The Athlete and the Artist is the title of the fifth chapter of Christine Brennan’s Edge of Glory. We are in 1997, I think it does not surprise anyone to discover that The Athlete is Elvis Stojko, the first skater in history capable of completing a quadruple jump in combination.
Obviously at his time he was considered the king of quadruples. Stojko is Canadian. Who is the artist? The book was written by an American journalist in 1998, the chapter in question is set at the beginning of 1997. Let’s see who were the most important skaters of the period. I delete with a line those who had already retired.
Kurt Browning, Viktor Petrenko, Paul Wylie and Petr Barna had retired, as well as Rudy Galindo, 1996 world bronze medalist at his only participation. Ukrainian Viacheslav Zagorodniuk has won six European medals, including one gold, but has only won one bronze in the world. The aforementioned Stojko, king of the quadruples, the French Philippe Candeloro, and several Russians remain. Alexei Urmanov was the reigning Olympic champion, but an injury suffered during the 1997 World Championship will exclude him for a long time from the most important competitions. Alexei Yagudin, and especially Evgeni Plushenko, were very young. Ilia Kulik was not reliable, he could skate very well or make disasters. And then there was the US champion, Todd Eldredge. Eldredge started on the world podium in 1991, and has done so several times. And, unlike the Canadian and the Russians, he didn’t do the quadruple.
Here he is, the artist. How was figure skating seen between 1997 and 1998 by the American journalists, when the one who did not perform quadruples, but who was the artist, was an American figure skater? Before 1997 World Championship, writing of Stojko the journalists criticized
his blunt, no-nonsense skating style. His jumps were monumental, the best of his sport. But his artistry, to some, was nonexistent. His skating had grown slow, his footwork dull. (pag. 104)
Aspects in favor of Stojko: he had the best jumps of the moment. Huge jumps. In recent years Nathan Chen, who has shown the most consistency on jumps, landing a huge number, has certainly done something remarkable for consistency, but his jumps have never been huge, and this may have helped him to land so many quadruples. If you have the necessary rotation speed, and Chen has it, a small jump is easier to control than a big jump. Stojko was praised for the number of his jumps and because they were monumental, but he was criticized from an artistic point of view. Chen deserves praise for the number of quadruples, but what about the rest?
On the next page, still talking about Stojko and his quad in combination, Brennan wrote that
The art of competition drove him, The art of artistry did not. “I want to show that it’s not a ballet recital, it’s not a dance recital.” he said. “It’s a sport.” (pag. 105)
Where have I heard this before?
Comments of this type, which exalt quadruples above all things, are generally made by those who can do only quadruples. But figure skating is not just quadruple jumps, something that the American press in 1997 was well aware of.
Athleticism was one part of the equation. But what about presentation? According to some experts, Elvis didn’t have any presentation. He maintained, of course, that he did, that his martial arts style–with black leather accountrements and jumps that reached the rafters–was artistry in the ’90s in men’s figure skating.
Elvis was on one side of the argument. On the other side were people who said his skating reminded them of a man with his feet stuck in drying cement.
“Tedious, two-footed approaches . . . an utter lack of artistry,” was the way the Chicago Tribune’s Philip Hersh analyzed Stojko. (pag. 105)
And not only Brennan and Hersh. Evy Scotvold, coach of the Olympic silver medallist Paul Wylie (1992) and Nancy Kerrigan (1994), called him slow, adding that
“all he does is stand around”
while for a highly regarded international judge, Joe Inman, Stojko’s program
“is blank […] From a musical point of view, you’ll find a lot of blank areas that don’t fit. There are areas that don’t make sense with the music.” (pag. 106)
Journalists, coaches, judges . . . all the Americans agreed. Elvis Stojko was an extraordinary jumper, but he was not an artist. They can see the difference, and it is an important difference. As for Stojko,
He often would talk of where he wanted “to take the sport,” as if he were its one and only savior. Elvis fashioned himself as a skating action hero. He was certain that his efforts were taking skating in the right decision (pag. 107).
Notice any affinity with the current situation and with the emphasis on jumps that would lead men’s figure skating in the right direction? However, from the 1998 text, it seems that the journalist reports Stojko’s statements without sharing them. How is it that the American press now finds itself exactly on Stojko’s position? Jumps are indispensable to save skating… from what? Now it seems that it is enough to jump and not fall to render a program artistically valid. I suspect that the consistency of some people ended up in the garbage can.
Unlike Stojko, a skater who worked a lot on the choreographic aspect was Ilia Kulik. But working from a choreographic point of view is a huge risk.
His moves were wondrous and exquisite, but there were too many of them. He was throwing himself all over the ice, arms going this way, legs going that way, wearing himself out, and finally wearing down in the final minutes of his long program.
Triple jumps turned into doubles or singles. He was having trouble keeping up a pace that, for four and a half minutes, had become overwhelming. (pag. 113)
Eventually Kulik will be able to solve the energy problem, complete the Olympic program without being exhausted and win gold. This is a real problem, which the insiders were well aware of at that time and which they should also know now: those who work a lot from a choreographic point of view get tired more, take more risks and maybe lose something from a technical point of view. But the program is more beautiful and should be paid better in components. Whoever makes a lot of quadruples has rightly a high base value. However, if the quadruples are inserted in an empty program, the components must be low. Is it possible to make a program with numerous quadruples, all perfectly executed, and rich from an artistic point of view? Yes, but it is something very rare. I only remember two cases with four quadruples, none with a higher number of quadruple.
And when a program contains numerous quadruples, some wrong, but is also full of transitions, the skater must receive a score that recognizes the mistakes as the positives aspects. The popped jumps lower the BV, the falls or poor landings lower the GOE, but if the program is rich between one element and another, if the skater proposes, beyond the mistakes, a unique flow in which he tells a story, his PCS must be high.
Let’s return to Stojko, that sometimes wonders if his competitors
Are they faking […] for the sake of the judges?
“Is the arm movement that’s stuck out there just stuck out for the sake of choreography? Or just thrown in there because it’s supposed to be busy?” (pag. 114)
Sometimes I too have the impression that a skater is making a gesture only to make a bit of show, but that in reality he is not doing anything.
Despite his doubts about the validity of what his opponents did, Stojko did not even dream of pretending to include some choreographic passage in his programs. As in the past,
much of his time between his massive triples was spent setting them up. (pag. 115)
Now we must use the word quadruples instead of triples. Remember anyone? In 1997 Stojko’s strategy (and programs execution) was the winning one. At the previous Champion Series final (now called Grand Prix Final)
Eldredge clearly was the master in artistic ability. But the judges were thunderstruck by the quad-triple. […] The judges were caught up in the moment, and only one–the U.S. judge, John LeFevre–gave Eldredge a higher artistic score than Stojko. The other six […] either tied the two skaters on the artistic mark or went with Stojko. Quad fever was catching. Artistry was dead. (pag. 117)
This also happened at the 2019 World Championship. Who were the contenders for the title? Before the competition, Shoma Uno, who at the Four Continents Championship had just set the world record in free skate beating the score set by Yuzuru Hanyu at the GP of Helsinki, had some hope. At the World Championship, instead, Uno got out of the game with too many jumps underrotated. By the way, I would look at Uno’s jumps well, very often they are underrotated but the call does not arrive. ISU, maybe it’s time to introduce better technologies.
And then there were Hanyu and Chen. Hanyu was the Olympic champion, but he was coming from a long pause due to injury, there were many doubts about his condition (and, as we learned later, he was still injured). Chen… Chen showed up with an impressive palmares, because he had won the last two Grand Prix finals and the last World Championship. True, in none of the competitions there was Hanyu because he was injured, but for judges, press and fans is really necessary to remember that the victories were obtained thanks to the absence of the opponents? There was not even Javier Fernandez, Olympic bronze medallist. And at the 2018 World Championship Uno, Olympic silver medallist, competed injured. Chen was helped by circumstances to win. Maybe he would have won anyway, but fate has given him a lot of presents, and in the minds of the judges at that moment he had become a great champion. Chen also showed up with the strength of a very high score obtained at the National Championship. Doesn’t the national championship count? Maybe it’s time for you to go and study some psychology, to see how our brains work.
I remind you that when our brains are busy with difficult tasks, it look for shortcuts. Try to enter in the mind of a judge. Did the skater present a program full of difficult steps? And did he do them well? And what do I know, it’s a 4-minute program, how can I remember every detail? Also because I have to assign the bullets for 12 technical elements, I can’t see or remember everything. Did the skater do difficult technical elements? Well yeah, he did a lot of quads, there were flip and lutz too, so he can do difficult things. Did he remain standing? Yes. So he knows how to skate, and if he knows how to skate I give him high marks in components…
I’m not kidding, that’s how our mind works. I have talked about it on a few occasions by commenting on Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and you can read my comments (mostly in Italian) on the blog, but my advice is to buy and read Kahneman’s book, because it makes you understand many things. An honest judge, and there are, would be delighted to have a reminder with a list of difficult steps the skaters did, or some outline related to the programs, to help him assign more correct scores. Easily made diagrams or tables like the ones I wrote about here, or like the charts made by Roseline Winter and Elisa in this thread:
Try looking at what cognitive bias is. Look in particular at the Anchoring. Kahneman made several examples to explain the anchoring. One example was about the height of a sequoia (pag. 165 of the Italian translation as Pensieri lenti e veloci). First he asked to several people if, according to them, the highest sequoia was higher or lower of 365 meters. After he asked to them which was, according to them the height of the highest sequoia in the world. He repeated the same two questions with other people, only this time the number that he said to them wasn’t 365 meters but 54 meters.
For the average of the first group of people the highest sequoia was high 257 meters, for the average of the second the high was 86 meters. The difference is of 171 meters.
I already wrote about the anchoring effect (in English) here. In my old post I looked at the 2016-2017 season and at the GPF 2019. Now I look at the 2019 World Championship.
Let’s go back to what I wrote earlier. Who were the favorites? Uno, who eliminated himself and who in any case, even before the competition, even though he was among the potential winners, was considered less strong than his opponents, Hanyu and Chen. In the short program Hanyu missed the salchow, he only did a double, the element dropped out of the score, and he found himself in third position, behind Chen and Jason Brown, who did not do any mistake.
As much as I like him, Brown is behind. We all know it, he too know it. With this scoring system, in current figure skating a skater who does not have quadruples cannot win against skaters who are able to land several quadruples. Hanyu completed an excellent program. Not perfect, this time he landed the salchow but did not complete the rotation, and since he was unable to train sufficiently due to injury, he slightly simplified some details and did not arrive at the total flow of his best performances. But he was not perfect only when we compare him to what he himself had already been able to do, because none of the others had ever done anything that came close to him. And then skated Chen. Chen was one of the two favorites before the competition, and started his free skate with an advantage over Hanyu that exceeded 12 points. He landed all his jumps. And, as for Stojko so many years ago, the judges were thunderstruck by the quad […] and were caught up in the moment. […] Quad fever was catching. Artistry was dead.
How has quad fever translated into the new scoring system? By assigning very high marks in the GOE and PCS, helped in this also by the anchoring of the National Championship. During the season Chen had already participated in Skate America, Internationaux de France, Grand Prix Final and National Championship. I only looked at the free programs, and only the elements that Chen performed well. I considered it a well-executed element if at least five judges (all the judges panels in those competitions were made up of nine judges, so I’m talking over half of the marks) awarded to him a +2 or a higher mark. This means that at Skate America I did not consider three jumping elements (4Lz, 3F+3T, 4T+3T), as well as at the Internationaux de France (3F+3T, 3A, 4T+3T<) and Grand Prix Final (4Lz<, 4T, 3F+1Eu+3S). There are 27 elements in all. At the National Championships Chen did everything well, there are 12 elements. At the World Championships Chen performed the combination 3F+1Eu+3S not too beautifully. There are 11 elements. Knowing that at the National Championships Chen received high marks, do you think he received a higher number of +5 in the 27 elements well performed before the National Championship, or in the 11 elements he performed after? And was the number of his +4 be increased?
If I have no problem recognizing that a skater can make mistakes in one competition and not make mistakes in another, I have problems with quality. Did the best Chen really perform good but not extraordinary elements before the National championship (I excluded the worst elements), and then he added so much quality to his elements? And in the PCS, growth is even less justifiable. Before, his marks higher than 9.00 were very few, after, he hardly got any mark lower than 9.25. The anchoring effect and the quad fever gave Chen scores he didn’t deserve, and with those scores they gave him also the World Championship (making gifts easier in subsequent competitions).
“It was so obvious to me,” said LeFevre, a veteran skating judge […] “The second marc [artistic] clearly was the differentiation between the two skaters. The obvious question is, Does everyone who does a quad automatically win? Sure it’s an accomplishment, but it’s not the only accomplishment.” (pag. 117)
As for Brennan, she wrote that
One grand moment–Stojko’s quad–triple–outranked a complete skating package–Eldredge’s long program. […]
“instead of coming up with a performance, coming up with an entire thing that really packages yourself in a unique way, that is really innovative, you . . . have a checklist of things you have to put in your program,” Scott Hamilton said, referring not to Stojko specifically, but a skating trend he found disturbing. “The programs just become connect-the-dots, and dots are jumps.”
“I hope the quad isn’t needed,” Brian Boitano told USA Today. “Skating needs to be more completa. By doing quads, you don’t have time to do an interesting program.”
“There’s an incredible sensitivity to the jump in skating these days,” Paul Wylie said. “You’re not seeing artistic programs. You’re seeing the results of the way the rules are written. A four-and-a-half-minute program with eight triples gives you very little time to do anything else. This breeds a certain type of skater.”
It was clear that the balance in men’s skating had swung to jumps at the expense of artistry. Quad-mania had taken hold and was not letting go. Perhaps it was time for a new description of the sport. This wasn’t exactly figure skating. It was more like skating jumping. (pagg. 117-118)
Hanyu has shown that it is possible to have a program that includes numerous quadruples without losing the artistic aspect, but Hanyu is a special case. The others either does not do quadruple (or do few, see Jason Brown and Deniss Vasiljevs) or sacrifice the rest to the jump, connect-the-dots, as Hamilton said, even if the score does not testify to this difference.
At 0:49 Chen Landed the 4Lz. After he did some simple step, a short inside spread eagle, a three and, at 0.55 he start to connect the dots toward the 4F. There are a couple of mohawk, a couple of change of direction on two feet, and crossover, crossunder, simple glides on two feet…
I stopped just as Chen is doing the three before the flip. If in the video you look carefully at the writing on the balustrade, you can see that Chen starts his run towards the end of the long side of the rink (at 1/3?), goes all the way down the short side, the diagonal, and does the take off when he is about halfway down the short side of the rink. They are between 110 and 120 meters. In terms of time, we are talking about 15 seconds. In which there are no skating skills, transitions, performance (it is not a speed competition, so the run-up is not valid for performance), coreography and interpretation. And that’s just one of the jumps. One of the most difficult, true, but it is not that things have gone so differently with the 4Lz. Chen deserves high BV because he does difficult jumps, he doesn’t deserve high PCS because what he does is connecting the dots, but the judges didn’t notice. And not just them. How is it that Brennan criticizes Stojko, and with her a lot of people, journalists, coaches, former athletes, judges, criticizes him, and now no similar comment reaches me from the United States? Chen (but not only him) does more jumps than Stojko, I don’t think that he skates better. And no, I don’t take the fact that Chen has been practicing dance for years as an answer. Taking lessons doesn’t necessarily mean learning to do something. I too have been taking tennis lessons for years. How come I’ve never won Wimbledon? The only criticisms I accept are those that show with facts me that I am wrong.
And if anyone does not believe that that day Chen received too high marks, this is the landing of the quadruple flip.
These are the bullets:
Bullet 1 isn’t usually there, Chen’s jumps are small, but let’s pretend it’s there. The 2 is not there, with this landing there is no way that I can assign it. Same goes for the 3. The 4 not even, we have just seen that he took a run-up of 15 seconds. 5 is another clearly absent due to the landing. Let’s say bullet 6 is present. Two bullets, +2. Let’s move on to deductions.
If I were really strict I could assign the weak landing, but I don’t feel strict. However, 15 seconds of preparation is too much. For long preparation I could assign a deduction ranging from -2 to -3. Since I’m in the mood to be generous to Chen, I give him a -2. From +2 of the positive bullets, we go down to 0. What marks did that jump receive?
No one of the nine judges awarded Chen the correct mark. On just one element Chen received as a gift (at least, because if we remove bullet 1 we go down to a GOE of -1) 2.04 points, because Quad fever was catching and the judges were caught up in the moment. And considering everything I’ve written, I highly doubt that Chen’s other marks are correct.
One of the judges that awarded a +3 to Chen, judge 6, Antica Grubisic, had just awarded a +2 to Hanyu’s 3A+1Eu+3S. Hanyu’s jumps are big (bullet 1) and this jump is not an exception, take off and landing were good (bullet 2), before the axel there was a back counter (bullet 3), the body position was good (bullet 5) and the jump was on the music (bullet 6). Five bullets, no bullet 3, so the GOE is +3. And why I, that with him decided to be strict (but a judge mist be strict or generous equally with all the skater), didn’t award to Hanyu bullet 3? Remember that Hanyu is one of the few skaters that does an euler that is a real euler and don’t seem a step out, and the rhythm in this combination is excellent. I didn’t award to Hanyu bullet 3 for this landing:
Hanyu’s landing position is much better than Chen’s, nothing strange can be seen from the screenshots. Only from the video you can see that the landing is slightly hasty. I repeat, slightly hasty landing, Hanyu puts his free foot on the ice very quickly. The movement is so minimal that no deductions are applicable. If bullet 3 is assigned, the combination deserves a +5, because all positive bullets are there, otherwise the combination deserves a +3. Yet one judge awarded Hanyu’s combination a lower mark than Chen’s combination, three (Judge 1 Anna Sierocka and Judge 9 Albert Zaydman, +2, and Judge 5 Philippe Meriguet, +1) gave the same mark. I suppose for a bad trend I’ve noticed in judges lately: high GOEs are rarely awarded for jumps that judges perceive as easy. It’s quad fever time.
How is it possible that such gracious mistakes are made and (almost) no one says anything? I close this post on Brennan’s book with a reflection that specifically refers to women’s competition, but which is applicable even now, in a very different context.
The only way to stop the little girls [from presenting programs full of very difficult technical elements but poor from an artistic point of view] would be for the judges to dole out horrid artistic marks. Figure skating judges were the gatekeepers of the sport; there were expectations that they would become the ones to draw the line, that they would tell the little girls to wait a while by giving, say, a 5.8 for their athleticism, then, say, a 5.3 for their presentation and sending them back to their home rinks to work on their artistry (pag. 133).
Now there is a different rule, in theory the judges should be a little more constrained in assigning their marks, but it is obvious that a low score in the PCS can push the skater to think about what he can improve to get better scores. Assigning marks in components above 9.00 to Chen, just because he land so many quadruples, certainly doesn’t push him to add transitions in the program, because adding transitions increases the risk of making mistakes. Think to Kulik in the ’90s, that was having trouble keeping up a pace that, for four and a half minutes, had become overwhelming. Now it’s even more difficult,because there isn’t only one quad, and it’s even more important to recognize if a skater does difficult transitions or not.
But the judges were shocking everyone; most of them were not sending that kind of message [work on their artistry]. They were acting just like the johnny-come-lately sportswriters ho had no idea what they were watching, but knew a fall when they saw one. Sportswriters and judges were doing the same thing; they had resorted to simply counting jumps. That made skating a bit more understandable to the average fan. And it made crowd-pleasing upsets more likely. But as long as the sport had two distinct marks, it didn’t necessarily make it right.
[…] At precompetition meetings, the referee would spell out to the judges the importance of artistry, then watch time and again as judges rewarded athleticism with a high first mark and did not sufficiently lower their second mark for a skater’s inherent lack of artistry.
Could it be that the judges were aware that they were being watched on network television and in magazines and newspapers as never before? And that they found themselves avoiding controversy by emphasizing the easily quantifiable elements–the jumps, the falls, the stumbles–while ignoring the fuzzier artistic and presentation elements they were supposed to be including in their overall evaluation of a skater, male or female?
Were they taking the easy way out, saying, quite simply: You jump the best, you win?
Some judges admitted that the answer was yes. Part of an international judge’s motivation was self-preservation; any judge too far out of line with the other eight on the judging panel has a lot of explaining to do. […] So, to avoid trouble, a judge–who has all of five to ten seconds to punch in a skater’s marks–can make decisions based on jumps. Then if he or she gets called in for questioning, the defense is easy: Just count the jumps. (pag. 133)
I would say that these words speak for themselves…
