Vote swapping deal to deny Virtue/Moir gold?

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by FFR

Well - if the rules stated you had to go a certain way and that points were awarded for following a specific style - he wouldn't have jumped the way he did. That's kind of a ridiculous comment. These athletes know what the rules are - better than you or me. They know exactly how to score high as they've been doing it their whole lives. If the athletes thought it was a farce to judge the event - they wouldn't be in it.

As an aside, there are some rules for high jumping. You aren't allowed to take off on both feet. I used to be able to jump over my height by diving over the bar and doing a somersault into the sawdust but it's illegal.

As another aside, Debbie Brill and her Brill Bend would be a better example for us Canadians rather than the Fosbury Flop.

[FFR]

Originally Posted by Slava

Well the problem for figure skating in particular is that they've opened the door to this criticism on their own. It might be that I'm not an expert in these matters, but the fact is there have been a number of judging controversies in the recent past. Even this article to start the thread was brought about because an expert in the field says a deal has been made. In otherwords you might not like the armchair experts like me weighing in every four years, but the judges themselves say there is a problem!

Unfortunately all of these judged events come out that way. We've seen this with boxing at the olympics (which should be really easy to score....guy gets punched and the other gets a point, yet somehow the fighter from the country that controls the commission gets more points). Its happened in MMA and boxing at the pro-level as well with people being incensed that the "wrong" fighter was given a decision. Unfortunately its human nature.

You mention a number of recent judging controversies in the recent past in figure skating... Care to reference that? The only one I can think of is 2002 Olympics - which resulted in massive changes to the figure skating judging system. The changes resulted in a significant increase in objectivity (for all technical skills) and a reduction in the ability for a single judge to influence the outcome. I did a very quick google search and wasn't able to find any other judging issues (besides this years allegation which seems to be more propagated by the media than anything else).

Judging in these sports is not as fraught with controversy as so many seem to think. The controversy comes when media watches an event they haven't seen in four years and writes stories of outrage that their athlete didn't win for whatever reason.

[craigwd]

Originally Posted by Slava

I laughed at this part. Have a look down the list. We're not talking about guys edging someone out within a margin of error. We're talking about guys jumping a couple of meters further, and that being measured and posted.

The idea of a Flames game isn't quite right either, because at the end of the game everyone knows who won. There is no one making a decision as to who they *think* won. You either scored more or you didn't. Same with sports like skiing, speed skating, etc. where you have actual measurements to determine a winner and not the potential of bias.

I wasn't talking about margin of error. I was referring to how jumps are measured and points are awarded. Again distance is affected by wind, length of in-run, conditions, technique.

As for a Flames game you missed my point. The novice can't sit there and understand why a faceoff is where it is right away, what icing is, what constitutes an offside, why OT wins aren't part of the tie-break equation etc. after watching for a period.

[craigwd]

Originally Posted by FFR

The changes resulted in a significant increase in objectivity (for all technical skills) and a reduction in the ability for a single judge to influence the outcome. I did a very quick google search and wasn't able to find any other judging issues (besides this years allegation which seems to be more propagated by the media than anything else).

Judging in these sports is not as fraught with controversy as so many seem to think. The controversy comes when media watches an event they haven't seen in four years and writes stories of outrage that their athlete didn't win for whatever reason.

And a much higher scrutiny of judges scores.

People keep bringing up the fixing rumour that was offered without a shred of evidence.

Okay. Here are the team scores from the final FD in the team event. Which judge was supposedly on the take?

http://www.isuresults.com/results/ow...D_D_Scores.pdf

[19Yzerman19]

Originally Posted by bossy22

The issue (or non-issue) we had here was that the athletes who compete on the world tour and are never judged by FIS judges. They came in expecting what the x-games and dew tour want. Big jumps and progression, as it relates to those jumps. It was thought that the winner would have to do at minimum two triple corks, maybe three.

Originally Posted by bossy22

Sage, who has never won a gold on the world tour, just did what he does best. It's his thing to be the creative, out-there guy, and that is what the FIS judges wanted.

Personally, this is one of the few times I've agreed with FIS. I liked that the rails were given some weight instead of just a lead up to the jumps.

1000% correct, with a major caveat: this is all an attempt to rationalize how the judges did things. We don't really know if this is what the judges were thinking when they scored SNB slope. It's just a justification for how things turned out. Everyone was guessing what they wanted, including the riders, as you pointed out. It's possible they weren't trying to reward style or grab variety, and simply didn't have a clue what they were doing. Maybe they legitimately thought that a 1620 was a more technical trick than a triple 14. Maybe they don't even understand what makes rail tricks more or less difficult. It's totally possible that this was just a crap shoot.

(The other caveat is of course that regardless of what they were doing, these guys won't be judging the ski slope and it's possible that none of this carries over into skiing.)

Now, if you're correct, and they were rewarding style, creativity, grab variety, and putting extra weight on the rails, well congratulations Olympics judges: you have just single-handedly solved a major problem with competitive slopestyle events.

Slopestyle is probably a unique case because of the transition to olympic status but it's a good example of some of the problems with judged sports. I look at this from the skiing perspective, because that's what I know, but it's not terribly different in snowboarding - everyone complains that these events have become too "check the box". If you don't have linked triples, you have zero chance. It's like figure skating with the quad. That is bad, because it stifles creativity and makes people go train on water ramps to learn one money trick that's exactly the same as everyone else's one money trick.

A related issue is that whoever is leading the game dictates the style that you need to win. For example, right now Nick Goepper is on top of competitive slopestyle. The more your run looks like Goepper's run, the higher you'll get scored, because it's relatively easy to compare Bobby Brown's triple cork with a mute grab to Goepper's triple cork with a mute grab and decide whose was better executed. It's not as simple to compare Henrik Harlaut's nose butter double shifty blunt to Goepper's triple, and the practical result is that Henrik suffers. Consequently, you see guys trying to adapt to ski similarly to the dudes who are scoring the best and the contest starts looking very monotonous. They hit the same features and do more or less the same tricks because that's what scores well. It also minimizes the rail features, because if you don't do the triples on the jumps the rails are meaningless anyway. Basically, the contenders are decided on the jumps and the rails may bump one guy up or down 3 or 4 points.

National teams know this is how scoring works, and that's why Tom Wallisch doesn't get an invite for the US (and Joss Christensen, who skis more like Brown and Goepper, does) and Vinnie Gagnier doesn't get to go for Canada. This is a problem, because slopestyle courses are supposed to be about variety and how each rider sees the course and what's possible on the features, rather than trying to copy the favourites and do what they do as well as them. As a result, regardless of country, a lot of the freeskiing community is pulling for Harlaut because we all know he's going ski the course his way and to hell with what the other guys do.

Now, if rails are worth half the score, that changes the game COMPLETELY, because the Russ Henshaws and Bobby Browns of the world tend to keep it pretty safe and stock on the rails, because they know the contest will be won or lost on the jumps. There's no point in taking a risk on the rail features, you basically just have to get through them. Thing is, some of the second tier guys, including Alex Beaulieu Marchand and ESPECIALLY Henrik Harlaut, are better at rails than those guys. If there's a ten point swing because Bobby Brown does a stock 270 on, 270 off of a rail and the other guys do actually cool ####, this gets interesting in a hurry.

Further, if STYLE is actually weighted equally to technical difficulty, you don't need triples to win anymore. The field is now wide, wide open. Who does this benefit? I'm not sure exactly, but it makes for a better contest. And that's true even if Goepper still wins, which he probably should - his genie grab double is the best trick in competitive skiing right now, imo. But if everyone thinks they don't have to do what he does better than he does it in order to knock him out of first, and we see 8 different tricks off the bottom jump, it doesn't even matter who takes gold; the sport wins.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by FFR

You mention a number of recent judging controversies in the recent past in figure skating... Care to reference that? The only one I can think of is 2002 Olympics - which resulted in massive changes to the figure skating judging system. The changes resulted in a significant increase in objectivity (for all technical skills) and a reduction in the ability for a single judge to influence the outcome. I did a very quick google search and wasn't able to find any other judging issues (besides this years allegation which seems to be more propagated by the media than anything else).

Judging in these sports is not as fraught with controversy as so many seem to think. The controversy comes when media watches an event they haven't seen in four years and writes stories of outrage that their athlete didn't win for whatever reason.

So you have a gold medal that was obviously wrong on the biggest stage that the sport has, and now the allegation that two countries judges have colluded to affect the outcome of another. Even if those are the only two, the fact that this can take place shows the flaw. Like I say we've seen issues in many other judged sports as well, and a lot of people have called things into question in this olympics regarding the slopestyle and moguls events. It might not be outright collusion (like we've seen in figure skating), but the judging is questionable just because its subjective. In other words its not always bias coming through, but completely subjective.

Originally Posted by craigwd

I wasn't talking about margin of error. I was referring to how jumps are measured and points are awarded. Again distance is affected by wind, length of in-run, conditions, technique.

As for a Flames game you missed my point. The novice can't sit there and understand why a faceoff is where it is right away, what icing is, what constitutes an offside, why OT wins aren't part of the tie-break equation etc. after watching for a period.

Lots of actually objectively measurable sports account for these things though. Sprinting even accounts for a headwind/tailwind.

Anyway, we're never going to convince each other. You guys are willing to accept judged events and all of their flaws, and that's great. I just think that these displays of skill and athleticism should be reserved for shows like ice-capades, but like I say we're never going to change each others minds.

[craigwd]

Originally Posted by Slava

So you have a gold medal that was obviously wrong on the biggest stage that the sport has, and now the allegation that two countries judges have colluded to affect the outcome of another.

A lot of people, and I am one of them, contend that the original results were correct and that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze had the better overall LP. Again, it's more than a simple "he stumbled thus they shouldn't win".

But still....cheers.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by craigwd

A lot of people, and I am one of them, contend that the original results were correct and that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze had the better overall LP. Again, it's more than a simple "he stumbled thus they shouldn't win".

But still....cheers.

Right, hence the controversy. Again the issue isn't what the outcome is per se, its that these issues come up because its subjective and cannot be measured.

[craigwd]

Originally Posted by Slava

Right, hence the controversy. Again the issue isn't what the outcome is per se, its that these issues come up because its subjective and cannot be measured.

But in this case the double gold wasn't awarded to settle a controversy. It was because the ISU eliminated Marie Le Gougne's marks leaving a 4-4 tie on ordinals.

If you measured S/B vs S/P on Code of Points the original result would have stood.

[Itse]

Since this hasn't been mentioned, I'm not sure if this is an obvious comment or not, but the Finnish commentators stated as a fact that "flawlessness", essentially how the athletes landed those jumps, mattered a lot more than they do in the X-games.

[Inglewood Jack]

ah what the heck, let's just throw another log onto this little fire for fun:

http://www.canada.com/olympics/news/...ail-u-s-rivals

The Canadians allegedly had buggered up a Finnstep, which is a tricky, 36-second-long compulsory quickstep segment that is worth a lot of points.

Now, Virtue and Moir, who had just come off the ice and hadn’t yet had time to review the video, didn’t think they’d screwed it up, but then, maybe they wouldn’t.

But more tellingly, the guy who invented the bloody thing — the plucky Finn Petri Kokko, who invented the step when he and his future wife, Susanna Rahkamo, were competing in the 1994-95 season — was tweeting, “Hope Virtue/Moir wins. Americans timing off in #finnstep and restrained even otherwise.”

Then Kokko tweeted that Virtue and Moir “should be leading in my opinion” and said, “I don’t understand the judges in ice dancing.”

CP figure skating experts, don't shoot the messenger, I'm not making a claim one way or the other cause I just don't know enough about this stuff, but our media seems keen to grind that axe for whatever reason.

the only thing I think I know is that the two pairs could not be more different in their style, and that the Americans' program and technique is just consistently more optimized for maximum points. personal tastes are a different matter.

I still think team USA should be docked 10 points for cheesy short program music selection, and another 10 for Charlie White's stupid hair.

[Cleveland Steam Whistle]

I won't pretend to know anything specific about ice dance. All I know is what my personal and potential bias opinion is. Thought both teams looked good today, but I thought Moir and Virtue looked slightly more in-sync and tight, and IMO their lift looks at least 4x more difficult than the Americans. Yet somehow their are behind and the US sets a new world record. I don't doubt I'm missing something fundamental to the sport, but as a casual observer, something seems off.

[Alberta_Beef]

Originally Posted by Cleveland Steam Whistle

I won't pretend to know anything specific about ice dance. All I know is what my personal and potential bias opinion is. Thought both teams looked good today, but I thought Moir and Virtue looked slightly more in-sync and tight, and IMO their lift looks at least 4x more difficult than the Americans. Yet somehow their are behind and the US sets a new world record. I don't doubt I'm missing something fundamental to the sport, but as a casual observer, something seems off.

You couldn't pay me enough to watch ice dance, but I would suggest that if the scores were good enough for a world record that every judge thought they were superior

[PeteMoss]

For as long as I can remember, Ice Dancing was the one sport where you could pick out the podium results before the event happened.

[kn]

Originally Posted by PeteMoss

For as long as I can remember, Ice Dancing was the one sport where you could pick out the podium results before the event happened.

Speaking to a female friend of mine who follows figure skating and ice dancing religiously, this is not unusual. She said it's fairly easy for people who follow the sport to pick the winners. The only thing you can't predict is who will falter on "game day".

[Cali Panthers Fan]

All I know is the American commentators stated that Virtue and Moir skated flawlessly and Davis and White had a small flaw (must have been referring to the finnstep), yet the Americans topped the Canadians who had just set the record for points in a long program. Not sure how you do better than a record setting performance with a flaw in the program.

Count me out of watching any judged sport ever again. I'm done, it's stupid. It's obviously pre-arranged and you may as well be watching professional wrestling for the "competition". What a waste.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Cali Flames Fan

All I know is the American commentators stated that Virtue and Moir skated flawlessly and Davis and White had a small flaw (must have been referring to the finnstep), yet the Americans topped the Canadians who had just set the record for points in a long program. Not sure how you do better than a record setting performance with a flaw in the program.

Count me out of watching any judged sport ever again. I'm done, it's stupid. It's obviously pre-arranged and you may as well be watching professional wrestling for the "competition". What a waste.

Any and all judged sports?

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Any and all judged sports?

Other judged sports don't have the history of corruption that figure skating does

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

Other judged sports don't have the history of corruption that figure skating does

Agreed, that was why I was seeking clarification on his post.

[nik-]

Ok it's mean to say, but that American ice dancer looks like Cruella De Vil