Originally Posted by
David Franklin
I don't actually know much about it first hand, but from what I've seen on the skating forums, the big problem with the scoring system is that because the judges just "add up the score for each element", the emphasis is much more on what gets marks than what is actually aesthetically pleasing. And the scoring system means it often makes more sense to do a difficult move badly than it does to do an easier one well.
I didn't actually see the men's final, but by all accounts, while Plushenko made sure he got every jump and technical movement, his programme was more like a set of practice moves than a complete artistic whole, with virtually no choreography, pauses to get his breath before the next jump, etc. And it won by a country mile.
With the ladies' singles, (and the men, I think), one big way of getting extra points is doing moves with unusual changes of edge and position. The problem is that no-one can really do these moves well with all the edge changes - in particular, we're seeing a lot of slow, awkward spinning sequences because the skaters end up losing so much speed. We also get people skating in very contorted positions when they really don't have the flexibility to make it look good.
And I think a lot of the awkward looking basic skating is for similar reasons; people are trying to do show they can skate on their bad foot on the difficult edge while contorting their body and striking fancy poses - even when they can't!
But even under the old scoring system there were always falls in the Ice Dance: the Italian pair (Fusar/Margaglio) fell in the last olympics as well. (And it was his fault that time as well. No wonder she was, um, annoyed...!)
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