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Originally Posted by Scarecrow
For those who watched the pairs figure skating last night. What do you think of the new scoring system?? I can not figure it out yet.
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This might help:
In Fitting Twist, Pairs Will Provide the First Olympic Test of New Scoring
NY Times
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: February 10, 2006
TURIN, Italy, Feb. 9 — The scandal's hard edges have faded in time, the details etched into Olympic lore under the phrase "French judge." But the figure-skating scandal that sidetracked the Salt Lake Olympics four years ago will reverberate here Friday, when a new Winter Games begin.
In attempts to avoid scandal, which shook the 2002 Olympic pairs, judges keep a running tally of points, adding or subtracting after each move.
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But there will be an instant reminder of the judging scandal — not only does the pairs competition open the skating on Saturday, it will also serve as the Olympic unveiling of the scoring system created to fix the corruption.
But while the new scoring is more transparent, it is also maddeningly complicated and comes with its own built-in debate: anonymous judges.
"At least in the old system, you knew" who had misjudged you, said Richard Pound, an I.O.C. member from Canada. "Now you can't tell." The competition may end in 17 days with as many questions as answers.
But Salt Lake's Games introduced a new platform for Olympic controversy. The French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne became the focus of international intrigue after she said she was pressured into helping a Russian pair win. Thanks to insistent television announcers and an enraged North American audience, the silver medalists Jamie Salé and David Pelletier became the sympathetic victims of a fix. They eventually walked away with their own set of gold medals, matching those of the Russians Anton Sikharulidze and Yelena Berezhnaya, after the I.O.C. intervened.
A sport that had always been at the mercy of murky judging was suddenly under siege.
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The double gold medals quelled the initial furor somewhat, but the scoring system took two more years to reform.
Le Gougne, who denies the conspiracy charges, was banned from international judging for two years, but she now says that she believes the scandal was worth it because the skating union was forced to install a new judging system before another worldwide audience would pay rapt attention again.
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The new system has been generally applauded by the athletes, although some are still struggling to learn its nuances. It replaces the old, simple 6.0 system, in which deductions were taken from the 6.0 to produce a set of technical scores and a set for artistic impression.
Now, a routine is evaluated in what appears to be a blizzard of numbers, assigning values to each element performed based on its difficulty. Judges are still given a set of marks to judge artistry as well, all rolled into a confounding total. Sasha Cohen won the United States championships with a 185.98.
"I think it's alienated a few in the public because it's complicated," said Peter Oppegard, a former Olympic pairs skater and current coach. "They look at those numbers and say, 'What does that mean?'
"You lose that immediate reaction of, '6.0, wow.' You do lose that excitement. But if it means these athletes are competing on a more even playing field, it is a good tradeoff."
That was ostensibly the purpose of the new system. In the old one, judges were allowed to give the same score to several skaters and decide later how to rank them. It was standard practice to judge early skaters lower in order to "leave room" for the more accomplished skaters to come.
All that is gone. What exists now is anonymity. There may be a French judge, but no one will know. The skating union insisted on this because it said judges felt it would keep nations and federations from trying to influence their judging.
"It worries me that the system is so corrupt that judges cannot make proper judgments without anonymity because of retaliation," Pound said. "That's a problem."
Pelletier agrees. "A system that protects the judges makes me laugh," Pelletier said in a recent teleconference. "It should be a system that protects the skaters."
The United States Figure Skating Association argued against anonymity when the new system was formulated, but has since supported it because the I.S.U. instituted a judge-review process. Now, a panel reviews the judges' marks at every competition. Wayward marks draw an official reprimand, which affect that judge's future international assignments.
But the general public's ability to match a set of marks with a judge is gone.
"Before, I think people liked to see the country identified with the judges and could understand it very quickly," said Jim Scherr, chief executive of the United States Olympic Committee. "Now it's something of a black box."
Pound and others say a better solution is for the International Skating Union to train a staff of professional judges instead of relying on each country's federation to train and nominate judges for international duty, leaving them open to outside influence.
Still others say that judged sports, by their very nature, can never be free of controversy.
Many skaters will point out that under the new judging system, the Russian pair would have finished first and the Canadians second. All the upheaval would not have changed that result.
"I was sitting in the front row and I saw both teams compete," said John Baldwin, half of the top American pair, with Rena Inoue, at this Olympics. "What happened was one team won by a tenth of a point. That's how figure skating is. It's a judged event. I don't know if you're ever going to get rid of that.
"The new system is good on the technical side. But as long as it's a subjective sport, you're not going to get rid of it."
The sport of figure skating was turned upside down, but may have landed nearly where it started.
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