Wow!!!!!!!

Hughes, Hughes, Hughes.

Pure gold.

you should have added (spoiler) to the topic of this thread

wowwee! that was a great performance!

was that daddy hughes who hugged her before nbc went to commercial?

seven triples!

that was simply amazing!!! lets go hughes legacy & cornell connection!

Congradulations, you beat me to it.

GREAT Scores...what's up the Dansk judge...oh well

Cornell connection, and don't forget Great Neck Public Schools!

sarah will medal!

if Kwan wins gold, I am packing my balls and moving to Siberia.

packing your balls????

Remember, Sarah was fourth in the short.

come Irina...give your Long Island comrade a hand

so... who is leading at this moment? i am confused... this is some uncomprehensible system for a beginner!

incomprehensible, that is...

sarah is leading the long prog but michelle is leading overall, having won the short prog

maybe not, according to what scott hamilton just said....sorry

c'mon... c'mon...

YES!!!!!!!!!!!

holy shit!!!@ SHE WON!!!!!

unbelievable...

Guess the judges got it right for once....

a congressman on the phone? hm... who can that be? schumer?

Gary Ackerman...hehe.

OH YEAH...THE CORNELL PLUG!!

yeah. cornell got mentioned!!

the best exposure by far...

Quick question,

Did Sarah Hughes skate a between period demo last year? She did, right (my memory is slowly going ? What an awesome performance tonight!

That was apparently her younger sister.

That was Emily Hughes, her younger sister. I saw on the news she has a book... "I am a Skater".

That was Sarah's sister, Emily last year. IIRC, Sarah skated at Lynah the first time, 7 years ago. At the end of her routine, I told my wife: "we're going to watch that girl in the Olympics someday." I didn't know how prophetic I could be. Congrats to the Hughes' family. What a moment!!

how old is emily now? will we be seeing her in the next olympics, wherever that is?

Gold medals for Dana Antal and Sarah Hughes. Of course I'm so oblivious to the mainstream coverage that I thought the figure skating final was tomorrow. So at the time I was watching my tape of curling from earlier in the day, which would have been more enjoyable if my satellite signal hadn't kept cutting out.

Emily Hughes is 13 (I think). So we might see the two sisters competing in the same Olympic games 4 years from now.

Nice plug mentioning Dad captaining the Cornell Championship team....sort of makes up for the fact that Cornell didn't get mentioned with all the other schools during the womens hockey medal ceremonies.


And it was also nice to hear Great Neck North mentioned. (sorry Jordan, couldn't resist)

And it was also nice to hear Great Neck North mentioned. (sorry Jordan, couldn't resist)

That's ok. I'll accept her as part of the broader Great Neck Public Schools....I guess.

It sure has been intriguing over the last number of years reading often in Newsday about her progression....seeing profiles of her life growing up in Great Neck, going to North, etc.

And we over at South need no NBC mention. We stand on our own.

This one sums it up very nicely.

[www.usatoday.com]

Guess the judges got it right for once....

Apparantly the Russians don't think so....

I don't know why the IOC and Mr. Rogge didn't see all of this coming when they gave the Canadians the gold, but that was a decision tha was clealy going to open up a can of worms, and has.

The Russian Skating Federation plans on filing a formal protest, saying that Irina Slutskaya (sp?) should have been given the gold medal last night, as was the victim of juding bias.

Take it FWIW, I guess....

OK. I'm not American (so no cultural bias) but I know that Hughes deserved that win last night. The russian was artistically inferior and tho very athletic was last night also technically inferior. this is different from the canadian situation where they obviously ( though there is a handful who disagree) had the best performance of the evening to the point where almost everyone was certain that something underhanded was going on ( which it was). here the best girl simply came from behind to win.

One of the bonehead judges had Sarah fourth in the long program.

Seems to me the whole scoring system needs an overhaul. Simply put, to have the Hughes/Kwan relative placing depend on how well or poorly Slutskaya skated makes no sense whatsoever. (Suppose she did a triple axel into the boards and fractured her coccyx--should Kwan then get the gold instead of Hughes?)

They oughta add up scores, factor in some kind of degree-of-difficulty measure (to counter the Kwan/Eldredge posing and posturing effect), and whoever gets the most points wins, a la diving, gymnastics, etc. And the judges oughta be accountable after the fact for the reasons for their deductions, particularly for technical merit.

Well, if this quote from USA Today is correct, one Russian thinks so.

"But Russian Olympic Committee president Leonid Tygachev said of the women's figure skating: "I think the result is right.""

Oksana Baiul, in an MSNBC interview this morning, also thought the decision was clearly the correct one.

> Gold medals for Dana Antal and Sarah Hughes.

And Joe still has a chance.

Did any other Cornellians medal? I know we had some competing in the stoner... er... arial and snowboard events.

The International Skating Commision has already proposed a new scoring system. I read this on CNN a couple days ago. The system will award points based on completion of elements with attention to degree of difficulty. The other change is in the judges. Currently there are nine who rank the skaters and the highest number of first place votes wins, essentially. In order to make this more objective and reduce possible vote trading there will now be 14 judges allocating points but only 7 (randomly chosen by computer) will count.
Here's the proposal on CNN: [sportsillustrated.cnn.com]
It seems a lot more vague at this point than the original story made it sound. But a step in the right direction I think.

Travis Mayer (Meyer? Maier?) won a silver in something.

Moguls maybe?

yup. moguls. was actually thinking about it this morning and the few cornellians present in the olympics have fared much better than avg. hope nieuwy gets gold. that'd be 3 golds and 1 silver out of 5 chances. not too shabby at all.

Let's all hope for a Canada/USA gold medal game. . .that would be pretty neat for both teams, there would be basically a home crowd for everyone.

> The system will award points based on completion of elements with attention to degree of difficulty.

Of course, this is already supposed to be the basis of the technical marks. Generally speaking (I know, the pairs was an exception), the technical marks isn't where the controversy occurs.


> In order to make this more objective and reduce possible vote trading there will now be 14 judges allocating points but only 7 (randomly chosen by computer) will count.

Sounds awful. In a close contest, the computer's randomization will effectively determine the winner. That's hardly fair.

I would prefer that they extend the concept of dropping the high and low scores. Take the current 9 judges. For each set of marks (tech and presentation), drop the top 2 scores and the bottom 2 scores. Take the mean of the remaining 10 scores. Get rid of the ordinals -- simply score by that mean.

What is wrong with that simple solution?

Yep, this would be real progress, but one of the keys is getting rid of the ordinals. Last night, if all the skaters besides Hughes had crawled around the ice on all fours for four minutes, and if Kwan had been judged to have crawled the best by the majority of the judges, she would still have won the gold medal based on ordinals (i.e., she would have finished second in the long program and ended with 2.5 ordinals to Sarah's 3.0).

Even the ECAC playoff system isn't this stupid.

The ECAC playoff system makes the #4 and #5 skaters from the short program skate a run off immediately before skating again in the long program.

that is my hopes. that way i'll be happy no matter who wins (tho i DO have a preference!)

Greg Berge wrote:

> In order to make this more objective and reduce possible vote trading there will now be 14 judges allocating points but only 7 (randomly chosen by computer) will count.

Sounds awful. In a close contest, the computer's randomization will effectively determine the winner. That's hardly fair.

Greg-

I think you are missing the point. In a blind random system, any horse trading for votes is *immediately* eliminated. I'm not going to try to trade votes with you if I can't be sure you actually followed through on our deal.

If someone better versed in history can correct me, please do, but I seem to remember that the US moved to the secret ballot system in the mid-1890's to prevent people like Boss Tweed from buying votes. If a buyer cannot confirm that the seller actually voted as promised, the entire vote fixing scheme falls apart.

-j

"That's just sour grapes," said Dan Tomaselli, a high school music teacher in Great Neck, N.Y. "The Russians, of all people, should keep their mouths shut."

Uh-oh.

The Russians have gone and done it. They've pissed off Mr. Tomaselli, and you do NOT want to get on his bad side!!

May they feel the wrath!

"Get....in...my....belly!"

So are you saying that you prefer having the short program count the same as the long program?

It's interesting to note that when Sarah performed poorly during the short program (and even before skating) there was some criticism of her decision to not stay in the Salt Lake City area earlier, similar to the criticism of Kwan at Nagano. When Kwan won the silver in Nagano, it was blamed in part on her decision to live offsite etc.

Now that Hughes has won the gold, what happened to all the naysayers who said she blew it by her choice of living arrangements? Maybe the experts should wake up and realize that where you stay or where you practice or whether you partake of the Olympic experience is mostly irrelevant and that on some days you have it, and some days you don't. Unfortunately for Michelle Kwan (and Slutskaya), she just didn't have it yesterday.

> Greg- I think you are missing the point. In a blind random system, any horse trading for votes is *immediately* eliminated. I'm not going to try to trade votes with you if I can't be sure you actually followed through on our deal.

Nope, I think you are missing the point. ("No, you." "No, you!" "Oh yeah... step outside." I'll explain.

Whether vote trading will or will not disappear is beside my point (although you are also not correct in saying that randomization guarantees the end of vote trading, because if the odds of having your own vote count are reduced by the same ratio as the person with whom you are negotiating, then an attempted deal is still attractive -- that is how the prisoner's dilemma problem in game theory resolves to the negotiators' maximum advantage).

But my point isn't about vote trading, it's about how winners get picked. Random selection of results will make ranking close competitors a total crap shoot. The slight variance in the range of votes will be overwhelmed by the large variance in the potential outcomes of judge selection.

(Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that close competitions are inherently not resolvable because there's such a high degree of subjectivity, but I think I'd rather have an artificial human resolution than a coin flip).

Of course not. Why would you think that? Simply weigh the long program twice as much in accumulating total points from the two programs.

Just get rid of ordinals. What makes no sense is having the outcome depend on whether Slutskaya finished between Hughes and Kwan in the long program (Hughes wins) as opposed to finishing below both (Kwan wins). What does that have to do with the relative merits of Hughes's and Kwan's skating both nights.

How does throwing out two more scores fix a problem?

It minimizes the effect of vote trading and unilateral vote skewing. I'm the US judge and you're the French judge (sorry). I have a #2 world ranked US woman (#1 is a Russian) in the womens and you have a #2 world ranked French team (#1 are Jamaican -- but they're really good) in the pairs.

So we cut a deal. I boost the French pair by .2 points and cut the Jamaicans down by .2 points, while you boost the US woman .2 points and cut the Russian woman .2 points.

As of now, we really do affect the result. But if you cut the high and low pair of scores, if all of our scores are out of line with the other judges, then our inflated and defalted scored miss the cut when the high and low scores are tossed out. The result is that the skaters with the best scores among the honest judges will win. If it turns out our scores aren't out of line with the judges and other scores are cut, then nothing was lost -- our "fix" just happened to accidentally reflect the real quality on the ice.

And like Al says, you double-count the long program mean: S+2L, when you compute the skaters final score.

sorry to get off-topic, but i just watched a video clip on cnn.com and it was reported that the russians had filed a complaint to ISU and they demanded that another gold medal be awarded to irina.

are they serious?