At upcoming ISU congress, results of important age debates may beg bigger questions about sport's future

Kamila Valieva (far left) and Russian teammates during informal victory ceremony for team event at 2022 Winter Olympics. The formal ceremony was cancelled because of her pending doping case. (Getty)

How young is too young to compete at the elite level in figure skating?

And how old is too old to hold elective office in the sport’s international federation?

Will the answer to either question do anything to arrest the decline in the sport’s appeal, especially in North America and Europe (other than in Russia, now an international sports pariah for its unprovoked and horrific invasion of Ukraine)?

Those are some of the questions the International Skating Union will debate at its (normally) biennial congress this June in Thailand.

While the Congress agenda will not be finalized and made public until the end of April, I have obtained copies of the agenda in its provisional form.

It includes proposals both to raise the minimum age for senior competitors and the maximum age for elected officials.  The latter could be called the Alexander Lakernik rule.  (More on that later.)

Other proposals are:

*An amalgamation of component score categories, from the current five to three.

*Having different judging panels for component scores and technical grade of execution.

*An expansion of the fields with competition format changes for the World Championships in an effort to increase participation of countries where the sport is in early development stages.

Some of these issues might have already been resolved had the ISU’s 2020 congress not been first postponed until 2021 and then cancelled because of the pandemic.

That effectively means changes approved by the 2022 Congress in several areas, such as the likely expansion of the World Championships, would not go into effect until the 2024/25 season.

There is a general feeling a sport that once was as much artistic as athletic has leaned much too far toward its athletic side - and also that understanding both the extreme sports tricks and the Byzantine scoring system that evaluates them has turned off even some of the most devoted fans.

Ironically, one of the proposals to bring a better balance in the sport involves giving greater weight to PCS with a factoring system so complicated that even the world’s fastest computer might struggle to process it.

One proposal about factoring changes for PCS is rather complex, to say the least.

The ISU has created a working group “focusing on improving the attractiveness of figure skating programs,” according to ISU communications manager Selina Vanier.  The pandemic slowed its progress, so it is expected to present a briefing rather than any proposals to the 2022 congress.

Two years ago, the chair of the ISU singles and pairs technical committee, Fabio Bianchetti of Italy, told me that a proposal with sweeping changes was to be presented to the 2020 Congress. The fundamental idea behind it, Bianchetti said, “is to push skaters to look for quality and not only for difficulty with much more time than today for transitions and choreographic moments.”

At that time, Bianchetti confirmed some of the proposed changes without providing full details.  A couple months ago, he told me the matter now was in the hands of the working group.

Let’s look at a few of the things that the ISU congress is likely to debate:

MINIMUM AGE FOR ATHLETES

A Dutch proposal to raise the minimum for senior events from 15 to 17 did not even make it to the final agenda of the 2018 Congress.  This time, both the ISU’s 13-member governing council and the Norwegian Skating Association have made proposals that will be considered – and, in the wake of factors related to the Kamila Valieva doping case at the 2022 Olympics, one (probably the council’s) seems a good bet to pass.

Under the council’s proposal, the minimum would go from 15 to 17, cover only figure skating and be phased in.

That would remove the possible cover of the World Anti-Doping Agency code’s “protected persons” language, which applies to athletes under 16. The Court of Arbitration for Sport cited that language as the first item in its ruling not to impose a provisional suspension on Valieva, 15, who had a positive test for a banned substance in a sample given Dec. 25.

That CAS decision allowed her to compete in the women’s singles event, in which she finished fourth.  News of the positive test did not emerge until after Valieva had helped Russia win the team event. Until her doping case is resolved, team event medals will not be awarded.

Under the WADA Code, “protected persons” can be sanctioned with a reprimand rather than a suspension even if it is finally determined they did commit a doping violation. And the “protected person” bears no burden to establish how the banned substance got in his or her body.

That certainly lessens the potential risk from being caught using PEDs, and it may encourage the “protected” athlete or the athlete’s coaching team to game the system.

In the ISU council proposal, formulated before the Valieva case was a factor, the minimum age would be 16 for the 2023-24 season and 17 for the 2024-25 season and beyond. The one-season delay and the phased-in implementation is to avoid penalizing skaters already in the senior competitive ranks who would not meet the minimum of 17 in 2022-23 (as well as those who would be moving up next season but would not be 16.)

The council based its proposal on a report from the ISU medical commission, which noted that allowing what it called ``under-age” athletes to compete “may subject them to loads and risks that are thought to be inappropriate for their age, not only physically, but in terms of the psychological and social development of the child.”

The council added that in a survey taken in December 2020 / January 2021 by the ISU athletes commission, 86.2 percent of respondents favored raising the minimum age.

The Norwegian proposal does not mention injuries, although many in the sport worry about the long-term effects of the accelerated development necessary to reach elite status in women’s singles. That proposal does note, “Young skaters are pushed to perform difficult technical elements to be able to compete against the more experienced and older skaters with better program component skills.”

Alina Zagitova in her role as TV commentator at December’s Russian Championships. The 2018 Olympic champion left competition some 20 months later at just age 17.

“Our main reason is to prevent the athletes from retiring after only a few years at senior level and to make it possible for more skaters to continue skating longer,” Mona Adolfsen, president of the Norwegian federation, said in an email.

Only two of the eight women’s Olympic champions from 1994 through 2022 have been over 17. Two were 15, two 16 and two 17. The last three, all Russian, were 17, 15 and 17.

It seems likely Russia would oppose a proposal that might slow its assembly line of young champions.  Given Russian influence in the sport, that might have been enough to defeat it before the invasion of Ukraine created global antipathy to Russia.

Any Russian lobbying might have to be done from afar.  There will be opposition to letting Russian and Belarussian delegates attend the congress since the ISU has barred their athletes from ISU competitions.

MAXIMUM AGE FOR ISU OFFICE HOLDERS

At the moment, any candidate for election or re-election as an ISU office holder must be less than 75 years old at the time of the election. (Terms are four years.)

Russia’s Lakernik, the influential ISU vice-president for figure skating, is 77.

So is it a surprise there is a proposal to raise the maximum age for election eligibility to 80?

Curiously, it comes from the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, who would seem to have no reason to propose it other than currying favor with the powers-that-be.

Experience is invaluable.  But having 80-year-olds (or older, since they could serve out terms that take them past 80) making decisions affecting athletes four generations younger does not seem in the best interests of a sport already out of touch with 21st Century entertainment tastes.

Coincidentally, the ISU president, Jan Dijkema, would also be disqualified from re-election under the current age maximum.  Dijkema, however, has already announced he is stepping down.

His replacement?  Nominations must be made by April 25.

The ISU, which governs figure skating, short track and speedskating, has not had a president from the figure skating side of the sport since 1980.

PCS CATEGORY SHRINK

This is based on the idea that there is too much redundancy and ambiguity in the current five categories – as well as way too many bullet points in each category for a human being to remember and evaluate in the limited time allotted to give a score.

(The last issue also is behind the reasoning to have separate panels judge the “athletic” and “artistic” sides of the sport.)

The technical committees for singles, pairs, dance and synchro have proposed eliminating the transitions, performance and interpretation categories; keeping composition and skating skills; and adding a category called presentation in place of performance.

Within each category, the number of areas to be evaluated would be simplified or reduced.

Such a change, with fewer marks and lower totals, would necessitate changes in the scoring range or some form of factoring to prevent the balance between technical and PCS numbers from getting even more out of whack.

Scores for the top 10 women in the free skate at the 2022 Winter Olympics. Note the huge TES/PCS imbalance of the top two.

Ironically, one of the reasons for women’s singles PCS scores being factored by 80 percent is that they once were considered too high in relation to technical scores.

It also was pointed out to me that an ISU analysis showed the imbalance today affects only some seven percent of women skaters – the happy few, the band of sisters who can pile up tech points by landing quads, triple axels and max base value triple-triple combinations. But unless the seven percenters make multiple errors, they are nearly impossible to beat.

Would separating the judging panels curtail the knee-jerk tendency to take the easy way out and give inflated PCS to some skaters who do little more than jump brilliantly?  Would it curtail reputation judging in both GOE and PCS if judges were allowed to focus only on one?

It seems worth finding out.

WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS EXPANSION

This idea seemed likely to pass had there been a 2020 or 2021 congress, and it seems just as likely to pass this year and take effect for the 2025 worlds.

Compared to the 2020 World Championships, which were cancelled by the pandemic, the proposal would increase the total number of singles and pairs entrants by some 50 percent (to 54 in singles and 32 in pairs) and dance entrants by some 15 percent (to 40.)

About half the entrants would have to compete in a qualifying round to join skaters who had qualified based on results of the previous year’s world championships.  The short program / rhythm dance fields would be capped at 36 for singles, 24 for pairs and 30 for ice dance.  The free skate / free dance would include 24 in singles, 16 in pairs and 20 in dance.

Based on expenses at the 2019 World Championships in Japan, the ISU has determined the extra skaters and qualifying round would cost the organizers an extra $500,000.  In the proposal, the ISU pledges to cover the increase.