Skating Passion

I’m alive and this blog is too...

Just a quick update on the recent *sigh* lack of updates. The reason is all the same – I got way too many projects to do and I had no time to write anything for this blog. I’m doing 4 projects at the same time and all of them require me to write extensive documents on their progress, or a document itself is a result of a project.

However, this lack of time will not last forever and, hopefully, I will return soon to regular updates. In fact, I’m planning to write a couple of new posts this week, which I wanted to complete long ago.

So, if you were checking this blog, I’m sorry for the lack of updates and just let me assure you that I’m not abandoning it or anything… It’s just that there was a hard week and this is something that inevitably happens sometimes.

Thank you for reading.

Not really an update, but still...

Just a quick and rough post, since I still have no time to write something bigger. Two things called my attention recently in figure skating world.

The first one is ISU’s communication No. 1790 which contains new scale of values, levels of difficulty and guidelines for marking grade of execution. I had only a quick look at it and, as expected, it doesn’t contain any major changes. This is rather typical – between pre-Olympic and Olympic seasons ISU never commits any big changes to the system. However, I hope that I’ll have more time soon to take an in-depth look at it and analyze what those changes exactly are, if they affect anything at all. But, on a surface, there’s nothing special.

Another thing that called my attention was Mao’s announcement that she plans to retire after Sochi Olympics. This, once again, is not unexpected, since Mao had a very long career and after 2 Olympic games is not surprising that she considers a retirement. With Mao’s retirement it looks like the whole generation of current top ladies is effectively going to retire after season 2013-2014. This will be the end of an era in female figure skating, a definitely great era that gave us so many great moments of joy. I think that this will make the next season more special than any other season that we witnessed since the establishment of IJS. It’s going to be exciting and, surely, unforgettable season.

Highlights of the season 2012-2013, definitive version

I think it’s time to post a definitive version of my “Highlights of the season” list since the season has ended and enough time passed to settle down my feelings. Previous versions of list are located here and here. But I will comment here on each item a bit:

1. The return of Yuna Kim

When I first created this list, I was sure that this is what is going to be the best highlight of the season for me personally. The truth is that it surpassed all my expectations, as I said before. I’ll still have to write a separate post on this topic, but Yuna’s return can only be described as legendary. She started this season exceptionally good during 2012 NRW Trophy in spite of less than perfect conditions and finished with performances that rival her Olympic triumph in terms of quality. No one really can ask for anything else from her. Those were the performances we’ll be watching again 10 years from now and later…

2. “Swan Lake” of Mao Asada and her short program too

“Swan Lake” is, probably, the best competitive program Mao had in her career. It’s absolutely great rendition to the ballet and it’s the closest approximation possible of how a ballet can be represented on ice. It is also one of the best free skate programs of this season, perhaps the best actually, even though Yuna’s free skate program effectively rivals it.

Mao’s take on Gershwin’s music is also an awesome program, even though to lesser extent than “Swan Lake”. But both of then are extremely enjoyable and I’m happy that Mao finally found those great programs that surely will be remembered as some of her best.

3. Hanyu Yuzuru’s performances

For me Hanyu Yuzuru is most interesting male skater currently. He puts real fire in his performances and while they often contain errors here and there and he clearly struggles to finish them, I think this is the case when courage and intent overweight most of mistakes he may have. Of course, I’m not talking about scores, but personally Hanyu’s performances are the most enjoyable for me and I’m sure than most of fans feel the same way. He’s a great skater to show to new fans and his performance will be even better when he matures a bit more.

4. Javier Fernandez winning Skate Canada, European Championships and later placing 3rd on World Championships

Javier Fernandez made history… It was clear that he had more than enough talent to be among the best skaters in the world, but still I thought it was going to take him a bit more time to actually be there. But this season he greatly surprised me and many others by stepping there and… Yeah, right now he is one of the best and can be 1st in any given competition. Technically he actually surpasses most of his rivals; it’s just that he needs a bit more of stability, but that will come with experience. Same can be said about PCS department that can be improved and surely will be improved with time.

5. Short return of Johnny Weir

Yeah, I guess many people would say his performances from this season shouldn’t really be here, but well… This is my personal list and I just happen to like this guy. Even it didn’t go smoothly, I think we should give him credit for trying and personally I don’t regret at all seeing what he had to offer.

6. Elizaveta Tukhtamysheva becoming Russian national champion and her general achievements this season

This season was EXTREMELY difficult for Russian wonder girls. I’m sure there is no other group of skaters in the world now that has anything comparable in terms of pressure to them. This is was the pre-Olympic season and it means it was horrible… In Liza’s case she was already extremely exhausted like after half of it. For her fellow skaters it wasn’t better either. Given all those circumstances, I think she did extremely well and she definitely deserves to be Russian national champion. She is one of the best skaters in world now, one of the best enjoyable and she is also a very smart girl that knows how to approach competitions.

Next season is going to be even more difficult… I wish it wouldn’t be, but no way, it has to be crazy and stupid to the end. But I’m sure that everything that she did this season will serve as a solid foundation for everything that she will do afterwards. She had moments of success and some moments of failure. This is ok and this is, maybe, the best for her right now.

And, of course, she is a real gem of figure skating already.

7. Denis Ten at World championship 2013

Since the moment I saw Denis Ten on Vancouver Olympics, I thought to myself that he will do great in the following season. But, sadly, I didn’t go as good as I thought, in fact he almost disappeared from my sight for a while. I started to really worry about him, because it was clear that he has a great talent that he wasn’t able to fulfil somehow. This, hopefully, seems to change starting from this season.

His World’s silver medal and his awesome performances prove what he can do. He is definitely one of the best skaters with great potential. And make no mistake, even though it is a silver medal, in reality it is a real victory – it’s the first time he’s on podium on a major skating competition. That this competition also turns to be no other than World championship just shows how good he really is.

And even though Patrick Chan surpassed him by points, the result of this competition is controversial, so it’s possible that Denis could actually win the gold. In any case, in opinion of most fans, he is the real winner of this competition and, perhaps, this is more important than any medal or actual score. The future surely will be great for Denis Ten and it’s great for us, because we will be able to see it.

Storms in Sochi and the useless coast protection

It’s been a while since the last time that we visited pre-olympic Sochi. So I decided that for today’s entry we’ll look at the recent rather disturbing events and rather horrible prospects for post-olympic Sochi. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Basically, a couple of weeks ago another spring storm hit the coast in Sochi. The same coast where Olympic village is located. The storms are something completely usual for this area, however in spite of that this storm caused great damage to coast protection structures.

And as the result, the sea inundated the area near to the coast…

That’s the Olympic village, by the way…

This is not the first time that this happens. In fact, since the very moment that the construction for Olympic games started, Sochi’s coast suffers problems like this. Every time these structures must be built almost from scratch and they cost a lot of money. But what is the reason why this happens so often?

Well, the reason is that, basically, this coast is simply inappropriate to have structures like this. In fact, there is no way to protect it. Before the Olympic craze started in Sochi they had huge sand beaches that protected the coast, so this problem never existed. However, since they constructed a port for Olympic games, that obstructed the sand coming from nearby river to the beach, the beaches disappeared and as the result the sea started to invade considerable parts of coast. I looked into the matter and, apparently, there is simply no way to protect that coast with the current technologies, no matter what kind of structures you may build.

The hard truth about Sochi is that the whole place is inappropriate for building objects like the ones that they built there, such as a port and the Olympic arenas. One reason is the inappropriate coast and the sea that from now will always endanger every building located near to it. Another reason is that the whole place where Olympic objects are built (including the ice arena) is essentially a swamp. Those two reasons essentially make the maintenance of them unfeasible in long term. I wish I would be wrong about this, but at this time the whole thing looks rather pessimistic...

While it’s unlikely that something wrong will happen during Sochi’s olympics, I really wonder about the fate of Sochi project afterwards. It’s absolutely ridiculous to rebuild those protection structures every year and there is no way to prevent their destruction. Combining this with rather inappropriate placement of Olympic objects, potentially this can be an economic disaster that will be worse than Montereal Olympics in 1976, which generated such a debt, that the city of Montreal was able to pay it only after 30 years from Olympics.

In any case, even before the Olympics the inhabitants of Sochi are now facing a problem that they never had before and additionally they had their gorgeous and clean sand beaches replaced with concrete structures that are periodically washed into the sea, contaminating it in process.

Sources, that I highly recommed to check out, if only to look at the photos:

Photos, part 1: http://www.privetsochi.ru/blog/photo/27825.html
Photos, part 2: http://www.privetsochi.ru/blog/photo/27856.html
A technical explanation: http://www.privetsochi.ru/blog/photo/27949.html

The werewolf of figure skating and the non-existent silver bullet

After reading some opinions about the most recent figure skating controversy, that is, the scores of Patrick Chan and Dennis Ten, I had a lot of thoughts about what is going on with figure skating rules, judgement and fan community, that we see controversies like this fairly regularly. It made me recall a certain well-known problem from the realm of software engineering, namely the problem with quality of software.

Basically, the whole field of software engineering is struggling for years to improve the quality of produced software with all sorts of different methodologies that are supposed to reduce the amount of bugs. The most famous methodology of that type is UML that was a really huge thing in 2000s, but there are many others such as “extreme programming” and so on. Most of those methodologies basically say the same – “follow us, and your software will be excellent”… And yes, those methodologies work well for the people who invented them, but once released to general public we inevitably see projects failing under those methodologies.

Then there is a view from Frederick Brooks, one of the best software engineers in the history, which basically consists in that there is simply no such thing as a perfect methodology that can solve this sort of problems. There are simply good and bad developers. Some methodology may work much better for some developers than others, but it’s up to a particular developer to decide which method works better for him or his team. The “werewolf” is a well-known metaphor for this problem of software engineering and “silver bullet” is a metaphor for methodology that is supposed to solve it. In my personal opinion, there is no such thing as a silver bullet.

This may seem like a topic that has nothing to do with figure skating, but personally I see a lot in common between this problem and problems that many people have with IJS. The reason is very simple – IJS is basically a methodology that tries to evaluate a performance in numeric terms. A performance, however, is not something that can really be evaluated in numeric terms. IJS tries to give numeric values to everything that can be evaluated objectively, such as types of jumps, but there are also more subjective things like quality of certain elements (evaluated with GOEs) and PCS. They try hard to reduce subjectivity with guidelines, but at the end of day people either don’t know about them or just refuse to apply them. As the result, we always end having some sort of controversy every season.

And every season fans make all kinds of proposals to change IJS, so that it can be more “fair” or to overcome “biased judges”. ISU mostly ignores those proposals… And I’m really grateful that they ignore them, because most of them, frankly, are absolutely mindless and, if they were applied, figure skating would cease to exist as a sport that makes any sense. And since we are talking about werewolves, I hope that people will realize one day, that sadly, it’s just an inherent problem in figure skating, that the performance we like the most is not necessarily the best. We have a system which is far from being perfect, but it was made by people who know figure skating better than the vast majority of fans and, more importantly, people who judge competitions also know figure skating better than most of fans.

There is no such thing as silver bullet, in this case, a perfect rules system that will appeal to everyone and will have no flaws at all. All intents to create such a system will miserably fail at some point. What we can do, however, to really improve figure skating, is to become better judges ourselves. This is the job that fans should do – mostly fans are horrible, horrible judges. And we can do this by understanding the rules, appreciating different types of skating and different types of skaters and becoming aware of the history of the sport. If we appreciate skaters other than our favourites and we can place them higher on the podium than our favourites if they deserve so, then we really are good judges and good fans of the sport. And when we are good fans of the sport we can actually start making proposals that ISU can listen to because they actually make sense. But this is not how things are currently.

So, what I’m saying is not that the current system should not be changed… It should be changed and it surely can be improved, but before making propositions to change it, one has to be sure in its own competence and be able to back up any change with good arguments and knowledge.

So, what can be improved in the current system? I personally have seen a lot of proposals, but most of them, in my opinion, are missing the point. Since we are dealing with subjective evaluation, I believe that any change in the system should be about reducing the uncertainty of evaluating any given aspect of performance. In other words, it should be as clear as possible how many scores should be given for a certain aspect of performance that has X, Y and Z qualities. That way not only it will be easier to understand the scores, but it will be actually easier to judge and, therefore, the judgement will be more objective and more consistent.

As an example of a change that reduces the uncertainty, I can propose the following. This is just an example and I’m not saying that this should be really done. Suppose we want to reduce the uncertainty in PCS, the most subjective and controversial part of rules. Currently the scores are in the range from 0 to 10 with granularity of 0.25 points. This granularity is very precise, if you think about it. It is actually so precise that it may not make a lot of sense. Think about it – I can, probably, explain what it is the difference between skating skills evaluated with an 8.00 and skating skills evaluated with an 9.00 and, most likely, this difference will be visible to many fans. Now, I personally would struggle a lot with trying to distinguish between 8.50 and 8.75. Does this 0.25 difference really make sense?

So, imagine that we reduce granularity to 1.00… Effectively, we reduced the uncertainty, because once we determined that certain skating skills can be evaluated up to 8.00, but not to 9.00, we don’t need to determine whether it’s 8.00, 8.25, 8.50 or 8.75 – it’s just 8.00. It’s possible that with this we effectively reduce certain “noise” from scores and make it much easier both for judges and audience. But I’m not saying that this is a right thing to do. It’s up to judges to decide whether they really need that sort of fine granularity as 0.25 or not. Personally, I think we could safely go for granularity of 0.50 points and I’m not so sure about 1.00 points. It may be a bit extreme. In any case, this is just an example.

On the other hand, if someone makes a proposition to start evaluating PCS with granularity of 0.01 points that would add a lot of uncertainty, because this would demand from judges to distinguish between skating skills of 8.37 and skating skills of 8.38. I’m not sure this makes any sense.

I’m not sure if I should talk about certain particular controversies because, frankly, this is all the same every season. This time it’s Dennis Ten/Patrick Chan, but in a year or so, we will see another one with different names. Once again there will be a bunch of more or less crazy proposals to change IJS, talks about “weak” and “strong” federations, maybe some more petitions… Instead I prefer to point out things that are inherent and will remain in time regardless of details of some particular controversy. What I hope for, however, is that eventually the skating community will seriously change for good, because, frankly, figure skating deserves a better community.

A cool retro synchronized skating

Yet another small post because I'm still overwhelmed with parallel programming and other weird stuff, but hopefully you'll find it interesting :)

Here is an interesting old video straight from 1981 (even though it says 1982, in reality it should be 1981): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEqXwB3xaWk

This is an exhibition program by then Soviet top pairs Marat Akbarov/Veronika Pershina, Stanislav Lonovich/Marina Pestova and Sergei Shakrai/Marina Cherkasova. I’m not sure that they should be called legends, but they were very good pair skaters with very successful results in international competitions.

One thing that I would like to point with this video, besides its aesthetic qualities, is that with introduction of the new judging system, IJS, synchronization of partners really fell out of favour and as the result you would never see synchronization like this in an actual competition those days. While I love new system and prefer it to old one, it’s true that certain aspects of skating that were present before are missing now.

The pair that has the best synchronization right now is Robin and Aliona, but even they are not on the same level as those skaters of the past. As a trade-off, however, we got increased difficulty of programs and other good stuff that comes with the new system. Still, perhaps, there is a way to bring back this awesome synchronization.

The season is over, but the passion goes on

The season 2012-2013 is over for quite some time already and the long off-season period is ahead of us… This was an exciting season for many reasons. For me it was extremely exciting because of Queen Yuna’s one of a kind return to competition that totally surpassed all of my expectations. But other skaters didn’t disappoint either and this season definitely should have been exciting for fans of many other skaters.

Another thing that made this season exciting for me was that I started this “Skating Passion” blog. I started it just as an experiment in a moment of passion, and it’s too early to talk about whether the result is good or bad, but it also made my skating season a little bit more exciting that usually. So the question is what I’m going to do during off-season… Well, the answer is that I will continue to do it as usually.

So, in spite of the lack of competition skating events, I’ll be trying to write as often and regularly as I can. My main problem right now is not the lack of topics to write about, but rather the lack of time. I have several projects going on at the same time, so sometimes I can’t really balance the time between them. But there is so much to write about, like I really should continue to explain more aspects of figure skating, especially jumps… Then it’s never too late to look on some past seasons, statistics, rules… And, finally, there are going to be several big figure skating shows too.

So, this blog should really go as it was going during the past months until the new season will start. If you like this, please stay tuned :)

Russian police disagrees with Plushenko

Just a small update regarding Plushenko’s fight with the Eurosport commentator… I already covered it here and here. First of all, I must clarify a couple of things that, as it turns out, I misreported, probably because the whole issue wasn’t really well reported anyway. What Plushenko had up to this day is actually not a libel suit, but rather he filed a police report that there was a libel against him. Today Russian police declined initiation of criminal case, which basically means that they think that the journalist acted within his right to express his opinions, basically his free speech right. It should be noted that they had done this before already and today it was the second (and final) time they decline to act.

This is, probably, good news for freedom of speech in Russia, bad news for Plushenko, and for skating fans… Actually I don’t think we should even care at this point, at least as skating fans. The rest depends on whether we are fans of Plushenko and if we care a lot about legal matters of the case.

The one thing I will say though is that, according to Plushenko’s attorney, they are still looking for ways to sue that journalist and punish him for expressing a stupid and disrespectful opinion. I’m pretty sure there are ways to do this, but I’m not sure at all that this is a wise decision if we take into account Plushenko’s reputation among laypeople; and then there is no such thing as a right not to be offended. So as much as I sympathize with figure skaters and disagree with journalists and their typical behaviour, I really think this is the case when a mountain was made out of molehill and probably all parties would do themselves a favour by just stopping doing anything about it. I hope that after discussing the matters with his attorney, Plushenko will decide not to pursue that journalist.

Source: http://www.newsru.com/sport/02apr2013/denied.html

My favourite montages (mostly Yuna related)

Today I decided to go for something simple…

Before joining figure skating community, I had no idea that there is such a thing as skating related montages. I knew that there are so-called “Anime Music Videos” which are basically video fragments of some anime joined together with some music and that’s pretty cool. Now it turns out that many figure skating fans put their passion in similar kind of video art and the result is often very good.

Now, I’m not a big fan of that genre and since I’m Yuna fan, I generally only watch Yuna-related montages, but I can’t say I know many of those either. So here I just list some of montages that I liked so much that I remember them really well and re-watch fairly regularly. But I’m not claiming that this is the “best of” list, those are just some montages that I remember the most and I really like them. Obviously, I’m leaving many good montages out of it, so if you know some good figure skating montage, fell free to add it in comments.

“Hot Issue” by CestLaVie73 – this is one of montages that first come into my mind as I am writing this list. I’m not sure when it was made exactly, but probably it was done somewhere in 2010, but before Olympic games.

I really like this montage, because it is extremely well done… The transitions, the effects, the video fragments used, synchronization with the music – it’s all really great. I’m not sure who CestLaVie73 is, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he/she has some professional experience with video editing.

“Just the way you are” – by Lovelee. Lovelee is well-known Yuna fan, probably her most famous project is the book with Yuna’s quotes and quotes about Yuna that was given as present to Yuna on her birthday last year.

She has a lot of good montages, but for some reason I love this one the most. Again, this is one of those montages where everything is done right – transitions, video fragment selection, and synchronization with music; it’s all perfect and makes sense. As a side note, I just love that Hyundai commercial… It’s probably the best commercial with Yuna for me and it just goes perfectly with this music. That was a great selection.

Now, moving to my absolute favourite montages…

“Run across the sky”, “Pina” and “suna no oshiro” by Anastasia, among her other montages

When most of people make montages, they usually go the obvious road – they present happy images of skaters and express their gratitude towards them using the music’s lyrics, sometimes it can even be taken literally, such as in case of “Just the way you are”. However, the artist behind those montages does it very differently. First of all, instead of going for happy images, she chooses darker themes and more energetic or haunting music. That’s original enough in this genre, but she goes even beyond that and, in fact, uses both music and videos as her artistic tools with purpose of creating an emotion. She succeeds in it and she even tells a bit of story in some of those montages, even though it is mostly just a basic association line. For me this is the best and the most you can do in this genre of video art.

This makes me watch “Run across the sky”, among others, again and again. It’s always interesting and never gets old. Technically it’s also just great – transitions, effects and synchronization are so good that I don’t even think about them when I’m watching it. By the way, those montages were done using extremely old hardware (an old Pentium IV based PC). That explains why the videos have a relatively low quality and the effects are rather minimalist, but that doesn’t make it worse at all, rather this makes those videos look somehow more authentic. Still I must say that she must have really a lot of patience to be able to make editing like this with such hardware.

So, hopefully you enjoyed all those montages just as I do. If you know some good montage or made one, feel free to add it in comments section.

A petition to award gold to Denis Ten that rather misses the point

Today I intended to write about something else like more thoughts on ladies skaters, but then certain news called my attention. I wouldn’t normally write about this, but it’s just that this issue made it into international press, so it is already huge enough and talking about it here wouldn’t really change much.

If you don’t know about it, there is a journalist called Monica Friedlander who occasionally wrote apocalyptic articles about figure skating with headlines like “International Skating Union Now Officially a Dictatorship” and “Artistic Heart of Skating Torn Out, Skaters Say”. She also writes on Yahoo groups under a nickname monicaf312.

So, what happened is that apparently she got really angry at the results of the men’s competition at recent World championships and decided to create a petition asking ISU to award a second gold medal to Denis Ten, the same way as it was done in 2002 during the infamous Salt Lake City olympics. I will not link to that petition, but it’s really easy to find anyway, as I’m going to quote certain parts of it.

This is interesting for several reasons – first of all, Chan’s victory is indeed controversial, even though I didn’t mention this in my previous posts, but there are certain parts of the score that aren’t clear enough. I’ll talk about this later in this entry. However, what is also interesting is the contents of the petition itself which are, well, how to put it, pretty much misleading and wrong. So let’s look into what Monica writes in that petition (emphasis is mine):

 

We believe that predetermined judging robbed a very talented young skater of the gold medal he earned. Denis Ten — the first skater from Kazakhstan to ever break into the ranks of elite skaters — delivered the program of his life on March 15, 2013. His program was not just technically difficult and flawless, but artistically exquisite as well. His scores were high and he won the long program, but by a margin so small that it allowed Patrick Chan, a perennial judges’ favorite, to win the gold yet again after skating a program marred by four major mistakes, including two falls. Any other skater would not have even been within striking distance of the podium with such a skate. Yet the judges deemed Chan't skate to be almost as good as Ten’s, and based on the combined long and short program score, awarded him the gold medal. In fact, Chan's program was also marked higher than that of bronze medalist Javier Fernandez, whose historic achievement (first Spanish skater to medal at Worlds) was overshadowed by the scandal ranging across the world.

It really strikes me that Monica not just says that Patrick shouldn’t have won the gold with such a performance, but she actually says that he shouldn’t have been on podium and she even says that any other skater wouldn’t have been within a striking distance of the podium.  This claim is absolutely ridiculous for two reasons… First, Monica clearly doesn’t take into account the short program where Patrick performed absolutely great and which, along with his free skate performance, clearly allows him to be on podium by the combined total of effort. Second, Monica can’t really know whether any other skater would be treated like Chan or not, because there is no one in the world who skates like Patrick Chan at this point of time. His components are clearly superior to everyone else. And yes, I personally don’t care much about his style of skating, but if you don’t recognize his superiority in that department, it’s probably because you are just plainly biased against him.

 

It is in part because of this kind of judging that the sport of figure skating has seen a catastrophic decline in recent years. Audiences believe that what they watch and what the judges judge are entirely different competitions. It is little wonder that most fans become alienated, refusing to travel to events and patronize a corrupt sport that is quickly losing its last trace of credibility.

My theory on the causes of “decline” is a little bit different. It consists in that the “declining” of figure skating is generally due to the ignorant journalists and the arrogant fan community that turn off the new fans and make it impossible to stick with the sport for long. Anyway, declining of figure skating – where? Is it in North America, where, coincidentally, most of ignorant journalists reside?

 

What makes Chanflation and other biased judging possible is the very judging system implemented by the ISU after the 2002 Olympic scandal — presumably to make political judging less likely to happen. Instead, it accomplished the exact opposite. The judging is now anonymous, with no one knowing which judge awards which mark to which skater. Moreover, the arbitrary program component scores (PCSs) are entirely subjective. Patrick Chan is constantly awarded PCSs high enough to make up for his technical flaws. In other words, the worse he skates, the higher his PCSs need to be to save him.  Under the 6.0 judging system it would have been inconceivable for a skater who made so many errors to get a perfect 6.0 mark for artistic impression. The flaws and falls distract from the artistic value of the performance. Yet Chan received higher scores for program execution than Ten, who was flawless — including an incredible mark of 9.5!  What would the judges have awarded Chan had he actually skated a clean program?

Monica seems to be one of those people who confuse PCS with “artistic expression”. In reality, what can be defined as “artistry” accounts, at its best, for only 1/5 of PCS while everything else refers either to technical or choreographic aspects of program. If you also do not understand what PCS is all about, I recommend you to consult my entry on the basics of IJS, as well as my previous entries on program component score.

Then PCS is not entirely subjective… It is subjective, but not significantly more than GOEs are and there are guidelines and, more importantly, statistical evidence to support PCS.

I also don’t think that the person who uses words like “Chanflation” is an example of objectivity, probably she is much less of an example than the actual ISU judges are.

The worst part of this petition is that the scores given to Patrick and Denis are actually controversial, but Monica completely fails to point where that controversy is located. She points at Chan’s free skate program that was actually fairly and consistently scored: Chan received 92.70 for PCS at Rostelecom Cup where he finished 1st, 86.78 at Skate Canada where he finished 2nd and 90.64 at Grand Prix Final where he finished 3rd, so his PCS at Worlds 2013 being 89.28 is rather consistent with his previous scores.

The real controversy lays in short program where I am not sure at all that the gap between Patrick Chan and Denis Ten had to be as wide as almost 7 points. This is the crucial difference that determined that Patrick had to receive gold medal instead of Denis Ten, who surely deserved it, but perhaps judges didn’t give enough credit to his program components for his short program performance. But better I’ll stop here. This issue deserves a more profound analysis than what I can offer right now.

It’s just sad for me that Monica, instead of deeply analyzing this issue and raising some interesting points, had gone for old and tiring trope of “if a skater falls, he can’t be on podium” and typical misunderstanding of PCS and their role in the overall score.