Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Tale of a combination!

Okay, after I posted my NHK Wrap-up Yesterday I promised a post, specifically about Mao Asada's Triple Axel combination in her free skate. I again need the help of my astute judging system experts.

So Mao Asada nails a Triple Axel in her free skate at NHK and then goes on to throw another Triple Axel with a double toe on the end...to the naked eye it looked amazing!

Now I get when we slow it down on the replay and zoom in on the jump she under rotated it just a bit. This season that is just not allowed and the jump is downgraded to a double axel with only double axel points attached to it. This part I understand.

Here's the part I don't get. Not only was the jump downgraded to a double...she received negative GOE's for it. So instead of...'wow, she almost pulled off another triple axel,' it was scored as 'that was a crappy double axel.' This doesn't make sense to me at all!

Seems to me that while the jump is downgraded, she should get positive grades because it was 1/4 turn (if that!) short of being a triple axel combo...come on! What she did was way better and more difficult than a double axel combo and she would have received more points had she simply done a double axel/double toe.

Am I missing something here? Is what I'm saying here not make sense? Can anyone help me understand how this combo was judged fairly?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The judges can't give more than -1 GOE on downgraded jumps. It's in this PDF here: http://isu.sportcentric.net/db//files/serve.php?id=934

A quarter of a turn short is still considered rotated. Mao would have gotten credit for the triple axel if she was only a quarter of a turn short on the landing.

Aaron said...

That's really a stupid rule. And it doesn't account for the -2 GOE's she got for the jump.

I am consistently finding things that I don't like about this judging system. I wish there was a common sense rule that allowed judges to clearly not score something stupidly!

Anonymous said...

yeah. that's lame. While it's good that the judges caught her and down graded her jump, but to down grade her again is just unacceptable. While they should not give her a positive GOE for a double axel, they should not have given her a negative GOE. That's uncalled for. Looks like we have a fight after all between Yuna and Mao.