I haven’t finished watching the short programs of several skaters yet, but at the moment I have decided to focus on one detail. Do you remember how PCS are evaluated? How are they evaluated now, because some proposals for the next ISU congress have just been published. These proposals aim to eliminate everything that require skating skills, to transform figure skating competitions into running and jumping competitions and nothing else. I hope they fail, but by now I have learned not to expect anything from the ISU. I wrote about the criteria related to the evaluation of components until the end of the 2021-2022 season in this post.

Here are just a few criteria of the first three items of the PCS, based on the screenshots of the summary slides published by Jenny Mast.

Skating Skills: use of effortless power to accelerate and vary speed.

Effortless power. The skater who manages not to show that he is striving to reach great speed deserves a higher score.

Transitions: integration of the various transitions and elements into a unit with no breaks, including entrances and exit of technical elements.

It is important that there are no breaks in the flow of the program. True, skaters have to pick up speed for jumps, especially quadruple jumps. But it’s different to pick up speed for 10 seconds straight, or for 5, take a couple of steps, and then pick up speed for another 4 seconds. And it is different if you see that the skater is only looking for speed or if he seems to be feeling the music.

Harmoniously and elegantly executing steps.

In the run-up, the thing that skaters do most often is the crossover, but there is also the crossunder, the mohawk, and sometimes someone makes short glides to vary the movements. They are all simple things, but there is a way and a way to do them. And every step, even the simplest, can be executed in a beautiful or in an ugly way.

Performance: carriage.

I don’t think we need any particular explanations. If a skater has a nice posture, a good carriage, if he keeps his back straight, he deserves a higher score than someone who has a clumsy position, or which clearly shows the effort he is making.

I remember also that among common mistakes made by judges, Mast list rewarding components based on the number of quadruple jumps included in the program.

On other occasions I will dwell on some other of Mast’s statements. Statements made in a training seminar for judges, so this is (was? Let’s hope not, that this isn’t only the past. Let’s hope they don’t do further damage with absurd decisions) the point of view of the ISU. No matter how many quads there are, quads count for BV and GOE, not PCS. And it is important how the skaters move before the quadruples.

I focused on the Olympic short program of four of them. For all of them I looked at a crossover made in the curve before the diagonal that preeceded the combination. The skater will still run over 70 meters before the combination, but here he has already begun to pick up speed. How does it move? What is his posture?

This is Nathan Chen. SS 9.57, TR 9.39, PE 9.71, CO 9.68, IN 9.64, PCS 47.99.

Just look at the position of the body and the tilt of the back to see that it is clearly picking up speed, with the arms in the simplest position. With minimal variation, Chen spends 12 seconds preparing the combination. True, it is a difficult combination, 4Lz+3T, but the combination has its own base value and its own GOE. It does not deserve any recognition in the PCS for qualities that are not there, this preparation actually interrupts the program, and among the common mistakes made by the judges Mast list also forgetting a part or parts of the program where the skater is going back and forth in order to prepare jumps.

After taking the screenshots, when I was already writing, I realized that Chen is going forward, not backward like the other skaters, so I decided to go back in the video and look at his posture in the curve at the beginning of the run for the 4F.

Back bent at 30°? There is no question that Chen is pushing.

He is focused on the 4F, which he will perform without any particular problems, but the artistic value of his run is zero. A run of 13 seconds.

This is Yuma Kagiyama. SS 9.50, TR 9.25, PE 9.54, CO 9.46, IN 9.46, PCS 47.21.

The back is straighter, although Kagiyama looks a little seated. After the camera changes, and he turn and start to going forward. I wanted another image, so for him too I watched the solo jump, in this case a 4S.

For him too the commitment is clearly visible, and if I go back a few seconds before, when he is going forward, it is equally clear that he is running.

Taking the speed before a jump is necessary, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, but the judges must evaluate how the skaters gain speed. Effortless power, no breaks in the flow of the program, elegantly executing steps, carriage.

This is Shoma Uno. SS 9.43, TR 9.21, PE 9.36, CO 9.39, IN 9.46, PCS 46.85.

Uno has his arms raised, he is trying to do some choreography. If we look at him carefully, Uno’s choreography is often done only with the arms, because he tends to skate on two feet (something that, according to the post I linked before, does not deserve high marks). But… have I already said that often Uno has the butt outside? The pose is anything but elegant or effortless. While I was there I also looked at the forward crossover.

The arms are still continuing the choreographic movement as before. In this position in my opinion they are unsightly, at other times the impression is better. But let’s look at Uno’ back. How fast he is running? How much effort are he doing? And the straight head, which breaks the line of the back, only makes things worse, because it would like to be elegant and instead denotes a remarkable rigidity. And Uno’s run are as long as Chen’s run, longer than Kagiyama’s run.

This is Yuzuru Hanyu. SS 9.43, TR 9.43, PE 9.25, CO 9.54, IN 9.47, PCS 47.08.

Hanyu has a relaxed posture. His back is straight, and one of his arms is doing a choreographic gesture, something that Chen didn’t do. Chen can only focus on speed, to do some choreography is too much difficult. And Hanyu does an asymmetrical gesture, unlike that of Uno, and asymmetrical gestures are increasingly difficult. Kagiyama moves his arms a litte more, but if you watch the video the moves are really simple. True, this screenshot it’s a little bit further from the combination. Why? Because here Hanyu has just started to take his run, but Hanyu breaks the run in several moments inserting several steps. They can be mostly simple, but they are there, something that other skaters don’t do. It is not a continuous run-up, there is attention to the choreographic aspect, and this made it impossible for me to take the same advance that I took with the other skaters. So I focused on another moment, which came a few seconds later, after a three and a glide.

With Hanyu it’s hard to just take a screenshot of a crossover. He is always doing something, moving from one position to another, so in the screenshots we can see that he is changing direction, that his is not a simple run-up but something richer. The head, torso, legs are always in an elegant pose. And, again, the raised arm shows us his attention to the choreographic aspect.

Since I took screenshots of a forward crossover for all of them, I decided to do the same for Hanyu too, but I found myself in trouble. There are only six crossovers in this program, mostly backwards, so I had to take one that Hanyu does a dozen seconds before the salchow, followed by a good number of steps, including a twizzle and an outside spread eagle, before to do the salchow.

The shot is uglier, this perspective makes it really difficult to correctly evaluate the movement. What we can see is that Hanyu lowers himself not by bending his back but thanks to a very deep outside edge, then he moves to the right leg – it is the leg that is bent, the back is in line with the left leg and that the leg is fully extended – and pushes. And, again, he makes an asymmetrical choreographic gesture with his arms (and the head).

His right thigh (the thigh, not the back) must have an inclination of no more than 40°, and this makes it appear that Hanyu’s position is similar to that usually held by Uno even if the two position are different. At the National Championship (from Roseline’s video) the shot was almost the same, we can see only slightly better the move.

If we limit ourselves to these details, how skaters pick up speed, regardless of the difficulty, quality and number of transitions in the whole program, Chen’s PCS score is not justified in the slightest. The quality of Hanyu’s movements, even in moments when the skaters are busy picking up speed, is considerably higher than that of Kagiyama’s and Uno’s movements, in turn capable of performing higher quality gestures than Chen’s. I would say that there is a serious problem in the valuation of the PCS.