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Inside the Rings

Skating’s Scoring Has Little Love for Artistry

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 Championships.

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, figure 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, creativity and originality.

Johnny Weir said skating had 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.

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Mirai Nagasu electrified a crowd at the United States Figure Skating championships in Spokane, Wash., on Saturday.Credit...Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

“It’s one thing I don’t like,” said Cohen, who finished fourth after a stumbling free skate.

Gerri Walbert, the executive editor of Blades on Ice magazine, said the judges were niggling over a failed quarter turn on a jump, which was 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, many fewer than football uses to determine whether a receiver had his 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 rewards and downgrades could be 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 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 expected to win. Performance does trump reputation.

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But the winner was Rachael Flatt, whose performance was steady but hardly inspiring artistically.Credit...Pool photo by Elaine Thompson/Getty Images

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.”

Perhaps people are still growing accustomed to figure skating being less political and predictable than it has been in the past, Zakrajsek said.

“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.”

Flatt and Nagasu will compete next month at the Vancouver Games. 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.”

He added: “She’s consistent and solid. You can depend on her.”

Zakrajsek, Flatt’s coach, quoted Sarah Hughes, the 2002 Olympic champion, saying, “When you go to the Olympics, you better stay vertical.”

But many will yearn for something more than an athlete who simply stays on her feet. After all, this is figure skating, not boxing.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: When Scoring Has Little Love for Artistry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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