#ANYWAYS back to watching some more yuzu and bing dwen dwen interactivity WOO

[hanyusan]

Hi, I would like to ask you about Yuzu’s scores, is it true that they judge him unfairly? And since when it started being like that? Also does it have anything to do with Nathan Chen?

Thank you:)

This question is as loaded as a trebuchet :) But hopefully I can provide some answers.

I don’t plan on going into a ton of detail because this topic has been analyzed so many times that it’s almost like beating a dead horse’s grave. Also, gonna be honest, I do my best to not analyze scoring at all – the anger from Yuna Kim being robbed in Sochi is still fresh, and I have zero faith that the situation will ever get better.

But short answer to your first question is yes.

Longer answer is yes: judging corruption in recent years has escalated across the board, and Yuzu is one of many victims. Scoring in the women’s field is equally, if not more infuriating (not to mention the surplus of other major issues that that discipline is suffering; keeping the women’s fans in my thoughts). As much as we can speculate, there’s a lot of politics involved behind judging that go beyond our understanding. Hence why skaters belonging to big-name federations like those of Russia and the U.S. are consistently overscored, whereas other skaters are scored much more strictly and/or underscored.

People have been saying that Yuzu has been underscored for a very long time, but the protests definitely got louder and more frequent once Nathan started receiving similar and eventually higher scores for performing programs that came off as lackluster in comparison to Yuzu’s. This is aside from jumps, as I hope we can agree that Nathan’s technical skills in that field are top-class. But his components are scored as if they’re on the same level as Yuzu’s. [insert long-winded explanation about how they’re not, which I’m not going to write out because if people can’t see the differences with their own two eyeballs, nothing I say will convince them otherwise]

The reason Nathan’s scoring should raise question marks is not, as some people will say, because his style is not “elegant.” I don’t think that any skater should be forced into a box of skating to classical music or donning glittery costumes (though, the costume part would be nice; no one will ever convince me that those costumes of his are fashionable). But having a different style doesn’t mean that he should be held to different (read: lower) standards, yet that is a luxury he has continuously enjoyed. He and the women’s discipline are both representative of how the sport is not prizing artistry as much as it claims to. Personally, that’s what bothers me the most – if the sport no longer cares about anything other then jumps, then it shouldn’t pretend to value something that clearly has fallen out of favor. Lying is far more anger-inducing than having a bad take.

To say that any of this “has to do with Nathan” would be misleading. Most seasoned figure skating fans will correctly tell you that the problem lies with the system in place, not with the skaters involved. But Nathan has become the perfect scapegoat for the judges: a lot of outspoken netizens point fingers at him when Yuzu does not win gold in a competition where both of them are present. It has gotten to a point where I’m convinced they make it a point to talk about how much they respect one another to mitigate the amount of hate going on. (Fun fact, I pretty much quit going on Weibo because the vitriol there is far more toxic than Twitter...didn’t know that was even possible. But that’d probably take too long to talk about in this ask.)

Nathan is an easy target, especially due to his more “modern” style, which borders on sacrilegious for some figure skating fans. It’s turned into one of those situations where disliking one thing about someone leads to a twisted “justification” for scorning their whole person. But is Nathan to blame for (supposedly) transforming the sport into a jumping competition, or are the judges, for rewarding him and pushing him to continue doing so? We all know the answer.

In other words, Nathan’s scores being inflated and Yuzu’s scores being depressed are correlated through unfair judging, but neither causes the other. We just have to take the judges out back for a stern talking to.