The judges are experienced and know how to evaluate competitions. A bit of discretion is understandable, because different people have slightly different criteria of judgments. And, even if by bad luck one of them gets it wrong, the fact that the highest and lowest marks are excluded from the average means that the final score is correct.
For real?
How large can the discretion be in order for valuations to still be held to be correct? What if more than one judge was wrong? These are the ratings in the PCS in the SP of some skaters in the Internationaux de France 2022, SkatingScores version because it allows us to see some details better.
I highlighted the lowest grade in red, the highest in green. How is it possible that there are two points of difference between the highest and the lowest grade received by Sota Yamamoto in composition? Was Yamamoto’s program a good program or was it mediocre? Overall, Ukrainian judge Natalia Kruglova (one who was suspended in the past for asking other judges to help her compatriots, but this is a secondary detail) awarded Yamamoto 7.92 points more than the Canadian judge Beth Crane.
Are they borderline cases? Between the second best score, awarded by three judges, the Korean Jungsue Lee, the Kazakh Yuri Guskov and the Estonian Kari Zvidik and the second worst score there are 3.76 points, a difference that continues to be enormous. It means 1.25 points of difference on each of the components items. It is not normal, and it is not fair towards athletes, who deserve to be judged fairly. For every skater unfairly benefited by judges’ mistakes, there is at least one who is unfairly penalized (at least one, because a skater can be advantaged with the gift of … this is an example, I’m not referring to anyone specifically. A skater hypothetically can receive a free fifth place instead of a sixth place, which damages only one skater, but he can also get an advantage with the gift of a second place instead of a sixth, which damages four skaters).
The skaters who have received incompatible votes, as if the judges have seen different programs, and who have received them from more than one judge, are many, and are found in all areas of the ranking. The most severe judge with Lukas Britschgi was Kruglova. The second most severe was the French Héléne Cucuphat. Let’s ignore them both and focus on the third most severe, the Belgian Francoise De Rappard. There have been two tougher judges, so her marks are fair, right? Have her marks entered the average? Two for sure, for composition and Presentation Kruglova was the most severe, so her marks were excluded. For Skating Skills De Rappard awarded the mark grade awarded by Cucuphat, so one of the two marks entered the average, the other did not.
The Kazakh, Canadian and Czech (Marketa Horklova) judges awarded the same score, if all judges had awarded the same score we would have thought that Britschgi’s program deserved 40.08 points. No doubt, no controversy.
Now let’s move to the other side. We have two more severe judges, so De rappard’s marks must be considered correct. Her final score is 36.33 points. Considering that two judges were tougher, it is not so unlikely that other judges not in this panel might have scored the program as De Rappard did. It is a pity that between De Rappard’s 36.33 points and the 40.08 assigned by three judges there is a difference of 3.75 points, a difference higher than the 2.78 points that separated Britschgi’s seventh position from Ivan Shmuratko’s eighth. So, is the final result correct, or was Britschi luckier than Shmuratko in the judges’ draw?
