Can an Ice Skater Try a Failed Element Again in Their Program

There are 15 sports and 109 events at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but the crown precious stone of these games is the cute, rigid, surprisingly complicated bloodsport known every bit figure skating.

It all seems elementary enough. The parameters of the sport are finite: Skaters are limited to about seven combined minutes of skating between the brusque and long programs and but 6 immune jumps. They're bound by the laws of gravity. The cardinal rules remain "more than rotations are amend than fewer rotations" and "don't fall." Still, the way skating is scored tin can be hard to decipher.

Figure skating is all nigh the minute details. Information technology's a competition that comes down to microseconds, a one-half-degree of an angle, and decimal points. Every four years, skaters pour in a lifetime of effort — thousands of jumps and spins and falls; hours and hours of flexibility exercises; nagging injuries; an inordinate amount of time spent in the cold — into less than 10 minutes of skating.

And while information technology requires superhuman forcefulness and balance, the sport has traditionally had an artistic side, likewise. The way a skater moves through the ice and the shapes they create are supposed to be beautiful. There is an unquantifiable attribute that some skaters have that makes you never want to finish watching.

The scoring organisation — which favors athleticism, especially jumps — is controversial, and information technology speaks to a debate almost what figure skating is supposed to be. I spoke with former skaters, experts, and fifty-fifty physicists to explain how scoring and jumping works in figure skating, in the plainest English possible.

How figure skating scoring works‚ and why jumps dominate

Over the by three Winter Olympics, experts, skaters, and fans have debated whether the effigy skating outcome has become more about sheer athleticism and much less about artistry and presentation. Is effigy skating a jumping contest, or is it a performing art? Tin can you have both athleticism and artistry? And what happens when the sport starts favoring one aspect over the other?

The controversy all stems from the current scoring system.

Two decades ago, figure skating was rocked by the contest-fixing scandal that afflicted the Olympic pairs and water ice-dancing consequence. Investigations plant that there was vote swapping with judges abusing the subjective scoring method (the old system was based on 2 ranges of scores — artistic and technical merit — that elevation out at 6.0). In an try to make a system that was less prone to abuse, a new method that focused on quantifiable numbers took shape.

Kamila Valieva, the favorite for the women's golden medal, performs her jumps with her artillery over her head. This is worth extra points considering information technology'south more hard to land.

Oleg Nikishin — International Skating Marriage/International Skating Union via Getty Images

Fully implemented in 2006, the current system assigns numeric point values to jumps, spins, and other technical elements in a skater's plan, in an attempt to standardize the potential scores for those elements. The idea is that if you lot break downward an entire routine'south features and elements to numbers, at that place'southward less room for subjectivity. Each of those elements has a base of operations value, and judges score how well a skater performed the play a trick on on a -5 to +5 scale which is called the Grade of Execution (GOE). An element hit perfectly would nab an athlete that element'south base value and a +5 GOE, increasing their total. An element not quite done correctly would nab a lower GOE and deduct their base value.

For skaters, the new scoring system makes it easier to show improvement or regression from contest to contest (i.due east., the aforementioned plan is going to score better the better you are at skating information technology). Information technology also puts the unabridged field into perspective. Everyone knows what scores they have to beat to become on the podium.

To achieve the best possible scores, skaters accept to striking their jumps.

Of all the tricks in a routine, the half-dozen recognized jumps — the toe loop, the loop, the salchow, the flip, the lutz, and the axel — are elements worth the most points. At this point, quads, which are versions of these jumps in which the athlete performs 4 to four.5 revolutions, are the human limit. Skaters are immune three jumping attempts (or passes) in their curt programme, which encourages skaters to maximize the difficulty of jumps.

In their free skates or long programs, skaters get seven passes and they aren't immune to repeat a bound unless information technology's in combination (i.e., skaters tin't cram a program with one or two jumps that they're really skilful at). In free skates, skaters are as well allowed three combination passes — jumps done i after the other — which yield the most points. And finally, skaters are allowed iii jumping passes in the 2d one-half of their routine, which yield a 10 per centum bonus, ostensibly a advantage for being able to country difficult jumps when fatigue kicks in.

Because of the way quads and quad combos are scored, it can lead to a slightly disruptive state of affairs. Theoretically, and it's happened in the past, a skater with a sloppier, high-run a risk routine can score college than a skater with a make clean routine with less difficulty. The current system rewards risk.

To see these points in activeness, hither'south Nathan Chen's free skate scoresheet from the 2021 World Championships. Y'all'll notice that he scored roughly 125 points from his "executed" elements — a large number of those coming from his combination passes, quadruple jumps performed with positive GOEs:

Nathan Chen'due south scores from the 2021 Globe Championships!

ISU

At the lesser half of this scoresheet is the Plan Components score, or what'southward considered the artistic aspect of the routine. The categories are skating skills, transitions, performance, composition, and interpretation of the music. Each category is judged on a scale of i to 10. Those are then averaged out, and the total is multiplied by ii in the free skate. The PC'southward max out at 100 points in the gratis skate and fifty in the curt program. As you tin see from Chen's score, the elements outweigh his very high artistic marks.

Under this scoring rubric, if the skater had to cull what to focus on, jumps and spins would be the no-brainer pick. They're worth more than. But as skaters tendency toward jumps, some may neglect the artistic side to their skating.

"In terms of artistic growth, some of the programs that we're seeing now are only stroking patterns into jumps, and there's actually no performance attribute anymore in that," Polina Edmunds, a old Olympian and US National argent medalist, told me. Edmunds retired from skating in 2020 and hosts a skating analysis podcast.

"That'southward not true for all skaters. There's some that are doing a good chore of combining both artistry and jumps. Just in general, I would definitely say, the artistic side of women's skating has decreased a lot because of the numbers game that nosotros're trying to play," she said, explaining that while scoring has pushed the athletic prowess of the sport to new heights, information technology has also deemphasized some of its artistic dazzler.

When she sprang into national prominence at 15 in the Sochi Olympics, Edmunds was primarily known for her jumping ability. She said that judges and coaches told her that artistry would come as she got older and "grew" into her skating, and the scores would reflect that. But Edmunds said because of a combination of high turnover in skating, especially women's, and judging condign more lax when it comes to artistic merit, that mentality has ceased. There's as well some overlap between the artistic score and the jumping score.

Skaters are being awarded artistic points for their jumping abilities, she explains, which means that performing quads automatically puts a skater's program components score at a higher number.

"In my stance, only considering y'all can practise jumps doesn't mean you tin do actually intricate footwork in your program," Edmunds said. "And then I think that'due south kind of the flaw in the judging system right now that needs to be corrected, where in order to residue it out, they demand to exist judged appropriately for their actual artistic ability."

There'southward a lot going into those jumps, from a physics perspective. Michalis Bachtis, a physics professor at UCLA, explained what factors into a figure skater'southward jump, saying to retrieve of the leap itself equally the way mass is spread multiplied by how fast someone is revolving. Skaters want to eliminate the spread of that mass and get as tight and narrow every bit possible — remember of how fast a pencil spins when you rub it in betwixt your palms. That's why they pull their artillery tight in the air, and open their arms as they gear up to land, to reduce the stress on their feet and ankles. All of this happens in a carve up second.

What amazes Bachtis is that skaters actually land these jumps — that they manage to fight torque, the spinning, twisting force that occurs when their bract hits the ice again.

Brad Orr, a professor of physics and the associate vice president for research, science, and engineering at the Academy of Michigan, explained that information technology is a quirk of skaters' physiques that they're able to land. "I mean, I think all these people are genetic freaks," he said, clarifying that he ways that as a compliment. He speculates that core and leg strength — as well as bearing a little shorter than the boilerplate Olympian — is a large part of this seemingly superhuman ability.

Alexandra Trusova is one of the contenders for the gilded medal. She performs a gratis skate that's on par with male skaters, but isn't considered the most creative skater.

Linnea Rheborg/Getty Images

The athletic push over the past eight years has made it and so that in order to medal on the men'due south side, you need to exist able to hit quad jumps since so many of the best men'south skaters — Nathan Chen, Yuzuru Hanyu, Yuma Kagiyama — in the globe have them. The women'south side this year is dominated by quad-landing Russians.

"I would say Chen probably will get for v quads at the Olympics, nigh likely," said Dave Lease, who runs The Skating Lesson, a YouTube aqueduct devoted to everything skating.

"For the women, you lot may need a quad [in the free skate] to win gilt. ... But women aren't allowed to practise quads in the short plan — it's an old rule and a constant source of debate. Where the women tin get alee is if they can do a triple axel in the brusk plan," he said, naming the jump worth the nearly points. He highlighted Russians Kamila Valieva, Alexandra Trusova, and Anna Shcherbakova every bit this twelvemonth's frontrunners.

To put that in perspective, iv years ago at the 2018 Winter Olympics, no women landed a triple axel in the short program.

The better the skaters are at landing quads, the college the value, the college the GOE, and the more points you can become from a skill. And there's a articulate gap between skaters who accept quads in their arsenal and skaters who don't.

Jumps are truly the proper noun of the game. If there's 1 matter we can count on this Olympics, it'due south seeing tiny humans spin through the air, trying to rack up large scores.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2022/2/3/22912876/figure-skating-scoring-explained-winter-olympics-2022

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