I mostly just lurk here, but all the hubbub over the way skating is scored (both on this board and in the papers) and this discussion about the elimination of school figures in skating touches on something that I'm both passionate and concerned about (that being gymnastics and its current situation).
Now, a lot of people in the figure skating world (which I know much less about than gymnastics, but am not totally clueless) seem to think it a marvelous idea to start scoring skating programs like gymnastics routines are now scored. I *strongly* disagree. The way that gymnastics routines are scored now- each jump, flip, etc. being given a certain numerical value and the total of skills performed correctly being added up at the end to give the athlete their score- is actually very recent. Until the early/mid-90's, it was much more like figure skating, with certain elements required and necessary for a routine to be judged out of a perfect score, but without the strict formula there is now (that skating people now want their sport to emulate). This allowed for judges to award originality and artistry just as much as technical perfection. Of course, it also allowed for just as many judging controversies (and some that were even more outrageous than the most blatant in the skating world), but, without going into too much detail, which could fill a book, when the sport (which bears the full name of Women's/Men's *Artistic* Gymnastics) switched from this method of scoring to a more controversy-resistant way, it gained "credibility," but lost its way. The word "artistic" no longer applies to the sport, and while in recent years, the governing body has tried to address this, gymnastics is still basically different athletes doing routines with the exact same high-value skills as everyone else, with a few half-hearted "dance" movements thrown in between them. There is next-to-zero originality in either gymnastics skills or expression and athletes that 10 years ago would have been considered just average, artistically, are now revered as the latest hope that individuality and artistry are still alive- and there are far too few of these gymnasts, anyway. Judges are supposed to deduct for "lack of artistry," but it hardly ever happens (if it did, believe me, the Romanians would not have been nearly as successful as they have been in the past decade), and cannot make up for the fact that artistry/originality used to be a sizable part of an athlete's base score and that an athlete used to earn actual bonus points for displaying an original skill. The sport, while moving somewhat forward technically, has gone into free-fall as a whole. If you think that skating is too focused on who can do the most quad jumps/jump combinations now, wait and see what happens if the ISU decides to emulate their scoring system. Gymnastics has also experienced a drastic decrease in popularity among the general public and I don't think anyone in the gymnastics community would deny that it is because of the "new" scoring system, as well as the lack of originality it has caused. The audience might as well be watching compulsory routines (the gymn equivalent of school figures).
Which is both ironic and brings me to my second point (and really does have to do with this school figures discussion). Compulsories (which were performed on every event) were eliminated from the Elite level of competition in gymnastics after 1996, ostensibly because it cost gyms and national training programs too much time and money to have their athletes working on both optional ("free") routines and compulsories and because spectators and TV viewers supposedly weren't interested in watching athletes do the same exact routines over and over again. Funnily enough (in a not-so-funny kind of way), since then, even with the success of the US women's gymn team in 1996, interest in the sport outside of it's hardcore fans has dwindled to the point where USA gymnastics, the national governing body, has lost money, and had a hard time finding both sponsors and television networks willing to show even half of the amount of gymnastics (per competition and in terms of competitions per year) that the public ate up not so long ago. So really, it's turned out that, while having compulsories may have cost the sport of gymnastics a considerable amount of money, the scoring system that all of a sudden the figure skating world is so eager to emulate has cost it much, much more- both monetarily and, on a sadder note, morally (can a sport have morals? I don't know, but I don't know how else to put it).
Lastly, the argument that compulsory routines and school figures are boring to watch ignores the fact that, because the athletes must work within the confines of something that is not tailored exactly to their strengths and abilities, it is the compulsories that distinguish the good from the truly great. The legends can take a compulsory routine and turn it into an expression of their individuality, an event that is as enjoyable to watch as an optional competition (and I'm really not just talking about floor exercise, where you've got the music and dancing worked in to make it a bit more palatable than skating's school figures- I've seen compulsory uneven bars routines that have taken my breath away- Nadia Comaneci's first perfect 10.0 was given for her compulsory bar routine and the actual routine is one of the most thrillingly perfect and exciting moments in gymnastics [and in my opinion all of sports] history). I think it's a shame that both figure skating and gymnastics have decided that what plays well on TV is more important than what develops athletes and helps improve and advance their respective sports. Gymnastics has taken it one step further, however, with the current scoring system and almost ruined itself in the process, with few signs of being able to drag itself out of this rut. I just hope, for the sake of figure skating fans, as well as the athletes and the growth of the sport, that the ISU won't make the same mistakes that the International Gymnastics Federation has.
