- Joined
- Feb 14, 2018
Zhenya just won 2 Olympic silver medals. If one expects Hanyu to be scored higher because he won a bronze at Worlds, one would also expect Zhenya's scores to remain high after winning a silver medal at Olympics. Not to drastically drop.
Not comparable situations or skaters, in my opinion. Comparisons are largely useless and don’t offer much value, but since someone else already did the math, I may as well paraphrase the results: it took Hanyu two years as a senior to achieve a 20% growth in PCS (and even then, his scores at WC12 weren’t anywhere close to maxed out or absurdly high, especially relative to his competitors’ marks); in the case of Medvedeva and Zagitova, their PCS shot up by 22% and 21%, respectively, in their first senior season, and the increases were spread evenly across all five components, which arguably makes very little sense. (Source. Not my analysis. Just happened to recall that someone did break this down before.)
Hanyu also didn’t have a major scoring overhaul occur during his first season with Orser. And there’s plenty in the new rules that can drag down scores: less leniency on URs; PCS caps for falls or “serious error”; higher potential TES but lower BVs overall; GOE levels accounting for more points, etc. It’s also hard to compare Hanyu (or any male skater) to someone like Medvedeva, as Hanyu had barely begun min-maxing his TES and had more quads still to add — which substantially increased his scoring potential. Medvedeva has almost certainly reached her technical limit, short of incorporating loop combos in competition — the odds of her landing a 3A or 4S are asymptotic to zero — and her PCS was already maxed out. If she can’t drag her overall score up with higher TES, and her PCS had no room for growth after the Olympics, then, yes, the only direction her scores could possibly go was down, especially when she’s yet to put together two clean skates this season.
If you really want to compare Medvedeva to Hanyu, then you may as well compare the slide-whistle-sound-effect-included drop his scores took at ACI... which were directly related to weaker performances and not taken as a chilling vision of things to come. [emoji23]