The skaters are all friends, they all love each other, and the only ones who contest the scores are those who don’t know how to lose. Fans, and sometimes even skaters who get swayed by those bad fanatics and start seeing conspiracies all over the place. Those who love figure skating should love all skaters unconditionally, and accept the scores without contesting them because the experts are the judges, not the fans.

Honestly, I’m tired of these claims. Tired of skaters who have benefited for years an imprecise system at best, rotten at worst, and according to whom everything is fine because they were the ones who won thanks to their skill, because they worked so hard. And I’m even more tired of their fans, who start to be cops sanctioning other fans, after being harmed for years, they should even shut up.

This is just one of the silly comments I’ve read:

I am sure that Uno will never complain about his scores, at least not those he has received so far, as I cannot know what will happen in the future. And this is not a consideration of his temper or his morals, which I am not speculating about. I am sure that Uno will never complain because it is not convenient for him to do so. It doesn’t suit him that anyone will look closely at the high GOEs that have been awarded to anything but perfect elements. It doesn’t suit him that anyone checks whether his jumps have been completely rotated in the air or not. It doesn’t suit him that someone checks the prerotation of several of his jumps, or how he did the toe pick at the take off. And it is not convenient for Uno if someone check if, with programs skating mainly on two feet, he deserves the marks he has received so far in the PCS (now the rules have been changed, skating on one foot is no longer required, but until June 2022 it was a specific request for high marks in TR and SS).

This is a competition that didn’t interest me, and a program that I’ve never watched, the Team Event at the PyeongChang Olympic Games. I chose it deliberately because Hanyu did not take part in it (and even if he did he would have been a teammate of Uno, with one of the two skating the short program and the other the free skate) and therefore no one can say that I am only complaining because, for me, Hanyu would have been wrongfully harmed. To tell the truth, I haven’t looked at the program in full even now, just one jump, because I wanted to check Uno’s technique. The video is this:

I concentrated only on the quadruple flip with which Uno opened the program. First, from the live broadcast, I look at the preparation. Uno has already begun his run-up before my screenshots began. Between 0:46 and 0:47 Uno brings the right foot behind the left, in a step that I struggle to define. He doesn’t lift his left foot off the ice, he only places his right behind the other foot for a moment, so it’s certainly not a turn, and I struggle to call it a step, because he never shifts his weight. I have many doubts, but let’s say that this satisfies the requirement of the rules that existed at the time, that the jump not in combination needs to be preceded by a step. It is a simple step, not worthy of bullet by difficult step, but let’s say that there it is and Uno does not deserve the deduction. At 0:47 the traditional flip entry begins, with a mohawk and a three. At this point, for screenshots, I move on to replays.

Uno comes with a really slightly outside edge, but gradually moves to the inside edge. Nothing to say in this respect, the entry edge is correct. My doubts are two, and they are the chronic ones of the quadruple flip of Uno: full blade, clearly visible, and prerotation. I would award Uno the deduction every time he takes off this way, but for the judges that is obviously correct. I hope that Uno’s knee has no problems with the continuous twisting he puts it through, and the same for all the kids who will learn an incorrect technique knowing that they will not be sanctioned, but let’s move on. In which screenshot does the take off take place? I would say in the central one of the second row, you can clearly see that the weight is no longer resting on the right blade, which only touches the ice with its tail. Tail is the correct term to use in English, right? Sometimes I have doubts about how to translate the names used in Italian into English. Let’s look closely in which direction Uno is going.

I took numerous close-up in time screenshots of the moment of landing, the last two are more distant because at this point I no longer cared about the direction taken by Uno but only to see which parts of the body landed on the ice. In the first screenshot Uno is still in the air, we see it clearly from the angle of the blades. In the second the blades are horizontal, I would say that it has already landed. And also to be generous, in the third he landed for sure. What do we see? Which landed on two feet. And … in which direction is Uno going?

I have placed the two screenshots side by side to see it better.

Perhaps this jump deserves to be downgraded, but I go in favor of the skater and I just call the underrotated. As for the rest, let’s do the math. The rules of the time were these:

Which bullets can we apply? The first three certainly not, unless you want to define that landing varied position in the air. Is the 4 there? With the prerotation I doubt it, but let’s pretend it’s there. The 5, 6 and 7 are not there, always if we do not say a step out is a creative exit. There is probably 8. Two bullets, we start from +1, the maximum from which we can start for this jump. Now let’s move on to the deductions.

Landing on two feet is -3, we are at -2. Stepping out, I could assign a -2 or a -3, as I am generous I give a -2 and go down to -4. There would be the underrotated, which goes from -1 to -2, but the technical panel has not called it, so I leave it alone. I repeat, on this jump, which could have deserved a downgraded call, the technical panel composed of the Italian Raffaella Locatelli, the Latvian Konstantin Kostin and the Mexican Ricardo Olavarrieta did not even assign the underrotated. And then there is the touch down with one hand, which is worth -1, we go down to -5. Since the -5 did not exist at the time, this jump should necessarily have received a -3. What marks did the judges assign? This is the protocol:

Six judges, the American Lorrie Parker, the Hungarian Zsuzsanna Vikarne-Homolya, the Latvian Agita Abele, the Chinese Feng Huang, the Austrian Thomas Biegler and the Finnish Pekka Leskinen awarded a -2. How did they do it? I can’t understand it.

For this jump Uno received a BV of 12.30 points and a GOE of -2.86 points, for a final score of 9.44 points. If both the technical panel and the judges had evaluated the jump correctly, the BV would have dropped to 8.60 points, the GOE to -4.00, the final score to 4.60 points. Uno received 4.84 points for free which he did not deserve. Even without those points he would still have skated the best short program, nothing would have changed in the final rank, but Uno has been receiving kind gifts from the judges and the technical panel for years. Why should he complain?

This is not the first, or second, or third, competition, in which I have seen that Uno has been treated very generously by the technical panel, the judges or both. Taking him as an example of someone who doesn’t complain about scores is one of the most ridiculous things I can imagine, and to say that skaters shouldn’t complain is to be complicit in the abuse that some of them have suffered and, in some cases, which they will continue to suffer.