They’ve got an innovation on this year’s Nationals, which is a sound track I wish they’d put as an alternate to the commentary on every network: they handed out 4000 little radios with\u00a0a low, near monotone ‘call’ of the moves, level, and points…including ‘count’ on the sustained elements like spins and rotations—for instance, you have to sustain a spiral (lifted leg) 6 seconds for it to count: if the leg drops below your hip before that 6th second, no good. The lifts have grades of difficulty, and you have to do 3 full rotations; you can’t body-check your partner on the exit from the lift. On takeoff for a jump, you have to be on the ‘right’ edge (inside or outside) for that particular jump, and the ‘call’ will say ‘reviewed’, if something is deceptive and needs to be reviewed on tape. Cheating a jump, the famous ‘flutz’ is starting a Lutz jump on the wrong edge, and a lot of American women are being hit hard on this one, because they got away with it young, and now are having to retrain.<\/p>\n
If this kind of ‘call’ were available on general channels a lot of people would change their minds about the points being ‘arbitrary’. There’s a lot more going on and the announcer’s ‘beautiful!’ doesn’t nearly cover it.<\/p>\n
Just a note: I’ve looked at the numbers, and have reached the conclusion there was no fudge on the numbers—everybody was getting rated a bit low. But in the system, if everybody is rated low, it still works.<\/p>\n
I really like hearing the ‘call’. It’s amazingly easy to keep up with. One choreographer really screwed his\/her skaters: they’re keeping with the music, but ‘shorting’ 4 or 5 of their elements, incomplete turns, incomplete spirals, you name it. They should have had different music, or should not have ‘packed’ their program. It does you no good at all to ‘pack’ a program with elements, if you’re going to short most of them and get no credit. Doing fewer elements to perfection will get you more points. So the frequent charge that people are having to ‘pack’ their programs I think doesn’t hold up. The plain mathematics of it says if you do that AND short your elements, you should not be getting credit. Period.<\/p>\n
You’ll also see long delays in the results coming out. If a skater has no or only one ‘reviewed’ comment, the results come fairly fast. If a lot they’re doing is iffy and requires careful review, it takes much longer. They have to look at each of these moves on tape, and with a counter running to be sure they sustained the move long enough or FULLY completed the last revolution.<\/p>\n
If you want an analogy, try watching football or baseball with no markings on the field. That’s what it is to watch figure skating with no ‘call’ . And that’s why, much as I love Dick and Scotty, I’d rather hear that monotone with the numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They’ve got an innovation on this year’s Nationals, which is a sound track I wish they’d put as an alternate to the commentary on every network: they handed out 4000 little radios with\u00a0a low, near monotone ‘call’ of the moves, level, and points…including ‘count’ on the sustained elements like spins and rotations—for instance, you have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-1376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-figure-skating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}