You have to admit SCD have less obvious winners, look at Chris Hollins who at one stage was priced at 33/1 and ended up winning. Same with Alesha Dixon at 10/1 and Darren Gough at 33/1 and that indicates to me for DOI that there needs to be a less distinctive winner.

Sam was bookies fav right from the off despite surges from Laura and Chloe. That indicates to me that for next year that we need a Joe Calzaghe but on ice who you think is going to be good, but in actual fact isn't very good at all. It would certainly make it more interesting and give it more fizz and sparkle if ya like. Just have to wait until next year where the new crop of celebs turn up.

You can argue about the marks and I agree that a dubious headbanger should have been enough for a 0.5 deduction from each judge. Sam would still have won the first round comfortably though.

To say there was any cheating though is another matter entirely. Does anyone have a copy of the rules? Do anyone really know what the judges are looking for during this "showcase" that has only been introduced this series and that nobody really knew what to expect from? Just because the show is called "Dancing On Ice" doesn't mean that those who do some of their programme off the ice are cheating. If it did, Bonnie Langford would never have scored above a 3.0 in series one (okay, I'm being facetious here). We should have known what to expect from the showcase. It did replace the flying after all and at least there was more skating than there ever was in one of those routines. Dancing On Ice is about spectacle first and foremost. You may not like it - I often don't myself (I'd love to limit the amount of time spent off the ice) but it's not cheating. A comparison with Suzanne Shaw or Jennifer Metcalfe doesn't work either; neither of them did a showcase routine. Clearly the showcase routine means anything goes. None of us knows what proportion of time should be spent on the ice or indeed any of the expectations for such a performance. To call it cheating though is rubbish.

So glad Sam won, some people take things far to serious, and, need to get a grip.

Good luck Sam.

It was a vastly superior routine to the other two.
The vast majority of people agree, many of them who do not like Sam think so.

Sorry if you do not agree.

Sam fans will be Sam fans but it seems they are more restricted and try to stick up for him as much as possible.

I was a Laura fan from the start, but Sam certainly has skill, I wouldn't go as far as saying it was vastly superior, yes, it was better, but Lauras second performance was better than Sams, and her past performances have been better than Sams too, it goes both ways...

He was a deserving winner but IMO any of the final 3 would have been a deserving winner (although I'd have questioned Chloe winning a bit)

I did like Sam a lot at the start, but his cocky side put me off, the fauxmance, the backchatting and blaming other things and not just saying 'yes, ok, I'll take the criticism' among other things.

Final 2 were both extremely good skaters but at the start of the final I couldn't call it.

Ever tried dancing like that on skates & 2mm thick blades, OP? it's incredibly hard off ice as well!

The scores are irrelevant in the final so I'll forgive a bit of overmarking. I think both Sam and Laura were treated fairly leniently.

I didn't really like any of the show dances, or whatever they called them, but I'd much rather see a bit of trickery off the ice than the majority of the routine spent "flying" so it's an improvement on last year.

All three of the showcases had their hiccups during the routine, as reflected in Laura & Chloe's marks (Chloe deserved 1 or 2 more marks) But i think the double lift in Sam's was rather atrocious and the headbanger wasnt too good. :/ Also he didnt do too much dancing on the ice

I would have given him a 9.0 for it, and a 9.0/9.5 for Chloe & Laura (:
Just my opinion (The fav routines were marked much better)

I am delighted for Sam , imo he was the best skater most of the way through the comp, last night and again imo he came out on top in every round , he was outstanding. Good luck Sam and well done!

The OP isn't simply about time spent not skating (which is a bone of contention for the OP and others as several threads show eg the Jai Ho one), it asks if Sam was 'cheating'.

As several people have pointed out, we don't know what the rules were but as T & D OKed the routines and none of the judges objected to the content I think we can safely assume that no rules were broken. 'Cheating' also implies getting an advantage by dong something underhand, how could anything be underhand in a DOI routine? What you see is what you get.

The showcase replaced the flying where hardly any of the routine is done touching the ice, so the 'off ice' argument simply doesn't hold either.

No if they are not in contact with the ice they are not 'on ice', and if they are dancing on the ice they are not 'skating', equally there are many routines where a lot of time is spent simply skating to get to the right place for the next move, perhaps next time we should have a load of threads complaining about that being cheating because it is skating and not dancing?

Whilst I agree that Sam's routine was over marked, I do not beleive it was cheating.

He needed to do that part of the routine off ice to get the iconic Footloose image, which would not have been achieveable on ice. They could have shortened that section, but I don't believe that overall his 'off ice' section was a greatly higher percentage time of the routine compared to the others.

(maybe it's my age, but I remember Footloose with great affection and was happy to see the off ice bit as it was the bit that evoked the film for me)

(I also think it is really off to say he cheated. It's one thing to say you hated a routine & you think he should have been on the ice more, but to say he cheated is a bit off in my book. Still think Laura should have won, mind)

They ALL did a fair bit off the ice. Perhaps Sam was more off the ice but he didn't have the benefit of all the lifts, unlike the girls. I'm not a Sam fan and I wanted Laura to win but credit where credit's due, his routine was the best.

I'm not sure I follow your argument here. Surely if the type of lift (and any other move) in Sam's show dance was set by Sam's standard, the same applies to the show dances of the two girls, too? Each of the competitors would be putting together moves and lifts that they could perform well and would show them to their best advantage, and the job of the accompanying pros was to perform at the celeb's level, "dumbing down" their own skating if need be to meet the level of the contestant.

Very true - possibly if one counts the time spent off the ice including lifts there`d be very little difference.

As for saying he was cheating ridiculous really and considering the scores didn`t even count it makes someone accusing him of cheating sound quite puerile imo.

I thought it was great but then I liked Vanilla Ice's routine to Nice Ice Baby and that had dancing off the ice. I think it has been Laura who was consistently overmarked 3 10's for a routine with mistakes and heavy footed landings - no way.

That said the best three were in the final and I really didn;t mind who won - but the public did get it right in the end.

I didn't think much of the Footloose routine and agree there could have been a lot more skating in it.

However, after seeing the other two routines, it's clear that there was a pattern to these showcases that meant the judges had to mark primarily on criteria other than skating; namely, how well they got the feel of the music and the overall routine styling, the skill with which tricks were performed, and the overall execution.

If you analyse all three, they all started with a large chunk of off-ice stuff. (To be honest, I'm just glad Sam's and Chloe's included dancing, because Laura's Madonna-style posturing looked a bit odd on skates.) All three then included synchronised lift sequences, some tricks of varying difficulty and then a big ensemble finish.

By the above criteria, Sam was certainly the best - and looking at the other routines, he didn't 'cheat' any more than Laura or Chloe.

So perhaps the real question is, if a showcase is meant to show off the stars to the best of their ability, why make so much of it about costumes, make-up and the tricks the pros do, and so little about the skating?

I certainly didn't think the showcase worked as a test of the finalists' ability. But I'd never have said that Sam had pulled off an unfair advantage with that routine.

Sour grapes! How did he cheat - we all know he can skate! A well deserving winner!

I'm in the above camp, Sam never really did it for me very often in the series but that routine was briliant, head and shoulders above the girls' ones. I was very impressed!

Sam certainly didn't cheat in his routine, given that the choreography was provided by T & D and he skated what was given to him, but I have to admit to thinking it was overmarked.

For me personally, I think Sam showed the most personality and performance in that routine that I'd seen from him all series and he did a good job in the main. However, the two person lift nearly didn't happen at all. Sam skated so slowly that Nina barely got off the ground, which I feel should have knocked 0.5 off the 10s as in essence the lift did not work correctly. Also some other parts of his routine involved him pretty much just standing on the ice whilst him and Matt E. turned Brianne in a cartwheel type manoeuvre so for me it didn't contain as much skating or dancing on the ice. The dance sequence he did off the ice was very good actually but I'm not sure it would have worked trying to replicate it on the ice. I've not seen Footloose but I assume that that section was a direct lift from the film dance sequence, and as such needed to be there in the context of the routine. However, as a caveat to that, by using dance sections off ice (for all three couples) the showcase routines did not demonstrate the full abilities of the contestants in ice dancing. I anticipated that the showcase would build on the technical challenge and show step sequences, jumps and spins, which it didn't.

I think 28.5 (3 x 9.5) would have been a better score and would still have left Sam leading the showcase section. There was no cheating involved though.

I was hoping it would too. Having ditched the silly "flying" stuff, I was hoping they would use the showcase to demonstrate the technical skating skills they'd learnt over the series, but no. Just more tricks and lifts and off-ice shimmying.

Oh well. There's always next year....

He wasn't my first choice or, for that matter, second before last night's show but I thought he was a worthy winner.

Re Lifts: A number of people have mentioned the girls being lifted, as if that were relevantly the same. It isn't.

Lifts -- when the partner doing the lifting is on the ice, wearing skates -- are a normal and accepted part of DOI routines, of ice dancing, and of pairs figure skating. Going off the ice to dance on some floor is not. And such lifts are 'on ice' in a way that dancing on a floor isn't.

Re "the rules": Some people have asked about the rules. I don't know whether it's explicitly against the rules, but I don't think it matters. There will always be many things that aren't mentioned in rules that would nonetheless be considered cheating.

Re fables:

What would the grapes be here? I take it I am meant to be the fox in the story, but what are the grapes I'm saying are probably sour (and so not worth having)?

See my post above. All three routines began off-ice and utilised steps off-ice. This has set a precedent for any future showcase routines that the routine may feature off-ice sections - making it 'a normal and accepted part' of a DOI showcase routine.

I'm in agreement that off-ice dancing seems less worthy of credit than on-ice moves, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as invalid when it

a) happened in all three routines - which you seem to be conveniently ignoring, and

b) is the first time a showcase has been performed

The "comparison" with Suzanne and Jennifer works perfectly for the point I was using it to make: that the judges can and have marked routines down for things that were due to T&D rather than to the celeb skater.

It a reply (>) specifically to this:

I think the judges have just become very lax. They also let Vanilla Ice go off onto a floor in the middle of his routine, without any penalty in comments or in points,


Since I addressed what the others did in an earlier post, I wasn't ignoring it. But perhaps I should say more about it.

I think there's a big difference between (a) some brief scene-setting and "faffing about" at the start of a routine, and (b) going off the ice and onto a floor after the routine had begun so that you could do flashier dance moves than you could have managed on the ice.

I'm not happy about (a). I think DOI needs a judge who'll at least criticise it, like Len does ("faffing") in SCD. And I think the "faffing" should at least be on the ice. But it is a lesser offence.

What Laura did off-ice at the start of her routine was little more than walking down steps, plus a couple of poses, and was clearly an example of (a). Chloe's routine was more problematic, since she did a substantial amount of dancing on the floor before she went onto the ice.

Sam started standing, then some skating. Then there was the banging on the locker, though at least it was on the ice. All that could count as the scene-setting sort of "faffing". But then, rather than properly start his routine, he climbed off the ice for some dancing on the floor.

By the time all of that was done, nearly a minute had passed (approx 50 seconds). Laura's scene-setting took about 20 seconds. Chloe took about 30 seconds before her feet touched the ice, though the end of that was in a lift when her partner was on the ice.

Now, it's true that Sam spent some of that time in a bit of skating, but still, something that long cannot be considered just scene-setting or "faffing" at the start of a routine.

Also, neither Laura nor Chloe had any 10s for their showcase routines. It's the combination of the 10s with everything else that made it so objectionable. His off-ice dancing wasn't even that good.