In the previous post I started looking at how high are the marks awarded to the skaters the national championships. Any explanation, as to why I did this check and how I did it, can be found there. I would have liked to have controlled a greater number of skaters, from more nations, but it takes time, also because on SkatingScores there are only the protocols, and not all, of the senior national championships of Russia, Japan and the United States. When a protocol is not there I have to look for it, and I have not always been able to find the protocols I have been looking for, and I have to do all the calculations, so it takes a lot more time. So I dealt with a rather limited number of skaters outside of these three countries compared to skaters from Russia, Japan and the United States. I start with Russian skaters and Evgeni Plushenko.

At the beginning of Plushenko’s career the 6.0 scoring code was in effect, so his early seasons are missing. After, he skipped several national championships (and several seasons as well). This means that the data on him are few and far between.

The protocols refer only to the last few seasons, in which he competed little. GOEs look normal. In components, the vote in which the greatest oddities are usually found, Plushenko has always received very high marks, but it seems that, at most, the judges were influenced by them only at the 2012 European Championship.

Artur Gachinski:

Curious those two tall columns, in GOEs and PCS, in the 2011-2012 season, with the one in the PCS that seems to have influenced the marks in the subsequent European Championship. A few months earlier Gachinski had won bronze on his debut at the World Championship, and in Russia the expectations on him were high.

Sergei Voronov’s career was much longer and more interesting.

Unfortunately for the 2009-2010 season I did not find the entire protocol, it would have been nice to see the perfection of the technical elements in relation to the very high PCS obtained. But if in December 2009 he went above 8.00 – and not just a little – in a national competition, in the international field he repeated himself only five years later, after having (almost) regularly repeated himself in the Russian championship. The help given by the federation does not seem to have been successful, but this has not prevented them from continuing to try.

The very high PCS are there too. This gives me a doubt. I’m not saying it happened, but I’m wondering if it’s possible. Clearly the federation tried to help his skater with too high marks. The result was not very satisfying. In such a situation, what do you do? Do you continue with high marks and that’s it? Do you use the press for propaganda? Do you use other less legitimate systems? The desire to help the skater is clear. How far can you go?

Maxim Kovtun:

Here, too, there are high marks in components. In 2013 and, to a lesser extent, because there was some precedent that was not very close, in 2014, 2017 and 2018 higher marks in the international competitions immediately followed. At this point the national champion was Kovtun, Voronov was an very good skater but came up behind him. Could this have influenced the support the federation has given to the skaters?

In the free skate on a couple of occasions Kovtun has had very high GOEs, in the PCS it has happened regularly but it does not seem that this has influenced the international marks. For the two programs it is necessary to make different reasonings. At the first short program after the national championship, the skater arrives after receiving marks from their judges. International judges can be influenced (even on an unconscious level), or not. If they are not influenced by the national marks, it is okay, but if they are influenced by them, they award higher marks than they should. At the free skate, however, the skaters arrive after the short program. Those skaters were seen by those judges. If the short program has been executed well, or at least cleanly, the effect of the national championship marks can continue. But if the short program was disappointing, the bad impression just received erases the memory of the high marks of the national championship, and the marks that are assigned to the free skate are more correct.

An example of this mechanism? Let’s take what happened with Nathan Chen at the last Skate America. In this case the last reference was not the National Championship, but last season’s World Team Trophy, where he scored the highest points among Men in both programs. And beyond that, what do we know about Chen? Chen came to Skate America after winning all the competitions he has participated in since PyeongChang, including three World Championships. He is strong? The results say yes. So if he is strong, he will inevitably score high, even if he skates badly. He can’t skate that bad, right?

Chen made two big mistakes: a fall on the initial quadruple, a big step out on the second quadruple that prevented him from completing the combination. Inevitably, his marks fell, even in the PCS, because according to the rules it is not possible to give the highest marks in the presence of big mistakes. I explained, both writing about Ritsuko Horiuchi and about the marks of the Russian judges, that the marks awarded to Chen are very high even if we think that he has made only one serious mistake and not two.

Now I take that table with the marks actually received by Chen in the short program and their real value considering the maximum marks that could be awarded to him in the presence of a fall, and compare those marks with those of the free skate protocol. I only took the marks in the components, and to have a more compact image I narrowed the white spaces a bit, but I didn’t touch any mark. In the free skate, which contains more quadruples, Chen proposes a little simpler choreography, otherwise he would run out of energy before the end of the program. So a lower mark in Transitions is normal, but in Interpretation of the Music it is not so automatic. Now, passing over all the other considerations that could be made about the marks assigned to Chen, let’s look at what was awarded to him:

When the judges evaluated the free skate, in their minds there was the bad impression of the day before, and Chen certainly did not impress them positively by proposing a good program, as he popped several jumps. The marks went down. All. All the marks are lower than those of the short program considering the highest marks that Chen could have received, and in Transition the mark is lower even at an absolute level. The previous competition influences the judges especially in the short program. In the free skate, except for really extraordinary or really bad programs, the closer impression of the short program counts more.

Mikhail Kolyada:

Russian judges are very fond of Kolyada, but the rise in his scores internationally rarely seems to be directly linked to the national marks.

I remember that for the 2020 Grand Prix competition I used a different blue because, even if nominally those were international competitions, since almost all the skaters were from the organizing nation, and all the judges were, I do not consider these scores to be reliable at international level. And not just me: according to the ISU these scores do not count for the personal best.

Alexander Samarin:

The love for Kolyada is nothing compared to the love for Samarin. There are many fascinating competitions, the one that stands out most is the national championship of the 2018-2019 season, because also the GOE of the free skate are very high. This intrigued me to such an extent that I decided to look at the full protocols. At the Ondrej Nepela Trophy no fall but an invalid spin (but the invalid elements don’t enter in the average of my graphs. My numbers are related to the percentage received compared to the maximum possible mark with the valid elements presented by each skater, an invalid element is automatically excluded), three jumps with slightly negative GOE, one of which marked with REP, some 0, many +1 and +2, some +3, a +4, by the Russian judge Olga Kozhemyakina. At Skate Canada no falls, three jumping elements with negative GOE, including a combination on which there are a ! and a <, a -1 (outside the clearly wrong elements), some 0, many +1, +2 and +3. At the Internationaux de France no fall, two jumps with negative GOE, both marked with <, a spin marked with V, some 0, many +1, +2 and +3, only two +4, by the American judge (Kevin Rosenstein on the CSSp3V, I suspect that the American judges have some difficulty in evaluating the spins, even if Jason Brown is American) and by the French judge Philippe Meriguet (the only one to consider Samarin the best in components, in a competition in which the mistakes done by Brown have been a < and jump that broke the Zayak rule, Meriguet is urgently requesting my attention again). At the Golden Spin a fall, a negative GOE linked to a !, a -1, some 0, many +1, +2 and +3, some +4. The impression is that, beyond the mistakes, Samarin’s elements are good but not excellent.

At the National Championship there is a fall, and that jump is the only one that has received a negative evaluation, with a unanimous -5. Such a thing should lower the percentage of GOEs, right? Only at the Golden Spin there is another fall. Yet its percentage is very high. Why? Here a spin is marked with a V, and has received the sole -1, alongside with five +1 and three +3. All other marks are +2, +3 (the majority) and +4. I have a vague suspicion that Samarin’s score was a little inflated.

And, surprise, at the European Championship which took place in Minsk some time later, Samarin improved his personal bests in the GOE of the free skate and in the PCS of both programs.

Alongside all these very high marks, the marks received by Dmitri Aliev seem strange:

Aliev was not pushed systematically as other Russian skaters. I can be wrong, but only in the PCS of two free programs the attempt to help him is evident, in the other cases the marks are much more normal, as if Aliev was not exactly the skater the Russian federation is aiming for. I have no idea of any political reasons that could be behind this different attitude.

This is the final table in which I recorded all the most important growth in score between what the skaters received at the national championship and the best previous international competition. I explained the sense of colors in the previous post.

I only listed oddly high marks at national championships, not whether those marks have had an effect internationally. For this check, I refer you to the graphs, because for this they are clearer than the numbers.

I start to write about Japanese skaters from Daisuke Takahashi.

In my graphs there are the two national championships of December 2018 and 2019, but in fact Takahashi’s career in the Men’s competition ended with the Sochi Olympics.

The competition that stand out the most is the 2009-2010 national championship, just before the Vancouver Olympic Games in which Takahashi became the first Japanese skater able to win a medal in the Men’s category, and before the World Championship he won a month later, and also this success was a first time for a Japanese. That year Takahashi received in the PCS higher marks than previously. At the Olympic Games, his marks were higher than before. Has he improved, or have the judges been influenced by the national championship?

Some other scores stand out from the graph, even if on a purely numerical level those competitions do not appear in the table that I will publish at the end of the check on Japanese skaters. They are the GOEs of the short program of December 2011 (69.33%), which would seem excessively high, were it not for the NHK Trophy disputed a month earlier (66.67%), because in the second best international precedent, dating back to three competitive seasons before (among those in which he actually participated, in 2008-2009 Takahashi did not compete due to injury) he had obtained only 51.33%. They are the PCS of the 2011 championship, 9.07 points, which does not seem excessive only thanks to the 8.86 points of the NHK Trophy held the month before, because the second best previous is the 8.46 points of Skate America 2010. It goes better with the National Championship of the 2013, in which the previous high scores are three, the NHK Trophy 2013, the NHK Trophy 2011 and the World Team Trophy 2012, curiously all competitions held in Japan. Of course, these are in effect international competitions, but the detail is curious. There are also the PCS of the 2012 national championship, 9.60 points, preceded only by 9.36 points of the 2012 World Team Trophy. Evidently Takahashi liked a lot the air of home, very often in Japan he obtained very high scores. It didn’t just happen with him, if you want to look at the graphs you can see that it happened to someone else too.

Nobunari Oda:

Since I have not taken into account the scores of the national championships if the skater had not participated in at least three international competitions before, I ignore the championship of the 2004-2005 season. Other than that, Oda may have only been helped once in GOE early in his career. I would say that the Japanese federation has not given him any special treatment.

Takahito Kozuka:

If I hadn’t written the names in these graphs, and had mixed Kozuka’s graphs with those of Russian skaters, you wouldn’t have noticed any difference. The attitude of the Japanese federation towards Kozuka was the same as that of the Russian federation towards its skaters.

Tatsuki Machida:

Machida has not been supported by his federation as much as Kozuka, but the impression is that in some cases the international judges have allowed themselves to be influenced by the evaluations at the national championship.

Yuzuru Hanyu:

The only marks that stand out are those of the short program of the 2010-2011 season, and as I have already said that is possible to have an excellent performance in a national championship even without judges’ aid. It is when the excellent performance is repeated year after year that it becomes suspicious. Of course, some might argue that, after the very high scores of the autumn of 2015, with this system of analysis any subsequent vote seems correct. To dispel any doubts, it’s enough to look at the programs. Hanyu has been injured and skipped three editions of the national championship, but in 2019 and 2020 he was there. How did he skate in the 2019 short program? The only moment in which minimal fatigue emerged is the landing of the triple axel. Not that he landed disastrously, for many skaters it would be a good landing, but it wasn’t one of his landings, especially not from an axel. In 5 previous international competitions he had achieved better GOEs, in another 3 he had achieved GOEs very close to these. In the PCS on four international occasions he had received higher marks, on another 4 he had received not much lower marks. It certainly cannot be said that he was helped by the Japanese judges.

Last year’s free skate was perfect, the only program that can compare to that is Hope & Legacy at Helsinki 2017. Sometimes someone did more quadruples, he himself did more on one occasion, but the perfection of the technical elements and the richness of choreographic moves are unparalleled. By this I’m writing about technically very difficult programs: the two SEIMEI of 2015 were equally perfect, the transitions a lot, but technically they were a bit easier since the quads were three and not four. No program with more technical difficulties and as many transitions has ever been skated perfectly.

In the percentage of GOE his marks were better on two occasions, in another, the Helsinki free skate, the most underestimated world record in history, his marks were not much worse. In components he has twice received better marks, in Helsinki he has received the exact same mark, on three occasions he has received marks very close to this. I haven’t gotten to American skaters yet, but if Hanyu had been Russian (or Canadian, think of the Virtue/Moir protocol I posted in the previous post), this program would probably have received 10.00, not 9.68. The Japanese judges gifted to Hanyu no points.

Shoma Uno:

If the Japanese federation doesn’t give Hanyu the slightest bit of help, it seems that with Uno the attitude is different. Very high GOEs on three occasions in the short program, and on one occasion these marks may have had an effect on the international competitions, and PCS which in some cases may have contributed to the appreciation of Uno outside Japan.

At the moment Yuma Kagiyama has participated in too few competitions to be able to make serious analysis, however I publish his graphs.

The final table:

Leaving aside Kagiyama, of whom nothing can be said because the competitions are too few, for the Japanese federation the skaters seem divided into two groups: Kozuka, Machida, Takahashi and Uno, who are helped, even if not with the same passion who the Russian federation has for his skaters, and Hanyu and Oda, which for the Japanese federation don’t seems to be important.

I’ve already written about Evan Lysacek and Johnny Weir in the previous post, so I’ll start to write of the American skaters with Jeremy Abbott.

In most cases, I list the skaters or judges in alphabetical order. Sometimes I go alphabetically by country. It seems to me the most correct system for everyone. Other times I use a scoring order, or chronological. This time for the skaters, the Canadian or French ones in the previous post, and Russian or Japanese in this one, I went in a more or less chronological order. Some careers overlap, but I have tended to write first of those who started competing internationally earlier. However, between Russia, Japan and the United States I did not respect the alphabetical order.

This is because before I started writing a single word, I had already made all the final graphs and tables, so I already knew how the judges of the various nations vote. I often find out one thing and write it down, then do another check, find out something else, and write it down. This time I took the direction of my writing more precisely. First the Russians, to show that, if they want, the federations help their skaters. Then the Japanese, to show that not all federations do it, or that they don’t do it with all their athletes, and it is not said that the skaters who are ignored are the less important. Politics is always important, international as well as domestic. In closing, the Americans, because they have brought to the highest levels what others sometimes do and sometimes not, and which in any case never do so well.

Abbott’s scores have been inflated quite often in both GOEs and PCSs, in both programs. In the final table his national championships marks appear 15 times, and he is not even the US figure skater who appears the most. The Russian skater who appear the most is Maxim Kovtun, 11 times, always for the PCS. The Japanese is Takahito Kozuka, 12 times, in all four scores, but with only one red box indicating a very high help against the two purple (we could say “beyond all highest expectations”) and two reds from Abbott, and the two reds of Kovtun. For the skaters of other nations, the one with the most sensational data is the Canadian Patrick Chan, 15 scores probably inflated, including two that I have highlighted in purple and one in red.

Max Aaron:

Poor Aaron, if we exclude Lysacek and Weir, who competed in the first years in which this scoring code was used, among the skaters of a certain level he is the one treated worst by the American judges. Always better than how were treated by the judges of their federation Dmitri Aliev, Kevin Aymoz, Michal Brezina, Artur Gachinski, Daniel Grassl, Yuzuru Hanyu, Boyang Jin, Brian Joubert, Mikhail Kolyada, Tatsuki Machida, Keegan Messing, Nam Nguyen, Nobunari Oda , Matteo Rizzo, Daisuke Takahashi and Shoma Uno, but an American deserves the best, right? They shouldn’t have treated him like that!

The skater whose scores have been inflated most often by the judges at the American championship is Jason Brown.

Sometimes the odd marks are so many that I don’t even know where to start. On just three occasions to Brown was awarded over 80% of the GOE available for him, and all three times it has happened in the national championship. And he skated also his fourth best program at the national championship. Coincidences?

Even in the components, the four best evaluations ever occurred in the national championship.

Adam Rippon:

Also with him there are no marks that stand out in a particular way, right? The Olympic team was defined at the 2018 National Championship, and it is probably no coincidence that Rippon’s marks were very high on the occasion. Rippon would also participate in the Team Event, his scores were important both individually and for the team.

Three times above 9.00 in the PCS, always at the National Championship. Nice! And on several occasions immediately after an excellent national championship Rippon improved his personal best in the PCS. Evidently he was in really good shape at that time.

Vincent Zhou:

How is it that Zhou in the national championship always gets very high GOEs? Isn’t it that the technical panel forgets to call the underrotations and this raises his GOEs? In the to-do list I have to add a stats of Zhou’s underrotated. Of course, now the problem seems to be solved with q. A stats is also needed here.

Those PCS are beautiful, so beautiful that they are also liked abroad, so much so that the international judges imitated them, even if they have not come to the same highness as the originals.

Repeat what has already been written for the short program, but, at least for the components, with greater intensity.

I close with Nathan Chen. I know, in a chronological order it comes before Zhou, but to me it seems right to close with a flourish.

Chen got off to a great start with a very high GOE at the 2013 Junior Grand Prix of Mexico, but then his scores dropped. In theory, this one competition alone should be enough to make us say that Chen was capable of skating good programs, but the difference from subsequent competition was so great that I got suspicious and went to check.

In that short program, as well as in that of the Junior Grand Prix of Minsk, the axel of the short program was a double (and obviously, being a junior short program, no quadruple, while in the free skate there were two double axels, and no quadruple). Only in the Junior Grand Prix final of that same year Chen did two triple axels (GOE 0.43 in the short program, -0.57 in the free skate, in which there was also a double axel and no quadruple). The technical content is so much lower than that of the Croatia Cup 2014 (one triple axel per program, even if in the short program he fell), that the programs (SP and FS) of the Mexico Cup 2013 cannot be considered a true precedent for the GOE of the 2015 National Championship. The confirmation comes from the fact that Chen needed five full seasons to return to that percentage.

Very high GOEs in 2017, even if in GOE judges have less room to maneuver because a fall is a fall… or at least it almost always is, when the skater does not put his bottom on the ice sometimes the technical panel has original ideas on balance and on the precise location of the weight, even if the skater has placed both hands on the ice and raised his free leg much more than he usually does in a camel spin. I could be wrong, but in my opinion the 2017 marks had some influence on the outcome of the following Four Continents Championship, not only these but also the PCS of both programs.

Very high marks also in 2019. Do we really want to talk about Saitama? Chen’s growth is unprecedented. Only one number higher than this appears in my tables for GOEs, and we are talking about 450 GOEs for programs performed by 32 different (strong) skaters from 8 different countries. Over 30.00% growth was achieved only by Chen, for both programs in 2019, and Patrick Chan, for the 2011 free skate, just before his first world title. And, at the World Championship, Chen won by greatly improving his personal best set in an international competition (in the short program he went from 48.00% of the World Team Trophy 2017 to 64.80% in Saitama, growth of 16.60%, in the free skate from 51.67% of the US Classic International 2017 to 68.80% of Saitama, growth of 17.13% compared to his best performance in a single competition). Even without thinking about anything illegal, here we see the anchor effect I wrote about in the previous post in all his strength.

Obviously with these numbers I could not go and look closely at the protocols. I counted, for each competition, how many +5, or +4, or +3… he was awarded. In the bold line I made the sum of the three Grand Prix competition, then there is the National Championship and finally the World Championship. Even at the beginning of the season he received some high marks, more at Skate America than outside his country (and you can ask Takahashi how good the home air is), but mostly the quality of the its elements was average. At the national championship he received very high marks, and suddenly his marks went up even when he walked away from home.

Especially in the free skate, the growth in the number of +5 is avoided, but to be clearer I did the percentages. I have not considered the elements that have received a call (second line for every competition), so all those marked with !, <, COMBO and the falls. This means that I calculated the averages (yellow line) excluding the marks Chen received on three elements in the three short programs of the Grand Prix, and on four of the free skate. The difference in quality, at least in marks, is remarkable. I have some doubts that this is also true in reality.

American propaganda with inflated votes at the national championship with Chen worked really well.

Obviously, if the GOEs are inflated, which is much more difficult in the presence of serious errors, to inflate the PCS is much easier. And with Chen, the international judges have always been influenced by the marks of the national championship, with the only exception of the 2018 Olympic Games, when Chen presented short programs so dreadful that it was impossible to assign him higher marks than those he had already received in the past.

One thing is certain: the support Chen has received from his federation is not comparable to the support any other skater has received from his federation. Unfortunately the international judges have adapted to the wishes of the American federation, perhaps without even questioning the correctness of what they were doing. And anyone who says that the marks assigned to the national championship at the international level count nothing, perhaps don’t know figure skating well enough.

The final table in all its glory: