- Joined
- Nov 7, 2007
What they should do is this: at the beginning of the skating season, a week or two before the the beginnig of the Grand Prix, they should have all the top skaters come together and do a run through of both of their programs without doing the jumps. They can show it on the internet or on Universal sports in the middle of the night, where skataholics can record it or stay up with a cup of coffee.
Anyway, the judges should assign a score for edges, speed, choreography, interpretation, etc. Basically, anything that is rarely fallen on. These base scores will be made public and every skater will know their competitors base score. This will do two things: #1, a skater with a bad base score will know what technical elements he/she must land and #2, if something doesn't seem right, they will have a week to file a complaint. For the rest of the Grand Prix season, that score will be automatically added before they even skate. Only if a skater makes dramatic changes--completely different progra for example--will they be able to have a re-do before World's. (They can do it again there, as it is several months later)
Let's say Patrick Chan gets a score of 82, because of his deep edges. He will automatically have 82 points. Let's say another skater gets a 69, because he has shallow edges and knee bends. He will know that he will have to land two quads to win, so he can adjust his technical content. Or let's say another skater feels he skates as well as Patrick Chan and can't understand why he has 10 points less than him to begin with. He can file a complaint and maybe get his own score improved. Also, I think this method would do two things: it would make the competitions more fair, because they won't set them up so that one skater is unbeatable no matter what he does (i.e, Patrick never meeting Daisuke throughout the entire Grand Prix), and I think the judges will not publicly give a skater a huge advantage over everyone else if they have to do it publicly. Someone like Patrick might get a one-jump advantage over other top skaters, but not three or four.
Ah, but they'll never take my advice!
Interesting idea...but I don't think it'll work primarily because many components of PCS vary from competition to competition.
For example, Stephane Lambiel normally deserves, IMO, high 8s or even 9s for IN and PE. However, if he gives a stiff performance like he did during his Olympics LP, those marks should go down, way down. I don't see how scores at the initial sessions should matter in a case like that.
Plus I think that many skaters would have much improved IN, PE, TR and CH scores if they weren't forced to leave space and energy to do jumps in their programs anyways.....