Worlds - Mens final (spoiler. duh!)

[Artemis]

Ok, I was offline over the weekend, just assumed someone else would start this ...

1 - Jeffrey Buttle - 245.17 - 1 - 1
2 - Brian Joubert - 231.22 - 6 - 2
3 - Johnny Weir - 221.84 - 2 - 5
4 - Daisuke Takahashi - 220.11 - 3 - 6
5 - Stephane Lambiel - 217.88 - 5 - 7
6 - Kevin Van Der Perren - 216.02 - 9 - 3
7 - Sergei Voronov - 209.93 - 15 - 4
8 - Takahiko Kozuka - 205.15 - 8 - 8
9 - Patrick Chan - 203.55 - 7 - 11
10 - Stephen Carriere - 201.69 - 11 - 9
11 - Jeremy Abbott - 197.26 - 14 - 10

Ok, huge congrats to Jeff. You can criticize the scoring system if you like, but there's absolutely no question he won fair and square. And as exciting as a quad jump may be to watch, I'd far rather watch a complete, well-rounded program where every beat of music is used and every movement counts. And Jeff's win was convincing not only in point value, but in the fact that he was the only gold medalist at these worlds to win all portions of the event.

Brian Joubert has never been my all-time favourite skater (although I've never doubted his wins) ... but now I'll have a hard time ever thinking of him as anything other than a d!ck-head. What a baby, going on and on that no one should win without a quad. Talk about sour grapes! And hello, even if his quad were worth twice what it was, he still wouldn't have won! He lost because a. he fell in the short and b. he dismissed the rest of the field and played it safe in the long.

I'll leave it up to the experts to determine exactly how much a quad should be worth ... but it seems logical to me that its worth should be what it is: the same proportion more than a triple than a triple is more than a double.

[dbny]

Brian Joubert has never been my all-time favourite skater (although I've never doubted his wins) ... but now I'll have a hard time ever thinking of him as anything other than a d!ck-head. What a baby, going on and on that no one should win without a quad. Talk about sour grapes! And hello, even if his quad were worth twice what it was, he still wouldn't have won! He lost because a. he fell in the short and b. he dismissed the rest of the field and played it safe in the long.

Wow, I totally missed that. What a shame he had to sully his reputation with sour grapes. My favorite was Daisuke Takahashi, but I would have been thrilled to see Weir or Joubert win also. That said, I'm ecstatic over Buttle's taking the title. I've always liked him and it's great to see anyone skate their best when it counts most. I think Takahashi is going to have the hardest time going home without a medal because of Japanese culture. I also think Weir was right about his skate being conservative, and I do think he did the right thing. The US had to have a medal, and that entered his thinking. In a sense, he gambled his chance for gold to secure any place on the podium.

It was, altogether, a great show!

[icedancer2]

Very happy for Jeff - a well-deserved win, that's for sure!

I was actually pretty surprised by the results and figured Joubert had won the thing on the strength of his jumps and his very strong style - but Jeff's very beautiful skating won out! And he won the technical mark and not the performance one, which I thought was AMAZING!!

Kudos to Johnny for skating conservatively and getting the Bronze medal. In looking at the protocols, he actually was 5th in the free skate, but with the 2nd in the short and the way the numbers came out - 3rd was just right! the only weird scoring I could see was that his two-footed quad was downgraded to a triple (toe) and then he got negative GOE for the two-footing, which meant that the jump got really a really low score (like 1.64) - so I think they may be looking into the rules surrounding that one... but like I said - very happy and yes, it was a great show!!:bow:

[Artemis]

I was just reading the judging protocols. Does anyone know why Patrick Chan and Stephen Carriere each a zero score and "invalid element" for their 3sal-2toe combos? And Takahashi got an invalid for his 3lutz-2toe?

I'm guessing it's some kind of too-many-repeated-jumps rule, but I can't figure it out. I though the rule was you can repeat no more than 2 jumps of 3 or more revolutions, and in all three cases they didn't break that rule. But even it's no repeats of 2 or more revolutions, does that mean doing a 4toe and a 3toe and a combo with a 2toe in it breaks the rules?

[icedancer2]

I saw this on another forum and have just blatently copied it - this is in reference to Takahashi's "invalid element":

"It was his 4th combo. Apparently there is a thing called a "Phantom combo" if a skater is supposed to do a combo but doesn't. Then the next tossed-in combo doesn't even count as the single 3Lu. If Dai and Chan and someone else had NOT tacked on the 3t, the 3Lu would have counted. I wonder if it would have changed things?"

[Artemis]

^ Hmm. Ok, now I'm remembering the rule that's applying here: a limit of 3 combos/sequences allowed in a long program (I think). Thanks.

So it's not so much a matter of "phantom combo" -- you are still allowed to change your program on the fly, just so long as you don't go over the allowed number of jumps or combos. So, for example, if you had a planned 3lutz-3toe at the beginning and a planned 3lutz at the end, but missed the combo at the beginning so tacked on a 3toe (or 2toe) onto the second lutz ... that still counts full marks so long as you haven't done too many combos or too many repeated jumps.

[charmainia]

I feel bad for Tomas Verner... He ended up in 15th place after he was 4th in the short program. I don't think he skated that bad in the LP to fall down 11 places...

[Artemis]

^ Well ... he had negative GOE on every single jump, he singled a lutz and an axel, downgraded his other 3axel, didn't do any combos, and did only 1- and 2-level spins ... as they say, do the math.

[Meredith]

This was the competition I waited for all year long, then screwed up my DVR and chacked the last half hour! :frus: I'm thrilled for Jeff and Brian and Johnnie, but really hoped Takahashi would win.

About Joubert. I did not see his free skate, but saw him at Skate Canada this past year. He was incredibly gracious, even though I now understand he was not feeling well at the time. When all other memories of Skate Canada have faded, I'll always remember the children (skating clubs?) who came in to watch one day's practices. They filled almost one entire end of the arena. They were so enthusiastic in their cheers (especially for Brian) that at the end of the practice session, Brian skated toward them, and with outstretched arms and a huge grin bowed toward them as he left the ice.

I can well understand how Joubert's words would rankle fans, especially Canadian ones!

[WeirFan06]

When all other memories of Skate Canada have faded, I'll always remember the children (skating clubs?) who came in to watch one day's practices. They filled almost one entire end of the arena. They were so enthusiastic in their cheers (especially for Brian) that at the end of the practice session, Brian skated toward them, and with outstretched arms and a huge grin bowed toward them as he left the ice.

Sorry, TOTALLY off topic (nothing at all to do with Worlds) but this reminds me of last year's 4CC's in Colorado Springs. I had gone with a couple of friends who were competing in ice dance, and so usually at most competitions there's lower attendance at the dance events, but at this competition there was EXTREMELY low attendance at all the events, which only made the sparse attendance for dance that much more noticeable. The OD would have had very few people watching had it not been for the bus loads of elementary school kids who were there on a field trip. They were SO enthusiastic, eventhough dance doesn't have the flashy jumps or throws. And they stayed that enthusiastic through the whole event. It was the cutest thing. I remember that more than anything else from that competition as well :)

[singerskates]

I was just reading the judging protocols. Does anyone know why Patrick Chan and Stephen Carriere each a zero score and "invalid element" for their 3sal-2toe combos? And Takahashi got an invalid for his 3lutz-2toe?


A skater can also get an element called an "invalid element" by not doing the element to at least the minimum technical requirements. I have 2 examples of this from my freeskate program at this year's Adult Canadians in Brampton, ON, Canada. I did a two part forward sitspin, where I did the normal sit position on my left forward inside edge and then I changed to a broken position, but it didn't count for marks because I couldn't and didn't get low enough in either sit positions; 90 degrees or less (injured myself the day before during my interpretive program). And then there's a way to get, what looks to a skating fans eye a nice spiral sequence even though it covers all of the ice, a discounted spiral sequence. I started out doing a forward right inside Biellman type spiral position, but then I remembered that I had forgot to put the bandaids on my fingers and let go of my skate blade before reaching 1 one thousand, 2 one thousand, 3 one thousand (this is how the judges count the positions in the spiral sequence) and instead of the first position having 3 counts, it only had 1 and bit and same with what they counted as the second (same edge and direction) and by the time I got to the position that was to be my original 2nd position, the judges already made my spiral sequence invalid. It looked nice but wasn't what the rules called for.
This too is an invalid element.

Believe me we adult canadian skaters, who competed at Adult Canadians and/or the ISU Adult Invitational Competition, know exactly how a skater at the World Championship feels when an element gets marked as an invalid element. At Adult Canadians every adult was marked with CPC (in US it's IJS) and at the ISU Adult Invitational Competition skaters are marked with the same COP's, except that under rotated single jumps count as well but for far less than had we done the full single rotation. For a while waltz jumps didn't count at all at the ISU Adult Invitational Competition.

If a World level junior or senior level skater does a jump that is 1 rotation or less, then it's almost better that they didn't do the jump at all. These skaters are better to rotate at least 2 revs and fall than to pop into a single. Singles and under rotated single jumps are the kiss of death for junior and senior level skaters in competition. Doing singles might even lower a skater's Program Component score as well.

[Artemis]

A skater can also get an element called an "invalid element" by not doing the element to at least the minimum technical requirements.

That wasn't the case here, though. Both Chan and Carriere had fallen on earlier planned combos, and then tried to make up for it by adding 2-toes to their 3-sals later. But because of the "phantom combo rule," the earlier missed combo still counted as a combo, so the later combo was one too many, so the whole thing counts as zero. No credit even for the 3-sal, which was always planned.

One of the wackier scoring rules, IMO. I thought this new system was supposed to award trying difficult stuff, and this seems to be contrary to that. The rule makes sense if you pop the second jump in a combo or something like that ... but if you never even attempt it? And what if you just change your mind, move a combo to later in the program. Are the judges going to say that you "missed" it earlier but it still counts as an attempt?

BTW, I'm going to open a new thread about this in the General forum.