In sports it is quite common for an element, a move or a rule to be named after the person who conceived them, or who made them famous. In figure skating we can think, for example, of jumps, such as the axel, by Axel Paulsen, the salchow, by Ulrich Salchow, the lutz, by Alois Lutz, or also the rittberger, by Werner Rittberger, even if for some mysterious reason the ISU seems to have decided that it is not nice to remember Rittberger, so much so that in the official documents the jump is called loop. And then there are the Ina Bauer, from the skater who conceived the move, and biellmann, from Denise Biellman, while the names ‘tano, from Brian Boitano, or rippon, from Adam Rippon, are not official even though we all use them. As for the rules, the Zayak Rule, which owes its name to Elayne Zayak, is mentioned quite often. Elayne Zayak, for those who do not remember, won the World Championship in 1982 thanks to her numerous triple jumps, all salchow and toe loop. I believe that Zagitova Rule, from Alina Zagitova, is not an official name, but I have heard it used. It is not so strange to use the name of a skater for a rule, and indeed a name can preserve the memory of his exploits. Alina Zagitova won Olympic gold in 2018 thanks – among other things – to the decision to perform all her jumping elements in the second half of the programs. A construction of the programs that, before her arrival, no one had thought was possible.

When something is so out of the ordinary as to be unimaginable before its occurrence, it is right to recognize the extent of the event.

The competition that opened my eyes was the 2021 Nebelhorn Trophy. I have already written about it, but perhaps it is worth remembering the incredible feat accomplished by Vincent Zhou. Not getting third place for Beijing for his nation, that was predictable even before the start of the competition. He was the favorite and, barring sensational surprises, we knew he would bring home the result. No, what leaves me speechless is his incredible ability to land jumps whose rotation is lacking exactly 90°. Not 85°, or 95°. No, he doesn’t like the approximation. Zhou is precise, in spite of Euclid, Pythagoras and all those who, over the millennia, have dealt with geometry. He wants to land jumps missing 90°, and that’s what he does. There is no other explanation.

To be sure, and to understand the extent of his feat, I took a look at the protocols of the Men’s competitions. I checked all the skaters who qualified for the free skate of the last World Championship, or who competed in the World Team Trophy or in a Grand Prix competition this season. For all of them I looked at these competitions, but also at the programs that they skated this season in the Challenger Series competitions, and I made a table. I split the jumps into full rotation, q, <, << and * (invalid element). I only looked if the rotations were complete, so I did not check the flip and lutz edges, the falls or problems of any kind, if a jump was a quad, a triple or had less rotations, and I did not consider the eulers which, by rules, can only be fully rotated or downgraded, without other possibility.

For each skater, the top line tells us how many correctly rotated jumps he has made, how many times he has landed at 90°, how many times he has underrotated… Since the numbers are not comparable, because someone has skated only in one competition and someone in four or five, I calculated the percentages of all the valid jumps. For the sake of completeness I indicated of how many invalid jumps each skater has performed, but since those jumps do not enter the score, regardless of the completeness of their rotation, and since the technical panel don’t say if the invalid jump was rotated or not, that number does not enter in my percentages.

Overall, the skaters (45 skaters in 110 short programs and 107 free skate, on 3 occasions one skater did only the short program) landed 1453 valid jumps. On 1258 occasions, 86.58%, the rotation was complete. In 110 cases, 7.57%, the jump was assigned a q, a sign that exactly 90° was missing. In 67 cases, 4.61%, the jump was judged to be underrotated. It is true that skaters try to complete the rotations, so they do their best not to receive calls, but that the jumps that are assigned a q are more numerous than those that are assigned a < seems strange to me. Okay, I take note of the numbers and move on. 18 jumps were downgraded because the rotation was really poor, that’s 1.24%. You can check the data for each skater in the table I published below.

Based on these numbers I made a graph.

I don’t know what relationship you have with the graphs. I love them, but sometimes to read the image can be difficult. To simplify things, I deleted 9 skaters, the ones that skated in only one competition. The next step was to delete the perfectly rotated jumps. By excluding the data relating to the correct jumps, the taller column, it is easier to read the height of the other columns and observe any oddities.

If you had read the numbers, or if you had looked at the previous chart, this chart is no surprise, the columns are based on the same percentages. I just removed everything that could make the reading a little more challenging. And among all these columns there is only one that really stands out, the one relating to the Vincent Zhou’s q. Zhou is the skater with the lowest percentage of perfectly rotated jumps, 46.67%. Less than half. The skater who has the most problems, after Zhou, is the Canadian Roman Sadovsky, who rotated 58.97% of his jumps. The third is another American, Tomoki Hiwatashi, who correctly rotated 74.36% of his jumps. All others are above 75%, that is, over three-quarters of their jumps have been rotated correctly.
The difference is quite substantial, even with Sadovsky. Roman has been assigned a lot of q, in fact he is the skater who, after Zhou, has received the most. However, they are 23.08% for Sadovsky against 40,00% for Zhou, almost double. This is because, despite being treated with a certain generosity by the technical panel, which often goes in favor of Sadovsky by assigning him the least severe call, the Canadian has received many more underrotated calls than the American. For Sadovsky the q are 23.08%, the < 15.30%. A big difference, but not a huge one. For Zhou the q are 40.00%, the < 11.11%, just over a quarter. Apparently the tendency to go in the skater’s favor that the technical panels have with Zhou, they don’t have it with anyone else.

Zhou’s numbers are so fascinating that I decided to look closely at all of his protocols. World Championship 2021:

With this masterpiece of the program, Zhou did not qualify for the free skate. For this he went to look for the pass for Beijing at the Nebelhorn Trophy:

Then there were the two Grand Prix competitions. First Skate America, at home:

and then the NHK Trophy:

I’ve only underlined the q, and the amount of red lines is impressive. Protocols in hand, I made some tables.

The first table (lines 2-12) contains Zhou’s jumps, competition by competition. The x indicates a jump with a full rotation, the other symbols are those used by the ISU.

The second table (14-24) contains the same jumps, but I have removed the division between competitions. Not surprisingly, Zhou’s most frequent jump is the triple axel, which appears both in the short program and in the free skate. The second jump is the quadruple salchow.

The glance says it all, but I still wanted to count how many and which jumps have been performed a certain way, the numbers are in the third table (26-31), and they are fascinating.

Zhou did nine quadruple salchows. The rotation was never complete. Never. On six occasions, two-thirds, he was given a q, on three the jump was called underrotated. To do this, is needed incredible precision. All four toe loop received a q call. But do we realize the difficulty of to obtain such a result? Zhou’s technical skills are extraordinary, no one else is able to be so precise. In my opinion it should be assigned at least a +1 for the superhuman skills demonstrated.

The last table does not distinguish the jumps by type but by completeness of rotation, competition by competition. In the World Championship in Stockholm he was a disaster, we knew that. Two q, one jump underrotated, one downgraded. The technical controller was the Finnish Leena Laaksonen, the technical specialist the Latvian Konstantin Kostin, the assistant technical specialist the Swedish Filip Stiller.

At the Nebelhorn Trophy Zhou rotated almost half of the jumps. Almost half. A true champion. The exact half was assigned a q. The technical controller was the German Anja Rist, the technical specialist the Japanese Shin Amano, the assistant technical specialist the French Fernand Fedronic.

In the United States, over 70% of Zhou’s jumps have been judged correct, evidently the air of home is good for him. Only four q, no stricter calls. The technical controller was the Russian Julia Andreeva, the technical specialist the German Claudia Unger, the assistant technical specialist the Korean Sung-Jun Byun.

Probably the different time zone, the fatigue linked to the flight, had a bad effect on Zhou, who at the NHK Trophy returned to under 40% of fully rotated jumps, even if this time the underrotated jumps, although less numerous than the on the quarter jumps, increased compared to the Nebelhorn Trophy. The technical controller was Leena Laksonen, the technical specialist was the Canadian Jayson Peace, the assistant technical specialist was the Russian Alexander Kuznetsov.

The numbers speak for themselves. Zhou has shown us that through hard work and constant application even the most incredible results can be achieved. Let’s give Zhou what’s Zhou’s. This rule deserves to bear his name because he is the brightest example of a skater able of landing jumps without exactly 90°.

The Zhou rule – I know, it’s not an official name, but in my opinion the ISU should really give the rule this name – has a noticeable effect on competitions results. Let’s look at the base value: with a q it doesn’t change, if the jump is underrotated yes. Below the base values I indicate also the deductions in the GOE.

What would happen to Zhou’s base value if he was assigned a < every time he was assigned a q? At the World Championship he did not qualify for the free skate, a worse ranking would have made no difference. At the Nebelhorn Trophy and Skate America he won by a large margin over the other skaters, therefore I go on. At the NHK Trophy, however, things would have changed, and a lot. I have transcribed in an excel file (left table) the elements performed by Zhou, with relative base value and GOE. Considering that with a q must be assigned a -2, and that with a < it’s possible to assign a -2, I have kept the real GOE. However, every time Zhou received a q, I assigned him a < (right table), and consequently lowered his base value. This is what came out:

Between the two programs, the overall score drops by just over ten points. Is such a calculation unfair to Zhou? I also checked the other skaters. Shoma Uno, Matteo Rizzo and Alexander Samarin did not receive any q. Actually they didn’t get any kind of call, their jumps didn’t have any problems with rotations. Junhwan Cha and Makar Ignatov received a few calls, only in the free program. I also recalculated their score.

At this point I checked the ranking. Above is the one we know, the real result of the competition, below what would have been if, instead of receiving a q, 5 of Zhou’s jumps, 2 of Cha and 1 of Ignatov had received a <.

Cha and Rizzo can thank for the Zhou rule, but also Samarin, since these competition have a prize money, and that obviously a better placement in the final rank means more money.

There is another fascinating detail. What jump is this?

I see an outside edge, from this image I would say it is a lutz. Wrong, according to official protocol it is a flat edge flip. The call is “4F!”, there is no the “e” that I think the jump deserved. In this case there were no rotation problems, the only call is on the flat edge. Of course now I have doubts. I have never looked at the edge of Zhou’s flip, to tell the truth I have almost never looked at his jumps, but now I think that the judges should look at them closely. And remember, if a call of “!” or “q” have no effect on the base value, the presence of one between “e” or “<” causes the value of a quadruple flip to drop from 11.00 to 8.25 points, the presence of both signs causes the value to drop to 6.60 points. A huge difference. In the past, Zhou has received several < on his flip. It’s not the jump that has the biggest rotations problems, but sometimes his rotation is poor. For the edge, Zhou got several “!”, but he got a wrong edge call on a flip only once. It happened at the 2021 national championship, when he popped his second jump and did a single instead of the planned quadruple. On a single, the call was “e”, the marks all comprised between -3 and -4, so from the 0.40 points of base value, Zhou earned 0.27 points for his jump. But surely it was a coincidence that the strictest call came only on the occasion when his influence on the score was minimal.

And, speaking of influence on the score, with the q Zhou (and the others, but to the others it happens much less often) keep the base value of the jump. What happens to the GOE? It is not said that with a q the GOE is automatically negative, but it is interesting to see how much the GOEs drops. The next lists, the ones with which I close the post, should be taken with caution. I looked at the marks awarded by the judges in the competition protocols. I have not looked at the score, since the final points are related to the type of jump performed and the number of rotations, a check on the score allows very few comparisons. I looked at the marks, the +3, +2, +1, 0, -1… The competitions are Men’s World Championship and World Team Tropy from last season, Grand Prix competitions and Challenger Series this season. I looked at all jumps (of all the skaters) that received a q.

From the right you will find the names of the skaters (PC column), the competition (PD), the program (PE), the call that appears on the protocol (PF), the judges’ marks (from PG to OP), the average of the marks (PP). The skaters are listed in alphabetical order. The following columns contain the same data, except that the order is made on the last column: at the top there are the skaters who received the highest marks, at the bottom those who received the lowest marks.

Obviously q is not the only thing that affects the marks. From the protocol it is not possible to know if there have been step outs, hands on the ice or other, we do not see any steps performed before or the width of the jump. To be sure of how each jump was performed we should watch the videos of the competitions, and too often this is not possible. But it is curious that if we exclude the jump in which Zhou fell and three combinations in which calls came on both jumps (or on the first and third in the case of the three jumps combination), the final mark was almost always positive, and also when it was negative it wasn’t so bad. Another unicum, given that only two skaters received, and on only one occasion, slightly positive evaluations. The ISU should really do justice to Zhou and call the rule after him, because it is evident that no one is able to exploit the full potential of the q as he does.