remaining seven are averaged. Judges never know whether their scores will count, and the ISU protects their identities by not connecting specific marks with the judges who awarded them.
The computer knows, though, and data are stored and can be used to discipline judges whose marking is consistently out of line. Still, if it's done subtly, the system can still be manipulated.
Skate Canada's high performance director, Mike Slipchuk, who skated alongside Kurt Browning under the old judging, is a big fan of the changes, though. The proof that it's working, he says, is the volatility in the makeup of the podiums -evidence, in his estimation, that performance and not reputation is deciding championships.
"It's opening up the sport," said Slipchuk. "In the five or six years since we've had this system, we've had how many different world champions? The podium can change in the blink of an eye, year over year, and skaters go in knowing that they can, in a sense, control their destiny." (he is so "naive" - why not say, that this happened because it was not Plushy? )In the five world championships held since the old 6.0 system was mothballed, the 20 titles have been won by 17 different entries.
"Vancouver is going to be a clear indication of that," Slipchuk said. "There's not very many categories going in where you're thinking: there's three people that have a lock on a medal. There's so much up-and-down, I know I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what the top five in men would be.
"There's got to be 10 guys [who could win], and our guy is in the middle of that pack. It would be great to see them all skate as well as they could, so you could really see where everyone factors in. "
Russia's Evgeni Plushenko, the Turin Olympic champion who has come out of retirement this year to restake his claim as the favourite, heads the list.
But despite the Russian's prodigious quadruple combination jumps and consistently high scores, Thompson says it's not a lock for any skater.
"Might he win? Yeah, he might. But he might not," said the Skate Canada boss. "Patrick's in that same bunch. He might win, but he's got to be firing at 100% and there's no room for error. That's the challenge -and really, do you want it any other way?
... really interested me, how many odds there Plushy, and how many Chan for victory : 70-30%?