Oh, I need a stiff drink after watching those. It's a good thing I'm going to a stadium where there will be beer.
Bianchetti and Lynch on Singles/Pairs: These are guidelines. But to give +4/+5 GOE, the skater *must* meet the requirements of the first 3 bullets. But (after 45+ minutes), it's the same as you're [the judges] are doing now, except it's on a -5 to +5 scale instead of a -3 to +3 scale.
While I get the concept of having to excel at the core parts of each element before add-ons can be tallied, it is mind-boggling to find that basics, like entry and exits -- and not difficult and "unexpected" and "creative" ones -- are bullet points 4-6 for some elements (aside from the choreographic elements, where I agree that creativity and musicality should be more important). For example, in the Pairs Split Twist, the woman's height is the first bullet point (followed by catch, and then effortlessness throughout, bullet point #3 for all of the elements), where the basics, like entry and exit, are extras. So does that mean that Sui/Han can only max out at +3, because she doesn't fly higher than the camera, but can be the poster child for an attribute for which she can't get extra credit?
All of the videos meant to demonstrate the positive aspects of the bullet points, although I think there were several big fails on the Pairs front. But should I clutch my pearls with the strength of 1000 elephants that nearly every video was of a current competitor (most) or one who might return, with only a few retired skaters (Chan, Ge, Duhamel/Radford, and maybe Marchei/Hotarek) used as examples?
But props to both Hendrickx's for being included, and who was the Ladies skater who was the second footwork example? I'm drawing a blank. And whenever they talked about clarity, they could just as well have skipped the clip and just shown a headshot of Miyahara.
On the Dance front, it was Gordon-Poltarek and Selby. What this video made clear is a fundamental difference between the way Singles/Pairs and Ice Dance will be judged: Ice Dance is reverting back to gymnastics when if you had a bobble on the beam, you could do a quadruple flip and still not get a 10: unless there are *no* errors in the element, the max that can be rewarded is a +3. (The example for this was a twizzle sequence by V/M, where both Gordon-Poltarek and Selby agreed they were too far apart, hence no number of positives could salvage anything higher than +3.)
The video examples they used on the Dance video were more negative than positive: the only two +4/+5 examples they showed were two choreo spins, Gilles/Poirier's and Capellini/Lanotte's. And since it's been a while since Tango Romantica was the required pattern, they used old videos.
I know it has always been the case that Dance judges can take off GOE when the dancers' edges are wrong at the same time the tech panel will hit them for levels on key points, but the "mock judging" examples they used were really harsh. (Maybe because they were not current competitors.) I had to laugh when, while comparing a couple's first part of the pattern to a second, Gordon-Poltarek thought the second part was better, but couldn't really justify by the criteria why she would give them a higher score.
This should be an interesting year if the judges try to conform and don't just take Bianchetti at his word and just do what they're doing now, but on a different scale. Then it will continue to look like that news story after SLC where each judge justified in a sentence why they placed B&S and S&P the way they did.
Ummmm no, maybe not the absolute closest, but not what I would call far apart.
