Figure Skating Athletes Generator

So you drew a figure skater

You wanted a figure skater and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It covers all four disciplines, men's and women's singles, pairs, and ice dance, which is why some entries are two people rather than one.

The tool is the simple part. Figure skating is worth understanding because it is a judged sport that was forced, publicly and humiliatingly, to rebuild the way it judges, and everything you see on the ice today is downstream of one bad night in 2002.

When a perfect score was 6.0

For most of its history skating was scored out of six. Judges held up cards, and a 6.0 meant perfection, and it was rare enough that the crowd would erupt at the sight of one. Torvill and Dean received nine of them for a four-minute ice dance to Ravel's Boléro at the 1984 Olympics, and a generation of British people who have never watched skating since can still tell you about it.

It was a beautiful system and it was hopeless. Judges were not really scoring the skating; they were ranking the skaters against each other and against reputation, and there was no way to see how a mark had been arrived at. Nations traded votes. Everybody in the sport knew. A skater from a small federation could produce the routine of their life and finish behind a bigger name who wobbled, and no explanation was owed to anyone. The scores were opinion dressed as arithmetic.

The night the judging broke

At the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, the Canadian pair Jamie Salé and David Pelletier skated cleanly in the free programme. The Russian pair, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, made a visible error. The Russians won.

The arena booed for several minutes. What made this different from every previous grumble was that within days a French judge said she had been pressured to vote a particular way as part of an arrangement between federations. The story escaped the sport entirely and became front-page news. The International Olympic Committee, which does not enjoy this sort of thing, applied pressure of its own. In an unprecedented decision, a second set of gold medals was awarded, and the Canadians stood on the top step at a hastily arranged ceremony alongside the Russians. And then the sport tore up its scoring system.

What replaced it, and what it did to the sport

The system that came in is unrecognisable from the old one. Every element a skater performs, every jump, spin, lift and step sequence, has a fixed base value. Judges then award a grade of execution, adding or subtracting from that base value according to how well it was done. Presentation is scored separately across several components. Everything is added up, and the total is a number in the hundreds rather than a mark out of six.

It is transparent in principle and it is coldly arithmetical in practice. Skaters and coaches now optimise: they know exactly how many points a particular jump is worth, that jumps performed in the second half of a programme earn a bonus, and that a difficult element executed badly may still outscore an easy one done beautifully. Critics say the sport lost its poetry and became a spreadsheet on ice. Defenders point out that at least the spreadsheet can be checked. Both are right. When the tool draws you a skater, whether they competed before or after 2002 tells you almost everything about what their programmes looked like.

The jump arms race

The most visible consequence is the jumping. Because difficulty carries a fixed value, and because the values reward rotations, the sport has spent two decades adding spins in the air. Four-rotation jumps, quads, were once a rarity performed by one or two men. They are now the price of entry in the men's event, and a competitor who cannot land several of them is not in contention regardless of how they skate.

Yuzuru Hanyu, the Japanese skater who won two Olympic titles and is treated in Japan like a head of state, spent years attempting the one jump nobody had landed. The quadruple Axel, four and a half rotations, is the hardest jump in the sport because the Axel takes off forwards. The American Ilia Malinin landed it in competition in 2022. The women's event has its own version of this arms race, and it has come at a visible cost to very young bodies, which is a conversation the sport is only now having properly. Draw a skater from this list and it is worth asking what they were rewarded for attempting.

What a random figure skater is good for

• Winter Olympics sweepstakes. Draw skaters for a group and follow them through the short and free programmes.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and watch one programme from before 2002 and one from after. The difference is startling.
• Quiz and trivia prep. The ice dance and pairs names will catch out anybody who only knows the singles skaters.
• Settling a debate. Pull two skaters and argue the greater career, technical difficulty against artistry, which is the sport's permanent argument.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a skater, then research how a judging scandal rewrote an entire sport.

Figure skating questions

Why is figure skating no longer scored out of 6.0?

Because of a judging scandal at the 2002 Olympics, where a disputed pairs result led to a second set of gold medals being awarded. The sport replaced the 6.0 system with one that gives every element a fixed base value plus a grade of execution.

What is a quad?

A jump with four full rotations in the air. Quads are now essential in men's competition because of how the scoring rewards difficulty. The quadruple Axel, with four and a half rotations, is the hardest of all and was first landed in competition in 2022.

Why are some entries two names?

Because pairs and ice dance are contested by couples who compete and are scored together. The list covers all four disciplines: men's singles, women's singles, pairs and ice dance.

Can I pull several skaters, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a keyword the entry has to contain, which is handy for filtering by discipline.

References

1. International Skating Union. isu.org
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, figure skating. britannica.com