How figure skating became all about the jumps
There are 15 sports and 109 events at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but the crown jewel of these games is the beautiful, rigid, surprisingly complicated bloodsport known as figure skating.
It all seems simple enough. The parameters of the sport are finite: Skaters are limited to about seven combined minutes of skating between the short and long programs and only six allowed jumps. They’re bound by the laws of gravity. The cardinal rules remain “more rotations are better than fewer rotations” and “don’t fall.” Still, the way skating is scored can be hard to decipher.
Figure skating is all about the minute details. It’s a competition that comes down to microseconds, a half-degree of an angle, and decimal points. Every four years, skaters pour in a lifetime of effort — thousands of jumps and spins and falls; hours and hours of flexibility exercises; nagging injuries; an inordinate amount of time spent in the cold — into less than 10 minutes of skating.
And while it requires superhuman strength and balance, the sport has traditionally had an artistic side, too. The way a skater moves through the ice and the shapes they create are supposed to be beautiful. There is an unquantifiable aspect that some skaters have that makes you never want to stop watching.
The scoring system — which favors athleticism, especially jumps — is controversial, and it speaks to a debate about what figure skating is supposed to be. I spoke with former skaters, experts, and even physicists to explain how scoring and jumping works in figure skating, in the plainest English possible.
https://www.vox.com/2022/2/3/22912876/figure-skating-scoring-explained-winter-olympics-2022
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