DR Jennifer, I know what you mean about the skating. Overall, it was not inspired skating by the podium dwellers. However, as I tried to explain last night, the new scoring system is a lot kinder to falls than the old one, and this is something all of us will have to get out of our heads. In the old system, Sasha Cohen would have fallen off the podium for one fall and one miss (with hands down). Now with the new system, hands on the ice doesn't constitute a fall, you get credit for the revolutions of a jump you do even if you land on your butt, and jumps in the second half of the program are awarded with bonus points. This is where Cohen made up for her mistakes because the second half of her program was flawless, and Slutskya's major mistakes all came in the second half robbing her of bonus points.
It used to be said that the judges would judge what you did, not what you left out, but that was never really true. Now, every aspect of a routine gets some kind of point consideration, and on these little things championships can rise and fall. There are good and bad aspects to both judging systems, but looks like this one is here to stay with us for awhile. (The last change in judging, when ordinals replaced points in judging, lasted almost thirty years.)
BTW, the Japanese skater who won also played it very conservatively. She had a triple-triple combination planned, and lowered her content because of Cohen's mistakes and the likelihood of Slutskya's tendency to play it safe. She played the odds and won.
