In the free dance a lot of the couples do a combined lift - e.g the Russians who won the bronze medal opened with a combined curve and rotational lift, and combined lifts can last up to 10 seconds instead of 6 for the short lifts.


You can't see what score a named judge gave to a particular couple, but the anonymised marks from each judge are given in the detailed protocol: http://www.isuresults.com/results/ow..._FD_Scores.pdf. You can see from it that no judge seemed to be going particularly low or high for either of the top couples, they were all within a point of each other, so it's very hard to make a case that there was block voting in this event.

Same here!

I appreciate that and I don't necessarily think there's been a stitch up here, just that the new system is not as clear in some respects to the average viewer who isn't aware of/able to access what info is out there about the system.

Oh I totally agree. If you're involved enough to seek out the protocols, and understand how levels are called, things are much more transparent than 6.0, but most people aren't and the system of levels & grades of execution isn't the easiest for a commentator to explain to the casual viewer.

I think average viewers felt they understand the marks better in the 6.0 system, but didn't actually understand them, because they either didn't take into account, or didn't fully understand, the way it used "ordinals".

Also, it's hard to think of any way in which the old system was clearer (apart from naming which judge gave which marks). If a judge awarded a 5.5, for example, that didn't have any real meaning except as compared to the other marks from the same judge, and there was no way to know what factors when into it being 5.5 rather than some other number.


Yes, but I don't think the new system should be so hard to explain or to understand. The main problems imo are (1) that explanations tend to get involved in the details of how the system works, which can make it seem too complicated for anyone to have an intuitive feel for what it's doing, and (2) that explanations don't give a good enough understanding of why someone who falls, or makes other 'obvious' errors, can be marked higher than someone who skated more 'cleanly'.

The component score shouldn't be any harder to understand than the old presentation mark; however, it needs to be made clear that it isn't only about things people think of as "artistry" (neither was the old presentation mark).

And the elements score is just about how difficult the things in a routine are to do, plus the judges' averaged opinion on how well each was done (which can be negative), with points subtracted at the end for things like falling.

A fall actually hits a contestant twice: once in negative "how well was it done" marks, and then in a 1 point deduction. It then needs to be explained that the penalties can be less that what the skater gains from a difficult jump. (Grade of execution can be as low as 3. Combine that with a 1 point penalty for a fall, and 4 would be taken off the points due to difficulty, But the "difficulty points" (base value) for a triple jump or jump combination are greater than 4.)

Talk about stating the obvious. We do know that these people are only learning to skate still and the others have been skating all their lives to get to Olympic level! Lol.
The same could be said for watching Olympic diving and then watching Splash.
Anyway, I enjoyed the ice skating at the Olympics and also enjoyed Dancing on Ice too. Its amazing how many falls the professional skaters had at the Olympics as well

I'm not going to compare the two because that would IMO be unfair.
That said, having watched pretty much all the Olympic skating, the shine was off on DOI for me and I didn't enjoy it as much as I usually do.