We need to update how ladies skating is scored this offseason

In the last six months, girls changed figure skating at a rate we have never seen. If scoring doesn’t change to keep pace, ladies figure skating will lose quality in areas other than jumps, and skating will risk losing the performances that make the sport special.

A figure skating program’s score is sum of two parts: the technical and the program components scores. The technical is made up of a set base value for each element (elements are: jumps, spins, and step sequences) performed in the program plus or minus a few points for the quality of how the element is completed. For the program components score, or PCS, judges rate the skater’s performance out of ten for each of the following six categories:

• Skating skills: How deep are your edges, are you generating speed and power through smooth, complex motions (good) or by easy, quick and scratchy ones (bad).
• Transitions: What happens between elements.
• Performance: Are you projecting or looking down at the ice, are you committing to every movement.
• Composition: How is the program organized, do you use a lot of the ice surface or just a small area, do your movements fit into a larger picture.
• Interpretation: Are your movements bringing the music to life, are you emotionally connecting.

Those scores are averaged and multiplied by a set factor. The goal of the factor is to give the components score the opportunity to be roughly the same share of the total score as the technical score and thus encourage programs that are complex in both technical elements and in performance. For the ladies free program that factor is 1.6. That means the highest program components score a lady’s free program can get is 80 points. With the addition of quad jumps, ladies can score near to over 100 points in just their technical score.

Below is an example of a protocol, or the detailed score sheet, for Anna Shcherbakova’s free program at the 2020 Grand Prix Final which in which she received a 94.52 technical score despite a fall and an underrotated quad.

In men’s skating the PCS factor is higher. For the men’s free program it is 2.0 meaning the highest possible PCS on a men’s free program is 100 points. That’s because mens’ technical scores ballooned so much when skaters began regularly competing quad jumps, that the weight of PCS needed to be increased to more evenly make up about half of a program’s score.

With the rapid introduction of quads to ladies skating, a similar math adjustment will need to be made. But it likely will not be changed until after the 2022 Olympics as traditionally all major scoring changes have come in the offseason following an Olympic Games.

Waiting that long is a mistake.

The best skaters have strong technical skills and strong components. That “well-rounded” skater should score higher than a skater who is technically talented but lacking in components, as well as a skater who has strong components but who is limited technically. But if PCS remain weighted and scored as they are, that won’t happen.

Take for example two of the top ladies skaters, Alena Kostornaia and Alexandra Trusova. Both are teenagers, and training mates in their first year of senior competition. Trusova is a technical wizard with multiple decently consistent quad jumps (and a tiny dog named Tina who often wears costume replicas).

Kostornaia competes programs that are more technically challenging than most of her competitors, but she does not compete any quads. Though she doesn’t have the technical value of Trusova, she is a much better skater. Her edges are deep, transitions flowing, and programs spellbinding (which honestly is a miracle considering the disappointing content that her team gives her and her training mates to work with).

In a perfect world, if both Trusova and Kostornaia skated cleanly, Kostornaia would have a decent chance to win. But that is not the case. PCS aren’t weighted high enough, and there is the problem — which occurs across skating disciplines — of components scores being heavily influenced by a skaters technical ability. Skaters who compete difficult jumps are frequently given component scores much higher than they deserve. I am not sure why that is, to be honest. And it would be beneficial to update scoring rules to offset this tendency as well.

Below are the program components scores for the free programs of Kostornaia and Trusova at the 2020 Grand Prix Final. There should be a bigger gap in these scores based on Kostornaia’s quality.

Now, you may say, isn’t it too early to make such drastic changes? It is true that there are still relatively few women competing at such a high technical level. Trusova hasn’t beaten Kostornaia yet this season because she hasn’t been able to land everything she plans. And it probably is too early. 15 year-old bodies will change. We don’t yet know that the level of technical difficulty Trusova and her teammate Anna Shcherbakova have been competing this year will be sustained over the next few seasons. Their training rink also has a history of burning out young girls and tossing them aside at the sign of weakness.

So maybe it would be an overreaction to make this change now. But the chance that we see ladies programs with multiple quads competed at the Olympics feels high enough that not upping the current free program PCS weight before that happens would be an even bigger risk than changing it prematurely. And I’m not saying we need to make the factor 2.0, I’d be totally fine with 1.8. We just need to do something to give the best program a chance to win the Olympics.

At the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics it was difficult for casual viewers to understand (and for hard-core fans to enjoy) why men who skated clean programs scored so much lower than men who were messier. And that’s with a more equally weighted PCS score. If nothing is done to ensure that components scoring keeps pace with the incredible, rapid technical growth of ladies figure skating, chances are very high that a messy program full of quads will beat out one that is a more balanced blend of difficult elements and complex skating. And that will be a shame (even if it means we get a chihuahua wearing an Olympic gold medal).