Since the ISU Judgyng System was established, the components have not changed. A few words in the explanations may have changed, I have not compared all versions of the table published by the ISU, and there are several factorizations, but the judges were awarding marks between 0.25 and 10.00 in 2005 and now, and the difference in the quality of what is performed on the ice remained the same. Some skaters make a lot of transitions, others don’t. Some skaters know how to use edges, others always skate the same way. For some music is something essential, for others there can be any music, so nothing changes. The table (one of the versions) is this:
The components have not changed, the technical content has. In 2010 Evan Lysacek won his Olympic gold without a quadruple, now Jason Brown is the only skater who can try to get into the top ten without a quadruple. In the top ten because, even if I’m sorry, I know that he has no chance of getting on the podium. He would not even have it if he managed to land his quadruple salchow, since now there are a lot of skaters who do two quadruples in the short program and at least three in the free skate.
The turning point came in the 2015-2016 season. Before Patrick Chan had won three World Championships with a quadruple toe loop in the short program and two in the free skate. Some skaters performed more quadruples than him, in Kevin Reynolds and Maxim Kovtun’s short program layout there were two, but Reynolds and Kovtun didn’t win the competitions that mattered. Reynolds won a gold and a bronze at the Four Continents Championship, Kovtun two silvers and a bronze at the European Championship, neither of them has ever been on the world podium. They could be dangerous rivals, but there were several skaters who could get ahead of them if they skated well.
At the 2015 NHK Trophy Yuzuru Hanyu destroyed the ISU Judging System. The two programs that he skated in those days made it clear that the system was no longer able to evaluate his performance, and to be sure that this was clear, two weeks later Hanyu repeated broke all the world records again. I should check the progress of the scores that season, but now I don’t have the time. Hanyu didn’t just jump. His jumps were of quality, and the programs contained remarkable spins, were full of steps in every moment and always tied to the music. They were the complete package. Hanyu raised the bar impressively, and his marks went up. To beat him, the others realized they should have done more jumps than him, but that’s not the only thing that happened.
I have checked the scores in the most important competitions since the ISU judging system has been in place: Olympic Games and World Championships. There are 20 competitions. I would have liked to check the Women’s scores as well, but these days there is something that is catching my attention, and I don’t have much time to write. I checked the evolution of the scores in four items: TSS, TES, PCS and BV, even if I only used TES and PCS to have readable graphs. I divided the skaters into four groups of six, as if they were the warm-up groups of the competitions, and wrote down their scores.
In columns C-F I have entered all the data of the 2005 World Championship, at the top the short program, at the bottom in the free skate. In the G-J columns I calculated the averages. Box G7, for example, contains the TSS mean of Lambiel, Joubert, Buttle, Lysacek, Plushenko and Li. In box G13 the average is calculated on the TSS of the best 12 skaters, in box G19 the average concerns the best 18 skaters, in box G25 the average is dedicated to the 24 skaters I have listed. I stopped at 24 because it is the number of skaters who skate free program, in this way I controlled the same number of skaters in the two programs. Actually on two occasions, at the 2005 World Championship and at the 2014 World Championship, a skater retired after qualifying for free skate, so the final line is on 23 skaters and not 24. I highlighted the two competitions with a asterisk placed next to the year. Row 26 is dedicated to the weakest skaters, those who finished the competition segment in a position between 19 and 24. I knew in advance that these scores would be much lower than the others, but I still wanted to see their trend.
The short program (for the 19-24 skaters there only the line for the PCS, I added this data after I made the graph and I forgot to add the TES line):
The free skate:
The lines go up. Not on a regular basis, sometimes the scores go down, probably because the judges of a single competition were a little more strict than the judges of the previous competition, but all the scores go up (with the exception of the TES in the last season, but it must be recognized that it was a particular season and not everyone was able to train well).
Okay, now that we’ve seen the detail, let’s think about it. Let’s really think about it. It is normal for the base value, and therefore the TSS, to rise. There are more quadruples, the scores have to go up. But the components haven’t changed, why do the scores go up? In the short program, the skaters in the last group, those who ranked between 19th and 24th position, at the 2018 Olympic Games and in the last two editions of the World Championship obtained higher average marks than the six best skaters in the 2005. In 2005, Lambiel’s PCS deserved 37.72 points, Buttle’s 36.89 points. In 2021, Selevko’s PCS deserved 37.67 points, Kvitelashvili’s 37.03. Lambiel little better than Selevko and Kvitelashvili, and Buttle little worse? Really?
Well, here’s a huge problem. Indeed, two. Probably to equate PCS with TES, the judges raised the marks in components. However, the two scores cannot be equated. Hanyu’s TES in the short program of a competition that I have not considered, the Four Continents Championship 2020, was 63.42 points, the components cannot go beyond 50.00. Chen’s TES in the free skate of another competition that I did not consider, the 2019 Grand Prix Final, was 129.24 points, but the components cannot go beyond 100.00 points. The first problem is that there is a very strong imbalance from a technical point of view. A skater who jumps and don’t fall can be unbeatable for one who can skate but who does not perform quadruples. If Vincent Zhou rotates his quads, Jason Brown has no chance of beating him. If we want a complete skating, and not just a jumping competition, we need to intervene on the factorization. And then there is another problem.
If the scores of all skaters have been raised by the judges to close the gap between TES and PCS, what happens to skaters who can skate? Their scores are deservedly high, almost to the maximum, the scores of the others are equally raised… and the quality of what is proposed on the rink by those who know how to skate is no longer recognized. All the strongest skaters have high scores, with differences between one and the other that have now become really small.
I made two more graphs. Again for reasons of readability, I limited myself to ten skaters plus the average of the best six skaters at the World Championship (in the Olympic seasons I made a further average with the scores of the Olympic Games and the World Championship). Two are skaters that have stopped skating but have won several world championships and an Olympic medal, Patrick Chan and Javier Fernandez, and eight are among the strongest now. I wanted skaters who have competed internationally for several consecutive seasons, which means I didn’t consider Mark Kondratiuk. There is not a single Russian skater constantly present at the most important competitions for a period long enough for me, in the end I looked at the scores of Kolyada, even if for two seasons he did not compete and in the graph I drew a thin line to join the lines of his scores. The other names are pretty obvious, with the exception of Brown they have all won at least one world medal.
I averaged their PCS in international competitions (excluding Japan Open, but including Fall 2020 Grand Prix competitions) season by season. In some cases it is an average so to speak, because the skater has only skated in one competition, sometimes the average is based on six or seven competition. The data is updated to include the 2022 Olympic Team Event.
The trend in the Short Program is this:
Free skate:
The older skaters, Chan, Fernandez, Hanyu, took several years to get to high marks. They have refined their technique year after year. Now as the skaters start landing quadruple, the scores in their components go up. Over the past seven seasons (six in the chart, but we can expect similar values for this season) Hanyu’s PCS have changed very little, everyone else’s has grown considerably. Is he really the only one who isn’t improved? Did the others really get that close to him? Or maybe it’s the others who have inflated scores, which he can’t counter because his scores are already nearing maximum? In the free skate of this season, five of the seven skaters who participated in international competitions (Hanyu only skated in the national championship) had higher average scores than Chan’s in the season in which he won his first World Championship. Are everyone really better at components than Chan? And if they are not, if their scores have been inflated and brought to the same or almost the same level as those who have worked for years to refine their technique, eliminating the quality differences that exist in reality in the scores, we are really sure that figure skating do deserve to be part of the Olympic Games?
