How to understand the figure skating scoring system
As the women's free skate Thursday night begins to wrap up the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, all eyes will be on Russians Alina Zagitova and Yevgenia Medvedeva from the OAR Team.
The skaters sit in the top two slots with 82.92 and 81.61 points, respectively, following Tuesday's short program. The highest placed American is Mirai Nagasu, who's in ninth place with 66.92 points.
Before any medals are handed out, though, the figure skaters will be scored and judged in what can feel like a confusing system. It's certainly not simple. Judges take into account everything from artistry to presentation (those costumes mean something), how well rotated a spin is, and how the skater landed from a jump.
As the 24 qualifying contenders battle gracefully for gold, here's how to decode the scores in the longer free skate routine.
How the Winter Olympic figure skating scoring system works
Skaters are required to do a certain number of jumps and spins in their routines. The six jumps are the Axel, flip, loop, Lutz, Salchow, and toe loop. You'll notice when those happen since they're the big moves, and the commentators will have plenty to say about how well (or poorly) they went. Commentators will also try to guess how the judges will rate the jump.
Competitors are judged on both the technical elements of how well they jump, spin, and skate and on the overall performance of their routine. Their eventual score breaks down into several components.
• Technical element score
The total element score is based on all the technical elements and is awarded by two groups of judges: one nine-judge panel and another three-judge technical panel.
The technical stuff — Lutz jumps, spins, and footwork — are given difficulty levels one through four. Performing a level-four spin will earn you more points. So attempting the more difficult moves often mean higher points — which is something the Russian athletes are known to do. Even butchering a more difficult jump can get you more points than pulling off an easier move.
• Grade of execution
This is another (confusing) part of the technical scoring process. For each move, the nine judges have a "grade of execution" which is between -3 and 3. That number is added to a predetermined base value, for say, a triple Axel. The highest and lowest scores from the judges get dropped, so the average of the seven remaining scores make up part of the technical score.
The base values of all moves are added up with the seven execution scores and totaled for the final technical score known as the total element score.
• Program component score
Then there's the overall program judging. Judges can give .25 to 10 points for five different program components: skating skills, transitions, performance, composition, and interpretation.
The judges' scores are averaged so you have five components with an average score out of 10. The total is multiplied by 1.6 for the women's free skate (the short program was .8).
For Zagitova's high-scoring routine, she earned more than half her points from her technical score (45.30). Here's her score break-down from the judges:
Together the technical and program totals make up the total segment score that we see presented in the kiss and cry booth. After tonight's skate, the scores combined with those from Tuesday's program will determine which athletes get a medal.
Told you it was more complicated than a triple Lutz-triple loop combination.
You can watch the show tonight starting at 8 p.m. ET. But maybe leave the head-spinning math to the judges.
Topics Olympics
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
