Kamila Valieva, the favorite for the women’s gold medal, performs her jumps with her arms over her head. In an effort to make a system that was less prone to abuse, a new method that focused on quantifiable numbers took shape. Investigations found that there was vote swapping with judges abusing the subjective scoring method (the old system was based on two ranges of scores - artistic and technical merit - that top out at 6.0). Two decades ago, figure skating was rocked by the competition-fixing scandal that affected the Olympic pairs and ice-dancing event. The controversy all stems from the current scoring system. Is figure skating a jumping contest, or is it a performing art? Can you have both athleticism and artistry? And what happens when the sport starts favoring one aspect over the other? Over the past three Winter Olympics, experts, skaters, and fans have debated whether the figure skating event has become more about sheer athleticism and much less about artistry and presentation. How figure skating scoring works‚ and why jumps dominate I spoke with former skaters, experts, and even physicists to explain how scoring and jumping works in figure skating, in the plainest English possible. The scoring system - which favors athleticism, especially jumps - is controversial, and it speaks to a debate about what figure skating is supposed to be. There is an unquantifiable aspect that some skaters have that makes you never want to stop watching. The way a skater moves through the ice and the shapes they create are supposed to be beautiful. Every four years, skaters pour in a lifetime of effort - thousands of jumps and spins and falls hours and hours of flexibility exercises nagging injuries an inordinate amount of time spent in the cold - into less than 10 minutes of skating.Īnd while it requires superhuman strength and balance, the sport has traditionally had an artistic side, too. It’s a competition that comes down to microseconds, a half-degree of an angle, and decimal points. The cardinal rules remain “more rotations are better than fewer rotations” and “don’t fall.” Still, the way skating is scored can be hard to decipher.įigure skating is all about the minute details. The parameters of the sport are finite: Skaters are limited to about seven combined minutes of skating between the short and long programs and only six allowed jumps. There are 15 sports and 109 events at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but the crown jewel of these games is the beautiful, rigid, surprisingly complicated bloodsport known as figure skating.
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