Thank you. I caught some of that as I continued watching.
This is a bit of a side rant, but it is a great frustration to me that some of this is NOT EXPLAINED by commentators. As a viewer, you do pick up some things, and could understand SO much more with just a
little bit of information explained, but they insist instead on just saying you lose points when you fall over and over again... Okay, end rant.
One thing I did notice was that if someone doubled a jump that had been planned as a triple or quad, it got a zero score. I don't recall whether this was just in the short program of if I saw it in the ladies (which I caught after the men's programs--and I'm going through 2018's now).
This would have just been in the short program. In the free skate program, a double in the place of a planned triple or quad would just receive the points it's worth in the scale of values.
Question about that presentation score. Is there any kind of "objective criteria" for it or is it strictly judges opinion?
This is a great question and I'm glad you asked it. PCS is made up of five different categories, in which a judge assigns a score from 1-10, given in quarter point (0.25) increments, in each category. Those categories are: Skating Skills, Transitions, Performance, Choreography and Interpretation. I think it's easy to look at that list of categories and think, "Aren't those all the same thing?" or "Isn't *all* of it skating skills?" There certainly is some overlap, but each one is defined distinctly for the purpose of giving a score and a high level overview of the criteria each judge should use to evaluate in each category can be found here:
https://www.isu.org/figure-skating/rules/sandp-handbooks-faq/17596-program-component-chart-id-sp-2019-20/fileThere is certainly criticism that PCS just tends to go up based on a skater's reputation and not so much on the performance the skater puts out on any given day, but I'll leave you to form your own opinion on that critique.
One more comment on scoring PCS: Judges would rarely (maybe never?) use the full range of 1-10 when scoring PCS in one single event. A 5.5 in PCS would be a devastatingly low score for an elite skater, but an unachievable, unimaginably high mark for someone like me competing in Adult Silver. So there's sort of a customary range within 1-10 that is used in practice based on the level of competition.
On a barely tangentially related topic: when did they start doing testing for entry into certain classes of competition in the US (pre-preliminary through senior)? I recently rewatched an old favorite movie, the 1978 Ice Castles (which really kindled my interest in skating, although it took...many years...before I could do anything serious about it). As things stand now in the US, it would be impossible for a skater like Lexie to come out of nowhere and enter a competition like she did. Was that possible in 77-78 when the movie was made or was that just a case of artistic license?
I don't know the full history of testing at USFS, but testing figures has been a thing for a long time. I think in the 70s, you would have had to pass a figure test to compete at a certain level, if not a free skate test as well. I would expect a lot of artistic license was taken on the topic of testing in Ice Castles. After all, in 2005's Ice Princess, a skater skips two levels of testing structure and qualifies for a competition just by virtue of a performance in a group recital and testing prerequisites for competition were *certainly* established by then.