Understanding live scores

 Understanding live scores or That damned little box in corner

If you've watched any figure skating (US Nationals, European championships etc) this year you know, in the upper left hand corner of the screen is a bunch of numbers and lights. Is it distracting? Yes! But it also lets you know as the skater is performing, how well they are doing technically! And also what they are doing. Before the new judging system, you had to laser focus on a skaters feet in real time or hope the broadcast did a slow motion replay of critical elements to see if they did a lutz or a flip (for example). Let's get into it. 

The element

This is probably my favorite thing about this feature. They literally tell you what element you just saw! Some might find this a little redundant, but it can be really helpful in determining number of rotations in a jump, what kind of jump etc. It's most helpful for jumps admittedly (and throws in the case of pairs), but it also will tell you the level an element was awarded. 

Jumps have difficulty value, but so does every other required element. They have point values (which I'll cover below) but they also have a level. There are rules governing how a level is determined, but suffice it to say Level 1 is the easiest, and it goes up to Level 4, which is the hardest. In ice dance for example, the top teams will be going for level 4s on all required elements. So in the little box you might see FCSp or Flying Camel Spin 4. Flying Camel Spin is the name of the element and the 4 at the end tells you it's a level 4 element and that's good-that's the goal. 

Under review

Long time skating fans will know that since the move to the new scoring system (not to mention fancy cameras that can zoom and slow-mo) judges have been a lot stricter on judging the full number of rotations an athlete does in a jump. So if you take off for your jump at 12 o'clock, you better heckin land it at 12 o'clock. If the jump is in question, you may see it as R or an asterisk noting that the jump is under review. A lot of asterisks or Rs and that's generally not a good sign. Either the skater you're watching is known to cheat jumps (landing and then swinging their body around real quick to make it look fully rotated), or that they're about to lose big points in their Technical Elements Score (TES). Possibly both. 

Base score vs. max score (and also GOE)

At US Nationals this year, NBC went back and forth during different events between base and max score (sounds great! Who could get confused by that!?). What's the difference? Well any technical element in figure skating is given a specific point value. For example, a triple axel in the men's short program is given a base value of 8 points. If the skater executes a PERFECT triple axel and I mean perfect, the judging panel may award positive grade of execution (GOE) up to 5 points. Without going toooooo much into detail, there is a panel of 9 judges, and their GOE scores are averaged (*edit-someone on Tumblr thankfully pointed out that I missed an additional rule here so I've corrected it below and big shout out to the person who told me).

So if all award 5's, the average is a 5. The max score, or maximum possible score is one and a half (1.5) times the base value of the skill. So for a skill with base value of 8, the maximum possible score or max score is 12 (8x1.5). A skater who gets all 4s from the technical panel would have a GOE scaled down proportionally. But let's not get lost in the weeds. It doesn't really matter which score the broadcaster chooses to show, base score or max score, but they should be consistent throughout the competition (word to NBC). In my opinion, for an Olympics, when a lot of non-loonies like me will be watching, they should show the max score. Base score gets too into the weeds. 

The color coding is. Well, in figure skating it's fine-the way they've used this color coding in gymnastics is a source of rage so we'll ignore that. Suffice it to say that generally speaking, if a skater receives a positive GOE, they'll get a little green light in that corner box (see pic above taken from 2022 Euros broadcast.). 

Leader vs. current

Pretty self explanatory, this is just comparing the leader's technical score to the current competitor's technical score. To be honest, I don't really like when this is included in the live score. If you see that leader says "44" and current says "10" you might think the current competitor is doing terribly when in reality, the leader's 44 accounts for the leader's whole program and the 10 might only count for the first 30 seconds of the current competitor's program. So it doesn't really tell you anything until the current competitor...finishes. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a live scoring widget. 

If you dig a little deeper, things get complicated. You'll find that "leader vs. current" is only telling you half the story. The total score for the short program (for example) is about 50% technical score (TES), 50% program components (which includes things like "skating skills" and "interpretation"). 

So say at the end of a competitor's program, it shows the leader has 50 points in the technical score and the current competitor has 45. You might think they lost. But a few minutes later, in the "Kiss and Cry" area, the score flashes and the current competitor wins because the "leader" was a dead-eyed robot person who skated to elevator music. 

This essentially means the "leader" may not have the best technical score-I'll leave for you to decide then whether including "leader vs. current" in the live scoring is worthwhile or not.