It was clear to me and millions of other people watching the U.S. Figure Skating Championships Ladies' long program last night on NBC that Marai Nagasu CLEARLY won the free skate - no one touched her when it came to grace, choreography, musical interpretation and artistic execution. She floated, light as a feather, seemingly slightly above the ice rather than on it, and made what is a grueling athletic performance look like an effortless ballet. I was entranced.
Watching Rachel Flatt skate left me - well, flat. She's technically proficient but she is not a gifted skater, she does not have the something special that excites audiences and draws you into her performance. Nagasu clearly does have that IT factor. To a lesser extent, the Wagner girl, who finished in 3rd place, has IT too. Flatt does not. Her unfortunate last name reflects her unfortunate appearance on the ice.
Too bad, because Flatt is the new U.S. Women's Figure Skating Champion and she doesn't deserve it. There's a big fat slap in the face from the U.S. judges to all skating fans in the USA. I'm surprised they didn't jump on top of the counter above their chairs and do a little hoochie dance while thumbing their collective noses at us as the scores went up. They should have been booed out of the arena.
Here is what
The New York Times had to say about the hose job the judges did on Nagasu:
Inside the Rings
Skate Scoring Has Little for Artistry
By JERÉ LONGMAN
Published: January 24, 2010
SPOKANE, Wash. — As Mirai Nagasu completed her stirring free skate Saturday night, the crowd at Spokane Arena leapt to its feet in raucous applause. A hail of toy animals rained onto the ice. Clearly, most in attendance thought that Nagasu had won the United States Figure Skating championship.
Except that she had not.
Even some of the sport’s most astute experts were stumped.
“I blew it,” Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic champion and
NBC commentator, said of Nagasu. “I thought she won. I got caught up in the performance.”
Instead,
Rachael Flatt, 17, of Del Mar, Calif., won her first American title with a performance that was steady and reliable but workmanlike, slow and hardly inspiring artistically. The crowd also gave her a standing ovation, but one far less boisterous.
In Flatt, skating’s controversial scoring system has its perfect competitor, one who is mathematically astute in piling up points. Yet she also leaves an audience wanting much more in terms of rousing performance.
Nagasu, 16, the 2008 national champion from Arcadia, Calif., delighted the crowd with a graceful and engaging free skate but finished second because she slightly under-rotated three triple jumps.
Critics of the point-based scoring system find it to be overly nitpicking — too weighted toward negativity in taking points away from skaters, too eager to reward competent but lackluster technical proficiency over risk and creativity and originality.
Johnny Weir said skating has become a math test.
Sasha Cohen eloquently and ruefully said that a skater’s head must now be stuffed with numbers. Did I spin eight times? Did I hold my spiral six seconds? In her view, bean counting has become an Olympic sport.
“It’s one thing I don’t like,” said Cohen, who finished fourth after a stumbling free skate.
Gerri Walbert, executive editor of Blades on Ice magazine, said the judges were niggling over a failed quarter turn on a jump, which is essentially what placed Nagasu in second instead of lifting her to first. The jumps are viewed by the scoring panel on only one camera, from one angle, much fewer than football uses to determine whether a receiver got both feet inbounds on a catch in the end zone.
“This is the problem with the scoring system,” Walbert said. “The crowd thought Mirai won and she didn’t because of something the crowd couldn’t see — a quarter under-rotation on her jumps. They’re making way too much of that. It’s getting to the point where it’s ridiculous. It hurts the sport.”
Even if Flatt did deserve to win — and under the flawed scoring system she did — skating officials did her a great disservice by not explaining to the crowd why she won.
Instead of placing the marks for each element in the skaters’ routines on the arena video screen, so that rewards and downgrades could be readily visible for each jump and spin, officials served the audience dry cumulative figures: Flatt finished with 200.11 points to 188.78 for Nagasu. The numbers might as well have been qualifying speeds at Daytona.
Even a technical expert who appraised each skater’s performance for spectators via in-house radio seemed to miss the tiny but critical mistakes that separated Nagasu from Flatt.
“It would be better for the sport if enough information was provided to the audience so they could understand why a skater got the marks she did,” said George Rossano, an expert on the scoring system.
No doubt the old 6.0 system needed revision after the judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. And the new formula makes one significant improvement: Judges no longer seem to be holding places, or reserving the highest scores, for skaters who are anticipated to win. Performance does trump reputation.
Various results at the national championships showed that “our sport is becoming more fair,” Tom Zakrajsek, who coaches Flatt, said in defending the new scoring system. “I thought Rachael was beautiful tonight.” [Well, DUH! What else would he say? Come on!]
Perhaps people are still growing accustomed to figure skating being less political and predictable than it has been in the past, Zakrajsek said. [This is bullshit.]
“All sports deal with numbers,” he said. “If figure skating is a combination of sport and art, then it shouldn’t be one way or the other way — all technical or all artistic.”
Noting that divers and gymnasts are penalized for imperfect rotations in their routines, Zakrajsek said, “Why wouldn’t we do that in figure skating?”
He added: “This is not a beauty pageant.”
Both Flatt and Nagasu will compete next month at the Winter Games in Vancouver. Their styles will appear in stark contrast.
“One is a great athlete, one is an artist,” said Frank Carroll, who coaches Nagasu.
Hamilton described Flatt as someone who “punched her time clock every moment. She’s consistent and solid. You can depend on her.” [Yeah, to put the audience to sleep.]
Zakrajsek, Flatt’s coach, quoted
Sarah Hughes, the 2002 Olympic champion, as saying, “When you go to the Olympics, you better stay vertical.”
But many will yearn for something more than an athlete simply staying on her feet. After all, this is figure skating, not boxing.
