Figure Skating Is Now Judging the Judging

Scoring System Takes Spotlight in Debut at Nationals

In figure skating's old scoring system, a simple 6.0 score signified the pinnacle of the sport, absolute perfection. Except for the times it suggested bias or flat-out cheating. No one could ever know for sure.

For years, nearly every major competition featured a handful of marks from individual judges that defied reality and common sense while hinting at backroom deals or chits for reputation.

"Before, spectators would sit back and watch a competition and see a mark of 5.7 or 5.8 and have no idea where that was coming from," said McLean's Michael Weiss, who will be trying to make his third Olympic team this week. "It was pulled out of the sky."

No more. After a judging debacle and the resulting international outcry at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City that led to the awarding of two gold medals in the pairs competition, the International Skating Union replaced its easily manipulated scoring system with a computerized, push-button process in which skaters are evaluated element-by-element and receive lump-sum scores.

Though the system has been used at major events and revised and refined for three years, this week's U.S. Figure Skating Championships in St. Louis -- at which the U.S. Olympic figure skating team will be selected -- and the 2006 Winter Games in Turin in February will mark its debuts at both events.

As a result, the sport's new arbiter, which so far has avoided major glitches while succumbing to a handful of minor ones, will find itself in a bit of a role reversal as the world's attention turns to the Olympics. It will be judged on how it judges.

Competitors will be forced to contend with its complexities, growing pains and, perhaps, as-yet-unknown defects as figure skating moves onto its biggest stage. In a sport that seems to attract controversy, the scoring system offers the biggest target. Casual fans will have to make sense of numbers for which they have no point of reference. Though the landslide of 6.0s awarded at last year's U.S. championships -- a record 28 -- suggested that judges got a bit carried away at the farewell event for the old system, at least the value of the marks immediately registered. At the recent International Skating Union Grand Prix Final, Japan's Mao Asada won with 189.62 points, edging Russia's Irina Slutskaya, who received 181.48.

"They're going to be lost," said Todd Eldredge, a six-time U.S. champion now with the pro tour Stars on Ice. The first time "I sat there and watched the new system, I went, 'One-hundred and thirty seven . . . is that good?' . . . It's hard to explain. We've all dealt with the old system for so long."

Commentators, meantime, will attempt to put into plain language an approach whose tweaks and clarifications this season alone required 73 pages of documentation. And skaters, coaches and Olympic officials will have to determine whether the new system can justify its existence by eliminating cheating and corruption from judging -- which is ultimately what it was designed to do.

"It's a work in progress, but the pros are obviously way over the cons in this system," said Canadian skater David Pelletier, a member of the pairs team that finished second at the 2002 Winter Games but received a gold medal after a judge in the competition admitted cheating. Pelletier and partner Jamie Sale have since turned pro and will not compete in Turin. "I would like to compete under it."

If the previous system was so simplistic that it all but accommodated cheating, this one is so complicated it requires extensive study to understand its nuances, or, skaters say, to achieve success with it. Every maneuver in every discipline has been assigned a base value whose worth can be increased or decreased by each member of the judging panel depending on the quality of execution. At the end of a program, skaters are also given grades in more general categories, including skating skills and choreography.

Even those like Pelletier, who appreciate the system overall, say it has swung judging from a broad-stroke approach to one that is so specific and all-encompassing that it has brought about a certain sameness to programs, as skaters try to stock their choreography with the tricks that merit the most points.