Understanding the Figure Skating Judging System - IJS Explained!

hello and welcome to my channel i am coach julia and today i'm going to try to help you understand the figure skating international judging system it can be a bit complicated so stick with me but first a touch of history to help you understand how we've gotten to where we are now with our judging for most of figure skating history we have used a 6.0 judging system that means that 6.0 is the absolute top score you can get if you've gotten that score you have executed a flawless program the scoring was divided into two categories technical merit and artistic impression so you might get a 5.9 save for technical merit and maybe a 5.8 for artistic impression you got those two scores but there was a huge judging scandal during the 2002 salt lake city olympics with the french and russian judges agreeing to fix their scores so the russians would win pair skating and the french would win ice dance fortunately the french judge couldn't quite handle the guilt and came forward about it after the pair's event resulting in two gold medals being handed out at the pairs that year one to the russians who originally won the event and another to the canadians who would originally come in silver because of the score fixing scandal that 2002 scandal instituted a judging overhaul resulting in the creation of the ijs the international judging system to create a system that is less prone to abuse they focused on quantifiable measurements it is a much more complicated system of scores and points where the judges grade every jump spin and footwork sequence fully instituted in 2006 the ijs assigns a base value to every technical element that way going into a competition with your list of jumps and your list of spins and footwork you know what the base value you could earn for that program is the idea is if you take all of the elements from a program and break them down into numbers then the judging is much less prone to abuse so let's say you're going into the program with a jump that's worth 10 points the job of the judges then is then to grade the execution of that jump and you get a mark called a go a grade of execution and that grade of execution can reduce as many as five points or add as many as five points to your score so if your base value is ten you can lose five or you can add five based on your grade of execution so judge's job is to grade each jump spin and footwork sequence unlike the 6.0 system which uses ordinals judges ordinals to rank skaters ijs focuses on accumulating points in both a short program and a long program that will be added together to give you your overall score for that competition so a number of things that judges are looking for in jumps that are going to help give a positive goe that are going to help elevate that grade of execution score things like difficult entries into a jump so maybe instead of a traditional jump entry they're going to do a number of turns on one foot before taking off they're also looking for interesting or original steps or movements immediately preceding the element so you're not skating halfway across the ice setting up for the jump and taking off you're fully skating intricate steps into the jump they're also looking for maybe varied or difficult air positions or a delayed rotation so when you see skaters put their hands up over their head that is a more challenging arm position and that's going to help them get a better grade of execution they're also of course looking for good height and distance in a jump so you want a large jump they're looking for good extension on the landing or creative exit so you want to see that beautiful clean landing with an extended free leg but you're also going to see some interesting exits things with fan kicks afterwards or little jumps onto the other foot to make that exit more challenging judges are looking for good flow from the entry to the exit including the entire jumps they want to see the flow from the whole jump beginning through the air and through the landing they want the jump to look effortless throughout and they want to see the jump matching the musical structure so you want to have jumps where they make sense within the music when we look at skating spins judges have similar things that they're looking at for the spin they want to see speed of rotation so you don't want to see spins that are taking long time for each rotation you want speed and power in those rotations every spin must have a minimum of three rotations in a position to be counted if you see someone doing a spin with only two rotations that position does not get counted they have to have a minimum of three rotations before changing position judges are also going to be looking for changes of position within a spin or changes of foot you can also get points for a difficult entry or exit for a spin or flying maneuvers so you can jump into the spin jump out of the spin jump to change your feet between the spins so jumping entries exits and within the spin are going to give you more points they're also looking for originality within the movements so you have a classic lay back spin that's going to give you a certain number of points but then if you can change it into a more challenging version of a laid-back spin that can also help your grade of execution to help you further understand how this judging system works i am going to show you an actual score sheet from nathan chen one of the united states male figure skaters and it's from the 2019 world championships in the top section we can see the number of executed elements in his program the first one is 4lz it stands for quad lutz the next element is a quad flip then a quad toe loop and a triple axel then you can see a camel spin with a change of foot to a backward camel spin and it continues on in this column we can see the base value given for each element this is verified on site by a technical specialist panel the quad lutz has a very high base value compared to the camel change camel spin and you can see right there why this has become such a jump heavy sport in the next column you can see the goe or grade of execution that is given by those judges this is the task of nine judges to give their judgment on how well an element was executed here you can see the scores of those individual judges which are averaged out to give that goe score these three jump combos with an x next to them were done in the second half of the program where the skater is more tired and so they are given a 10 bonus here you can see the total for nathan chen's elements in this long program at the bottom half of this score sheet is the program component score or what's considered the artistic aspect of the routine the artistic side of the sport is evaluated in five program component scores skating skills which is the overall skating quality including edge control and flow of the ice edges steps turns speed etc the next is transitions that's going to be the varied or intricate footwork or positions or movements and holds that link all the elements then the third one is performance the involvement of the skater physically emotionally into translating the music and choreography then we have composition this is an intentional developed arrangement of all of the types of movement so you want the program to be well balanced you don't want to have all the spins at the beginning and all the jumps at the end you want them to be balanced throughout and that's the composition score then we have interpretation of music the personal and creative translation of the music to the movements on the ice these components are marked on a scale from 0.25 to 10. it's a pretty big range those are then averaged out and the program component score maxes out at 100 points in the free skate and 50 points in the short program so you hear where you see the two that's because this is a long program it would be a one in the short program so that tells you how many times to multiply these scores as you can see from chen score the skating elements outweigh his very high artistic component marks he has good artistic component marks but his technical score way outweighs it so those jumping passes he has makes up a very significant part of a segator's score so you add up the scores for the technical elements and the scorecardistic program components deduct one point for every fall and then that's the skater's total score now if you'd like to see the exact base value of every jump spin and element i will include in the description below a link to this page from the united states figure skating site that has every element listed as well as the abbreviations that are being used on the score sheets so you can do a little bit of your own learning on the subject it also includes pairs and ice dance you get a really good scope of all of the scoring in figure skating i hope that this helps you better understand how figure skating is judged it's not a sport where you cross a finish line or accumulate a certain number of goals so it can be seen as a subjective sport but with the institution of the new international judging system it is a much more mathematical sport and it's much more quantifiable as far as what people are being judged on i would love to hear your thoughts on the judging system and i'd love to know who you're looking forward to watching the most during these two olympic weeks if you enjoyed this please do give us that thumbs up and if you haven't done so yet then hit that subscribe button and the little notification bell down in the corner so you can see all my videos when they come out happy skating and i'll see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Coach Julia

Views: 15,250

Keywords: Toe Loop Jump, Toe Loop Tutorial, Figure Skating Jumps, Figure skating, How to figure skate, Figure skating tutorial, Figure skating tricks, Ice skating lesson, Learn To Figure Skate, Beginner Skating Jumps, Flip Jump, Olympic Figure Skating, Ice Skating Olympics, Ice Skating Jumps, International Judging System, IJS Explained, Olympic Judging System, How is Figure Skating Judged

Id: d7q6HEmANDk

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022