Recent content by Rhino

I'd quite like to see something like an 'X games of Figure Skating'. Skater has 2/2.5 minutes to do as many jumps as they can, subject to some sort of repetition rules, but to give it a bit of a framework they also have to do a couple of crowd-pleasing spins e.g. vertical scratch spins, plus a...

Thanks again for the article. Yes, this is why Sweden's approach is so risky and controversial, but that appears to be their decision for better or worse. Incidentally have also found out why the France 24 article link above isn't working - if it's got C*********s in the name, FSU is converting...

Thanks for the link. The one thing in the Guardian article that caught my eye was where it said a quarter of people in Stockholm have already had the v***s, plus half of all Swedes were infected to some degree, implying that the virus was well advanced as it were in working its way through the...

One thing to bear in mind in all this is that next year's World Champs are in Sweden and, famously, Sweden has hardly had any sort of lockdown https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/15/europe-emerges-lockdown-question-hangs-was-sweden-right...

Thanks for your reply and others pointing out that youngsters under the age of 7 can often get at Youtube and other social media under parental supervision. Thinking back this is what happened with my niece, though at age 12 she's only just got her first smartphone, and yes I can't imagine young...

As one of the 3 people who think network TV is still the way to go - not true, it's what happens to skating where the TV coverage is now much smaller, or maybe now non existent except for the Olympics every 4 years, it's the future competitors I'm most concerned about it. It may well be the...

2018- Wakaba Higuchi. Silver at the World Championships just a few weeks later, and would have brought the house down if she'd performed her 'Bond' program the same way she did at the World Champs or Cup of China the previous autumn.

I believe 93% of all Tweets at the Olympics were about figure skating - 13 times as many as all other sports put together - have certainly read it somewhere (source article). This I very much agree with, it must be a godsend if you're from a smaller skating country, and certainly the ISU's...

This may well be true, or at least for niche sports, but where do you get the future fans or skaters from? For example I'm in the UK, and while events were being streamed on the Skating ISU channel, I would estimate there was a maximum of 5,000 people, and probably very considerably less than...

If you used these minimums you would have ended up with 48 male skaters at this years World Championships (40 countries, plus 8 additional entries), and 53 female (45 countries, plus 8 additional - Kazakhstan would have only had 1 additional, plus Elisabet Tursynbaeva wouldn't be there either)...

I would have thought a 2nd camera angle would work wonders. It's like NFL reviews, one camera angle might be unclear, but another could give a definitive view. Plus in skating you wouldn't have the great pile up of bodies you have in the NFL. Get one technical specialist to look at one angle...

I think they just misjudged Eurosport completely, and also didn't realise what impact its takeover by Discovery might be having. Anyone who watches Eurosport knows it's a cheap as chips operation, basically its sports are cheap to buy, go on for a long time and hopefully attract some sort of...

This may not be a bad thing. Perhaps TPTB having to peer at Youtube will concentrate a few minds.

It would take a certain amount of nerve though, especially as they would know their scores are under much greater scrutiny. Not saying it wouldn't happen, but at least it should be minimised, and of course anything that helps must be good.

Alternatively discard the scores from the judge whose skater is skating and take the middle 6 out of 8 scores (in a 9 judge panel), or have a substitute judge system whose scores only come into play when a skater whose judge is on the panel is skating. This would also have the effect of...