Skate Scoring Has Little for Artistry

SPOKANE, Wash. — As Mirai Nagasu completed her stirring free skate Saturday night, the crowd at Spokane Arena leapt to its feet in raucous applause. A hail of toy animals rained onto the ice. Clearly, most in attendance thought that Nagasu had won the United States Figure Skating Championships.

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Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Mirai Nagasu electrified a crowd at the United States Figure Skating championships in Spokane, Wash., on Saturday.

Pool photo by Elaine Thompson/Getty Images

But the winner was Rachael Flatt, whose performance was steady but hardly inspiring artistically.

crowd couldn’t see — a quarter under-rotation on her jumps. They’re making way too much of that. It’s getting to the point where it’s ridiculous. It hurts the sport.”
Even if Flatt did deserve to win — and under the flawed scoring system she did — skating officials did her a great disservice by not explaining to the crowd why she won.
Instead of placing the marks for each element in the skaters’ routines on the arena video screen, so that rewards and downgrades could be readily visible for each jump and spin, officials served the audience dry cumulative figures: Flatt finished with 200.11 points to 188.78 for Nagasu. The numbers might as well have been qualifying speeds at Daytona.
Even a technical expert who appraised each skater’s performance for spectators via in-house radio seemed to miss the tiny but critical mistakes that separated Nagasu from Flatt.
“It would be better for the sport if enough information was provided to the audience so they could understand why a skater got the marks she did,” said George Rossano, an expert on the scoring system.
No doubt the old 6.0 system needed revision after the judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. And the new formula makes one significant improvement: Judges no longer seem to be holding places, or reserving the highest scores, for skaters who are anticipated to win. Performance does trump reputation.
Various results at the national championships showed that “our sport is becoming more fair,” Tom Zakrajsek, who coaches Flatt, said in defending the new scoring system. “I thought Rachael was beautiful tonight.”
Perhaps people are still growing accustomed to figure skating being less political and predictable than it has been in the past, Zakrajsek said.
“All sports deal with numbers,” he said. “If figure skating is a combination of sport and art, then it shouldn’t be one way or the other way — all technical or all artistic.”
Noting that divers and gymnasts are penalized for imperfect rotations in their routines, Zakrajsek said, “Why wouldn’t we do that in figure skating?”
He added: “This is not a beauty pageant.”
Both Flatt and Nagasu will compete next month at the Winter Games in Vancouver. Their styles will appear in stark contrast.
“One is a great athlete, one is an artist,” said Frank Carroll, who coaches Nagasu.
Hamilton described Flatt as someone who “punched her time clock every moment. She’s consistent and solid. You can depend on her.”
Zakrajsek, Flatt’s coach, quoted Sarah Hughes, the 2002 Olympic champion, as saying, “When you go to the Olympics, you better stay vertical.”
But many will yearn for something more than an athlete simply staying on her feet. After all, this is figure skating, not boxing.

Except that she had not.
Even some of the sport’s most astute experts were stumped.
“I blew it,” Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic champion and NBC commentator, said of Nagasu. “I thought she won. I got caught up in the performance.”
Instead, Rachael Flatt, 17, of Del Mar, Calif., won her first American title with a performance that was steady and reliable but workmanlike, slow and hardly inspiring artistically. The crowd also gave her a standing ovation, but one far less boisterous.
In Flatt, skating’s controversial scoring system has its perfect competitor, one who is mathematically astute in piling up points. Yet she also leaves an audience wanting much more in terms of rousing performance.