Why Adelina Sotnikova beat Yuna Kim, fair and square

It's been almost a week, and people are still complaining, and what I've noticed is that many (especially those who aren't figure skating fans at all) don't understand how figure skating scoring works, and are busy making side-by-side video comparisons and talking about the cleanliness of the skate in the simultaneous comparison, among other rather arbitrary measures that declare Kim the winner over Sotnikova. While the cleanliness of the skate, or how it looked, etc., may factor in to the final score, there is a much more structured approach to awarding points. Judges don't just watch a performance, not taking any notes, and then arbitrarily award points at the very end based on how the program made them feel or how graciously the skater performed.

The much more rigorous figure skating scoring system is as follows: In all four disciplines (pairs, men's individual, ice dancing, and women's individual), there is a short program that qualifies skaters for the free skate the next day, and the free skate is the medal round. However, it is not only free skate score that decides the medals, but rather the combined total of the short program and free skate scores. Within each of the two phases, there is a technical score and a component score. These are summed, and then the two program scores are summed. So there are actually a total of four different scores that go in to the final score, which equals short program technical + short program component + free skate technical + free skate component.

Technical score refers to the overall difficulty of the program, which is set before the skate even takes place. The skater submits her full program, not only what jumps and other elements she plans to include, but also at exactly what minute-and-second mark in the piece each element will take place. This is actually why when you watched NBC Sports Network's live figure skating over the course of the two weeks, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir were able to tell you exactly what jump was coming up next in the routine right before it happened.

(Aside: Sandra Bezic and Scott Hamilton were able to do the same for you in primetime on NBC, and you may have thought that this was only because it was on tape delay, but they actually called the action live as it happens (Their booth was located on a different side of the Iceberg Skating Palace from Tara and Johnny.), and when it aired in primetime the only editing that was done was to only air the best skaters to fit in the primetime window. No editing of their commentary was done. In fact, this is true for all of NBC's primetime delayed Olympic events, summer or winter. Never is commentary added after the event, regardless of how much time later the event airs.)

To return to apropos discussion of how the technical score is computed, a group of judges awards a score based on the submitted program and jumps, and the component score is the only score that is calculated during the actual performance.

Courtesy: nbcolympics.com

As you can see from this skater comparison graphic that aired during NBC's coverage of the free skate, the difficulty of Sotnikova's program was 5.85 points higher than that of Kim's, and since she ended up beating Kim by 5.76 points in the free skate, it can easily be said that the slight misstep Sotnikova had (that everybody seems to be harping on in the last week, saying that Kim skated perfectly, while Sotnikova did not) could have resulted in a deduction of .09. Even if you don't believe that the deduction could have been so small for that, it is close enough to true to say that most of Sotnikova's final victory margin was due to her technical score, which was predetermined, even before the short program took place. The final result could not have been rigged in favor of Sotnikova because she was a surprise on day 1! Remember that the final score is a sum of the short program and free skate scores, and Sotnikova's being only .28 behind Kim after day 1 came out of nowhere. If the judges truly were trying to rig the scoring in favor of a Russian, they would have upped the technical score of Yulia Lipnitskaya, the 15-year-old Russian sensation who had stolen the show in the team event, and had won both the short program and the free skate for the women's individual for Russia. If any Russian were expected to upset Kim, it was she, and the judges, even if they were trying to rig in favor of a Russian, certainly weren't thinking about Sotnikova at all when they assigned technical scores to both phases of the program before the short program even took place.

Finally, let me break down the two performances, and find where Sotnikova's program was 5.85 points harder than Kim's. The two key areas were the double-triple combination and the layback spin. The following composite images are by the New York Times.

double axel followed by triple toe

Sotnikova chose the hardest double for her double-triple: the double axel. She reached an excellent height and distance on both jumps, and received a 10% point bonus for executing the combination in the second half of her program.

triple salchow followed by double toe

Kim chose one of the easiest doubles, and also neither of Kim's jumps in the combination reached as high in the air as either of Sotnikova's did. The combination finished with little speed.

On the double-triple combination, Sotnikova scored 3.44 points higher than Kim.

Layback spins:

In her layback spin, Sotnikova changed positions with ease while maintaining her speed and intensity from the first position, for which she scored .73 higher than Kim.

While there are several other smaller elements involved in determining the technical scores of the two skaters, that can more fully explain the 5.85 differential, these end up being the most important, and hopefully now you can see that regardless of how it looked, and regardless of other performances, Sotnikova deserved the gold medal.