#scoring discourse

Unfortunately I have no solution to offer for this.

As my posts very much show that I am not able to not care for it either...

I think the only way to not care is to either have absolutely no clue on scoring and believe the judges know what they are doing (which was me at the start of following skating back in 2008-2012) or to just not have emotional attachement to any skater and neither is a thing I am capable of.

I think I kind of accomplished that feeling of not caring of scoring for ice dance and rhythmic gymnastics to a certain extent that I am not bugged that much with the scores. But that is only due to the fact that politics play an even greater part there and there is absolutely nothing in the capability of a skater to change this. In singles or pairs you at least have the BVs that if a skater does a higher BV their scores cannot be kept too low even if there are countless ways to still underscore skaters with UR calls or little GOEs, PCS etc...but even the nastiest scoring will not put someone with a terrible skate into first place and therefore there is still some sort of hope that the scoring may be correct or at least understandable...but well it isn't but hope dies last I guess...

I do think though even with all the lamenting about scoring most of the time the right skaters win the medals - not always, but most of the time. Like today I can lament about Shoma's scores but still the final placement is not a discussion for me.

This is may sound a bit harsh but I think it's the only way:

I can only advise that if you personally suffer emotionally too much from the scoring issues, you probably should take a step back from watching competitions. This is not our life, this is a hobby and it should be fun to watch. And even if we do care a lot for those skaters, these skaters don't know us, they aren't our friends and they don't gain anything from our suffering. I know it's hard to step away from something you love, but your own happiness isn't worth it tbh.

For the skaters the scoring issues are a totally different matter - it can destroy careers - but it's not in our hands to change the system and the skaters know better than anyone else how politics and judging goes. I think we as fans can make our voices heard by the ISU and skaters will feel the support by an audience, so we should not stop adressing issues and supporting the skaters but in the end we are just fans and it's also understandable that our opinions don't matter this much bc look how different the opinions about scoring and skaters are from different fan groups.

I think that as much as I personally feel involved into the skaters I like we should not forget that it's our life, our personal wellbeing we need to keep care of. Pls don't forget to live your own life and if skating doesn't bring you joy anymore, take a step back.

I can only say for myself that I do enjoy to watch competitions and as much as scoring often sucks and even if my lamenting is a lot and sometimes it's bringing me personally pain, but not as much as that it influences my daily life in any negative way. I do enjoy skating a lot, unfortunately it comes with a scoring...but that's also making it excited and interesting....

My fucking villain origin story, istg.

Like holy shit, I mean... Imagine being Wakaba in this situation! Other people have said it before and I’ll say it again: Imagine narrowly missing out on the Olympics once, then spending the last few years being told you’re not good enough to keep up with the Russians, then spending all that time struggling and learning a 3A... and when you finally make it to the Olympics, land that 3A and skate the short program of your life there, you get scored almost 10 points behind a skater with the same program content, except that skater:

- has worse skating skills that you

- uses cheated jump technique

- isn’t nearly as good of a performer as you

- had two mistakes in their SP: stumbled and almost fell on the 3A landing and the combo looked really shaky, too

- and is literally proven to have doped.

Like holy shit, I’d be furious and I understand why Wakaba was furious. I know that Kamila’s always overscored to hell and back, her scores are literally in a whole new dimension of overscoring, but 82 with an almost-fall and that combo? I’m not trying to shame her for struggling under these circumstances, but there’s no way in hell that should be her score.

I personally think it's interesting to see what actual skaters had to say about Shoma's skating and scores. Because they know better than any "couch judges" or fans how hard and difficult it is what skaters do on the ice and they can appreciate with better understanding of the technical aspects of skating and with experience in their own careers how judging works and what's going on politically and personally behind the scenes. If not skaters than who knows better how crucial judging decisions are.

An incomplete list of some skaters opinions on NHK and Shoma's scoring and calls on the quads:

Ashley Wagner and Adam Rippon and guest Sarah Hughes (not the Olympic champion) in the "The Runthrough " podcast Episode 22 (summary done by @RutrumusM (twt) here )

Michail Savitsky (German junior ice dancer) at Anything GOEs Yt podcast NHK Trophy 2023 recap here

Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir on the Peacock/NBC commentary (audio snippet here)

Keiji Tanaka saying to Shoma that his 4Lo was "pristine clean" (i add the source when I find it in the realms of twt sorry)

I didn't listen to the podcasts in full yet so I won't share the full comments but the sentiment is that the scoring and some tech calls of Shoma were questionable or putting it more "neutral" can at least be seen differently.

Some additional posts related to recent discussions about jumps and scoring:

Elizaveta Tuktamysheva on Shoma's jumps in her blogpost on Russian media translated by @ RutrumusM (twt) translation here

A Japanese article didn't criticize the scoring specifically, but adressed - as far as automatic translation is any use - the strictness of the event compared to other GP events and question the equality in judgement in scoring. Source (I added this because it's rare for Jmedia to release something sort of critical on scoring.)