Latest news on figure skating scoring changes? I stumbled upon that needle in the haystack
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The International Skating Union sure doesn’t make it easy.
In mid-May, it published two communications about significant changes to the scale of values and grades of execution used to score and judge singles and pairs skating. There was no email alerting media to the changes. I learned of them from a figure skating official who had received the communications.
In mid-June, with the Covid-19 pandemic having put the viability of the 2020-21 season in serious doubt, the ISU said it was suspending the changes published in May. Once again, there was no media notification of the decision.
Only because ISU vice-president Alexander Lakernik of Russia had told me last month that there would be further news about the suspended changes this week, I went to the ISU web site Friday morning to look.
There was nothing under the “Latest News” rubric at the top of the web site (see photo above.) And nothing on the entire front page of the web site. But, just for the heck of it, I clicked on the “Communications” link near the very bottom of the front page.
And discovered that a communication about the changes to the changes had been published two days earlier.
The ISU has both been deluging me with emails and also stuffing social media with information about its first skating awards show.
But not a word could I find in plain sight about the information related to the scoring and judging changes.
(Warning: the following contains a lot of “inside baseball” and may be hazardous to rational thought processes.)
Opening the latest communication, dated July 8 and numbered 2334, I was immediately left boggle-eyed by this tossed salad of numbers:
Communication No. 2334
SINGLE & PAIR SKATING
Levels of Difficulty and Guidelines for marking Grade of Execution, season 2020/21
The following Communication replaces Communication No. 2254
As per ISU Communication No 2332 “Decisions of the Council” the ISU Council decided to suspend the ISU Communications 2323 (Single & Pair Skating Scale of Values season 2020/21) and ISU Communication 2324 (Single & Pair Skating Levels of Difficulty and Guidelines for making Grade of Execution and Program Components Season 2020/21).
In the meantime, the Council and the Single & Pair Skating Technical Committee have evaluated the need for an update of the above-mentioned Communications and the Council decided that
• ISU Communication 2323 is definitely cancelled and consequently ISU Communication 2253 remains in full force for the season 2020/21.
• ISU Communication 2324 is definitely cancelled.
ISU Communication 2254 is herewith replaced by this new Communication 2334
In the next 11 pages, there followed not a single word of clarification about what had been changed and then not changed and then eventually left the way it had been in the second (and far more complex) of the May communications, No. 2324.
The one thing clear is the scale of values changes announced in Communication 2323 will not be implemented in the near future. For the next two seasons, the ISU will stick with the scale of values used last season, as detailed in Communication 2253.
So goodbye, at least until after the 2022 Winter Olympics, to the revaluation that would have made the two quadruple jumps considered the most difficult, the lutz and flip, worth the same as the quad loop. The changes also would have made the Lutz worth just 1.5 points more than the mundane quad toe loop after having been worth 3.3 more back in 2016.
(If the current values had applied last season, with everything else equal, Alena Kostornaia, with no quads, would have won the Russian Championship instead of Anna Shcherbakova, with two outstanding quad lutzes in the free skate. It was the latest attempt to recalibrate the sport’s balance of athletic and artistic prowess, which has shifted heavily toward athleticism.)
That’s the easy part.
It gets more complicated trying to figure out what happened to “Levels of Difficulty and Guidelines for marking Grade of Execution” because the communication (2324) that detailed it has been erased from the historical record on the ISU web site. You will notice its conspicuous absence (as well as that of 2323) from the list pictured below, where the numbers jump from 2322 to 2325.
(Alas, 2323 and 2324, we hardly knew ye. R.I.P.)
One change that has remained from 2324 to 2334 involves the new “q” score, designed to penalize jumps under-rotate by one-quarter turn or less for grade of execution rather than base value.
Italy’s Fabio Bianchetti, chair of the ISU’s singles and pairs technical committee, had explained the “q” idea to me by saying it would spare the technical panel from choosing between calling a jump either under rotated or fully rotated when the jump is one-quarter rotation short.
Calling these “borderline cases” under rotated, he noted, would bring deductions in both base value and grade of execution that could amount to five points on high-value jumps – and the three-person technical panel often is split on which call to make.
But the latest communication on GOE no longer mentions the penalties for “cheated jumps” that were detailed in 2324. Some are jumps where there is “excessive rotation on the ice” before takeoff. Others, referred to as “toe Axels,” occur when the backward takeoff for a jump that uses the toe pick has a half-rotation on the ice and begins like the forward takeoff for an Axel.
That also will not change before the 2022 Olympics.
Lakernik, for whose consistently generous help I am very grateful, said the net effect of the latest version on marking GOE was, ”All things that pushed the skaters to learn something new were deleted, so skaters can have the same (GOE) level as before with the same abilities.”
Of course, this whole discussion about determining precise rotation amounts to little more than a reductio ad absurdum, given the minimal evidence available (one camera angle) and the difficulty of pinpointing the precise point of takeoffs and landings, especially with the limited time allocated for technical panel reviews.
And, much as the intent to quantify everything to the millimeter in the interest of fairness is admirable, it makes the sport less and less comprehensible and attractive to fans, even those with extensive skating experience and computer chips in the occipital lobe of the brain.
