Yuri
Well-Known Member
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- 815
You are correct that ordinals are irrelevant in this case, but factored placements are in effect if you assume each sub-event is worth an equal 1.0 weight. Earlier in the thread some objected to simply summing up the raw scores because the Men's results would be given extra weight--this could be addressed by a weighting such as Men=1.0, Pairs=1.4, Dance=1.2, and Women=1.4 (just picking a weighting summing to 5.0 so that 50 would be the maximum score) such that the average factored scores would be similar for each segment.
I will probably regret revisiting the results, but let's say as a hypothetical that the ISU had disqualified EVERY ROC competitor (as many have suggested) and moved up everyone who finished below an ROC competitor in their segment. After the short programs and rhythm dance, there would be a flip-flop:
ORIGINAL RESULTS / DISQUALIFY ROC
Team M-P-D-W TOT / M-P-D-W TOT [+/-]
ROC 8-9-9-10 36 / 0-0-0-0 0 [-36]
USA 10-8-10-6 34 / 10-9-10-7 36 [+2]
JPN 9-7-4-9 29 / 9-8-5-10 32 [+3]
CAN 3-6-7-8 24 / 4-7-8-9 28 [+4]
CHN 5-10-6-1 22 / 6-10-7-2 25 [+3]
GEO 7-5-3-7 22 / 8-6-4-8 26 [+4]
ITA 6-4-8-2 20 / 7-5-9-3 24 [+4]
CZE 4-3-5-3 15 / 5-4-6-4 19 [+4]
GER 2-0-1-5 8 / 3-0-2-6 11 [+3]
UKR 0-2-2-4 8 / 0-3-3-5 11 [+3]
If the ISU had disqualified every ROC competitor, ROC drops to last place and USA moves to 1st, JPN to 2nd, and CAN to 3rd position entering the free skate/dance portion of the Team Event where only the top five teams advance. While the point spreads may be altered by a point, there is no RELATIVE change among USA-JPN-CAN. HOWEVER, now there's a problem determining who SHOULD have moved on to the finals regarding CHN and GEO. Under the original scoring, CHN won a tiebreaker with GEO to place 5th so the host nation advanced to the finals. But if ROC had been DQ'd in its entirety, GEO jumps all the way from 6th to 4th place while CHN remains in 5th--simply from removing the ROC results. Is that a fair outcome? Arguably, GEO should be advanced (or perhaps both CHN and GEO) by the retroactive application two years later of "moving everyone up".
Of course, the chances for further flip-flops increases if you have EIGHT sub-events (with the free skates) rather than limiting the analysis to the initial FOUR sub-events. As an aside, using a 10-9-8-7-6 scale for the free skate/dance segments was also a rather dumb idea (perhaps the Free Skate/Dance should have been weighted double like in the old days?). The placements in the finals also would also have been altered if you eliminate all the ROC skaters. Especially if the GEO skaters had been permitted to compete in the finals instead of or in addition to the CHN skaters. Maybe no one else on FSU cares about some potential flip-flops among the 4th-5th-6th place teams based upon the ISU's decision, but it wouldn't be too hard to construct scenarios where the medal positions would be impacted by throwing out all the ROC results.
For those who may remember this notorious results (that also benefited Russia!), I believe that the death knell to the ordinals PLUS factored placements was what happened at the 1997 European Championships when Alexei Urmanov of RUS drew an inside straight to pull up from 6th to 1st after the Short Program:
1 | Alexei Urmanov |
| 4.0 | 6 | 1 |
2 | Philippe Candeloro | 
| 4.0 | 4 | 2 |
3 | Viacheslav Zagorodniuk | 
| 4.0 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | Ilia Kulik |
| 5.5 | 1 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Alexei Yagudin |
| 6.5 | 5 | 4 |
| 6 | Andrejs Vlascenko | 
| 7.5 | 3 | 6 |
The RELATIVE results of many skaters flip-flopped during the Men's Free Skating, and Speedy led the charge for the ISU to dump both systems. Yet somehow, the great minds at the ISU thought that bringing back a version of the Factored Placements to the Olympics for the Team Event was a good idea! Some conspiracy theorists believed the judges "gamed" the ordinals, and thereby the factored placements, to manipulate 1994 Olympic Gold Medalist Urmanov to a European Gold Medal. If the 2022 Team Event had been closer between ROC and the rest of the field, there was the potential for the manipulation of placements as well. That's why I believe that simply adding up the raw scores, or factoring/weighting them as I suggested above, would be an improvement.
