Why is she revolting? Yes, her over-grinning can be annoying but other than that, there is no aspects of her personality that are apparently distasteful or obnoxious.

But just as facts, those things don't mean thenetworkbabe is wrong. They just mean that some skaters have high enough "performance marks" that they outweigh a content deficit. In defence of thenetworkbabe's view, I would argue as follows:

* Although it's tricky to compare the two systems formally, because they work in such different ways, in practice the new scoring system for figure skating does seem to give considerably more credit for content and difficulty than the old 6.0 system. So thenetworkbabe is right at least about the direction of change.

* The skaters you mention are relatively unusual in getting so much benefit from "performance marks", but they are good technically too. For example, in the Ladies Free Skate in the Sochi Olympics, Carolina came 4th. Her elements score, 68.84, was less than the elements score of the three above her, and greater than the elements score of everyone below her except Gracie Gold (who fell). So she'd have been in almost the same place if her component score was ignored.

* What is the "performance mark"? This is tricky too.

Most people seem to treat the Program Components score as a performance mark (with the elements score as the technical mark), but "Performance / Execution" is only one of the components, and some of the other components include such things as skating skills and "the variety and difficulty (of) how the individual elements are linked together." I think there's a pretty good case that it's primarily only the Performance / Execution and Interpretation components that mark performance. (Choreography / Composition is a tricky one, but I'd argue that it's more about what's performed than how well it's performed.)

However, it could also be argued that there's a performance aspect to some of the things that can contribute to the judges' "grade of execution" adjustments to the elements scores; and if someone wanted to be extra strict about what part of the marks is about technical difficulty, they might argue that it's only the base values of the elements.

So there's a lot of room to disagree about exactly what part of the overall mark is about performance; but I would argue that less is about performance -- especially performance as it seems to be understood in DOI -- than most people normally think.

My take on it is because Ray was in the bottom two on Sunday's show, I think he'll get more people voting for him in the final in the hope that he's not near the bottom again.

Also, Phillip Schofield said on This Morning that Ray, Beth and Hayley will be performing their favourite routines, which should mean that Hayley will perform to Jai Ho. It was memorable to a lot of people and will probably get people voting for her.

And with Beth, we know that she has a lot of support as even though she's been near the bottom of the leaderboard over the past few weeks, she's never been in the bottom two.

So I think that all three of them have a good chance of going far enough to skate the Bolero, but I do think that overall, it will be Ray that's crowned champion.

She did and she was brilliant and I jumped up and down whenever she did win.

I can't argue with this Veri, you make some excellent points

Are they allowed to perform a routine from any series, I thought it had to be the current one? Unless save me skates count too. If it's any series, I'd like to see Ray and Maria do their Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now routine.

Can Beth beat Ray.
Two words: Louis Smith.

Phillip Schofield said something like, "they'll be performing their favourite routines, so I think we'll be seeing Jai Ho". It wasn't made totally clear on whether it'll be their favourite routines from this series or from all the routines they've done.

Odd if it was - because the old routines don't show what they can do now, some have stronger routines this series, and some, like Jai Ho, have little scope to add much to without changing the coherence of the routine. Odd too, because if things had produced different finalists, we might already have seen all those routines.

You could end up with the final being decided by what someone else thought of and someone else did in the showdance - if thats back - and a competition of choregraphy in the second routine - with Jai Ho looking competitive because T and D didn't write it.

Utterly bizarre if one of the simplest old routines won - when there's been better routines shown this series and other, more difficult, winning routines have been seen with improvements added .