I’ll never learn. I think that I’ll do something quick, and I spend in doing it much more time than I thought before.

In his career Yuzuru Hanyu established 19 World records. Three are record for the total, SP+FS, so I ignore them. Watching the programs, there are 10 SP and 5 FS. There are the data with two graph, one for the SP, one for the FS, so we can see the growing of the score.

Both in the data and in the graphs the passage from the +3/-3 system to the +5/-5 system is marked by a black line. The getting up and down of the base value are due mostly to the level of the spins and of the step sequence, sometimes also to how many jumps he did in the second half of the program. I’ve written when he did a major change as the add of a quadruple jump. We see easily the growth, but if we aren’t observant, we can loose an interesting detail. I did the graphs in another way.

I added to the graphs done by the computer some lines, so you can see easily the height of every column.

Beside some little change due to the levels, the BV (column blue), both in the SP and in the FS the BV really increases only when he added the second quadruple. From the 2018-2019 season the BS is lower. It’s normal, the BV of the jumps was lowered, no surprise in the blue columns.

In the SP the brown columns, the GOE, grow regularly until (and comprised) the 2017-2018 season. In the FS there’s a strange detail: in the 2017 World Championship his GOE is lower than in the two competition of autumn 2015. But, with a quadruple more, he had a element more with the maximum GOE that can go up until 3.00 points. With a flaweless program, his GOE fell. He did the world record only because his BV was higher. If we say that Hope and Legacy was really underscored…

But the strangest thing comes now. With the change in the scoring system, the BV of the jumps was lowered, but the GOE was lifted. So, how happened that in the first SP and in both the FS the GOE was lower than before?

The percentage of the GOE that he earns comparing to the higher GOE possible with his elements now is much lower now than before. I did the graph, and the graph for the PCS (green columns), some months ago, in a really long post that you can read in Italian and, thanks to Nymphea, in Japanese (but after her translation I did some little changes).

In the free skate of the 2018 Helsinki Grand Prix the percentage of the GOE is only 33.95%, and that a world record is paid so little is impressive, and not in a good way. True, with the introduction of the new scoring code for some time there have been several records, so it was possible to set one without being perfect, but by the time Hanyu set the record both Shoma Uno (for he world record in September at the Lombardy Trophy) and Nathan Chen (world record in October at Skate America) had already competed and set the new world records. In November Hanyu did a record that lasted until February, when he was surpassed by Uno at the Four Continents Championship. Only Hanyu and Chen at the 2019 World Championship surpassed Uno’s score. The one established at the Helsinki Grand Prix was therefore one of the best scores of the season, but the GOE only got 33.95%. A particular case? Okay, let’s look at the other scores.

As I wrote, the free skate of the 2017 World Championship is not to be taken seriously, on that day Hanyu, who started from fifth place, was the first of the best skaters to skate, and the judges, among whom were the Spanish Daniel Delfa (and in the lead of the competition there was Javier Fernandez), the Chinese Weiguang Chen (with Boyang Chin who was fourth, while Hanyu was fifth) and the Canadian Jeff Lukasik (Patrick Chan was third, and all these skaters did their free skate after Hanyu) have lowered his scores to allow others, if they skated well, to stay ahead of him. None of the juges ever said they did this, but looking at the scores it is obvious.

Let’s ignore Hope and legacy and look at the others. In all five world records he set with the new scoring system, Hanyu’s percentage of GOE was lower than what he had achieved in two of the four previous records, which I highlighted in yellow in the table. Only in the 2020 Four Continents Championship he surpassed the 80% of GOE, which he had done in three of the last four previous records, and the time he failed was the competition where the judges were particularly strict. This tells us that, according to the judges, the quality of his elements got worse.

The second table, and the graph on the right, concern the components. In order to make a comparison, I did the average. In the short program I divided the overall components score by five, in the free skate, which has double factorization, I divided it by ten. In all five world records set in the last two years, his components were lower than those of the previous five world records. While with the years the marks of all the skaters in components tend to rise, those of Hanyu go down, regardless of the quality of what he proposes.

For the last screenshot I did the same tables and graphs focusing not on world records but on a single program, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1. This time I looked at the times when Hanyu proposed a clean program, without any kind of mistake. In addition to the four competitions already mentioned, NHK Trophy 2015, the competition in which Hanyu destroyed the scoring system, Grand Prix Final 2015, Autumn Classic International 2017 and Four Continents Championship 2020, on two other occasions he went close to his own record, at the 2016 World Championship and at the 2018 Olympic Games.

On the first competition, at the NHK Trophy, the score is much lower than in other competitions. Not that it is a low score, Hanyu has surpassed the previous world record, also held by him, by 4.88 points, in most cases whoever sets a new world record surpassed the old one by less than two points. It was simply at that moment that he made the judges understand that they had to raise the marks. In the first competition they were afraid to do it, in the second they got used to the idea of ​​a perfect program, and the high marks arrived. Hinted that it was not heresy to assign a +3, or a 10.00, after the Grand Prix Final the marks gradually rose for everyone … except for Hanyu. The marks for the GOEs dropped competition after competition (the only exception: the GOEs of the Autumn Classic International 2017 are slightly higher than those of the previous competition, the 2016 World Championship) and the components as well. Whether they do it consciously or not, the judges have placed Hanyu on a downward slope that has no relation to what we see on the ice and which is really worrying.