Comment at Winter Olympics II

[gharold]

"Today, judges not only watch each performance, but make electronic notes on computers that takes them back to each and every jump so they can study it on a screen and make sure every little bobble and mistake is duly noted, while also making sure the proper number of rotations on each jump were met for maximum credit. In our 'old days,' we had the tick system, where judges watched every performance and made little marks (ticks) on the sheets on their clipboards, allowing the tabulator to make sure every little bobble and mistake was duly noted."

Seems to me, the new and improved scoring system for figure skating sounds a lot like the old way of scoring drum corps. Figure skating judges used to just make up a number based on an impression. That's what drum corps judges do today.

[Dave_G]

Garry... drum corps does a better job with musicality than skating... you do NOT want to watch olympic skating with me as I sit there and am screaming at the TV ... like when the music changes in the mid

dle of a spin or something... obviously, musicality isn't as important to those judges - HOWEVER, in a couple of instances where it got very bad, the expert commentators did say that musically they were weak.

Any Visual interpretation of music is the ability of the mind to relate to what they are seeing vs what they are viewing... drum corps and color guard are based on this and overall do extremely well... figure skating would be much more audience friendly and see increased audience size if they did fewer tricks and paid MUCH more attention to the music.

As a former skater (gasp, I've revealed my dirty little secret ) I can safely say I disagree that the audience would increase if skaters sacrificed some of their tricks for musicality. Many people that I know that follow skating aren't all that interested in how the choreography fits the music until it gets to the point that it outright clashes with the music, such as the instances that the commentators bring up. They're all about the big jumps, fast spins, etc. and everything else be ###### as long as they execute that well.

Personally I agree with you, I haven't followed skating outside of the Olympics since the 90s because of an increasing focus on the technical over the artistic. But skating has found their audience and that is what the majority of the skaters go for anymore. Unless someone that's a legitimate world championship/Olympic gold contender on a regular basis can come around that can regularly combine the choreography to properly suit the music then we're prettymuch stuck with what we have. But if that person comes around it could absolutely revolutionize that activity for the better.

[byline]

As a former skater (gasp, I've revealed my dirty little secret ) I can safely say I disagree that the audience would increase if skaters sacrificed some of their tricks for musicality.

I agree with you. Ignore the music and pay attention only to the crowd response, and there's no question that the biggest reactions are to the jumps. The bigger the jumps that are nailed (and especially if they're in combination), the bigger the reaction. Most in the audience couldn't care less if it goes with the music or not. I've never been directly involved with skating, but have been following it since the early '70s, and frankly, that's always been the case to some degree, though I seem to remember that tight, quickly rotated spins used to get more crowd reaction than they do now.

People who follow figure skating have always followed it . . . though, as you note, individuals make different choices about that depending on what it is they prefer to see in figure skating. After Torvill & Dean made such a huge impression on me at the Sarajevo Olympics, I tried to follow ice dance but didn't really like what the teams were doing until a full eight years after "Bolero." For me, anyway, it was like it took that long for everyone else to catch up to Torvill & Dean and integrate the innovations and expression that they introduced. Since then, I've followed that particular discipline much more closely (and, of course, I followed Torvill & Dean throughout the rest of their career).

The big bubble in figure skating TV viewership occurred not because skating was so much more musical back then (and it wasn't; I can clearly recall plenty of cases of unmusical programs back then, too). It was because of the soap opera aspect of it, which reached its zenith with the whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan brouhaha. This was long before we had shows like "American Idol" which have since captured the public's imagination and effectively replaced figure skating as a source of competitive histrionics. Like it or not, that's what the general public is looking for. It's why figure skating developed such a huge audience at that point, and other sports never did . . . and probably never will. People wanted to see the drama in the "kiss and cry" area. They wanted to see the glitz and glamor, tears and jubilation, rivalries (real or perceived) and whatever else might happen.

That's part of what made ABC's "Wide World of Sports" such a hit. They were the first sports program I can recall that televised events that weren't typically televised, like figure skating, and focused on the lives of the athletes to personalize events for the viewers. For better or worse, they injected human drama into the events, and televised sports were never the same after that. Other networks picked up on that and ran with it . . . to the point, I think, where it ended up undermining a lot of disciplines like figure skating and gymnastics because too much emphasis was placed on whatever soap opera elements the networks could seize upon.

I also think that around this time, there developed a glut of figure-skating programs (fake competitions like "Ice Wars") that oversaturated the market with figure skating. So people also got tired of it, lost interest and drifted away. Now that we have shows like "American Idol" which satisfy the general public's appetite for that kind of sequin-drenched drama, the ratings for figure skating have gone down over the years. Not because of musicality or the lack thereof, the new judging system or whatever else people want to blame. Individuals may drop out, or develop an interest, because of those aspects, but I really believe the biggest shift has to do with the general public's shift toward other programs. Figure skating is still one of the marquee events at any Winter Olympics, just as it was before the Harding/Kerrigan incident. And I think it always will be. In my opinion, the musicality of the programs isn't going to be much of a factor either way.

Edited February 27, 2010 by byline