McGrath, Maybe it should depend on what "artistic" means. Executing a jump, spin, footwork sequence, or other move with good/proper/superior form should count more than just doing the move inelegantly or klutzily. Connecting one move to another with ease and fluidity should also count. But when judges rate a balletic style higher than, say, a hip hop dance style, I say they're no longer judging sport.

Wolfgang, I would add that it's assinine to round off the averaged ordinals from phase I and from phase II before combinining them. Often, in the compulsory phase there is very little difference in technical merit raw scores among the top five or ten contenders. Maybe they all completed all their required moves with no more than a few tenths of a point deductions, for example. Then in the free (long) program maybe one or two skaters clearly outperform all the others -- no mistakes, greater difficulty, superior form, greater speed, etc. Everyone else has major flaws in their programs.

The raw scores may reflect this greater spread in the long than the short program, but when they are first converted to ordinals and then rounded off before being combined, a lot of the variance is lost. With the current scoring system, if one phase of the competition is essentially a tie and the other has a very clear winner, there is a very good chance that that person will NOT win the overall competition.

Suppose we did this with timed sports like speed skating. Imagine that in phase I all the skaters' times were within .01 sec. of each other, with no two tied exactly. Then in phase II, one skater finishes 10 sec. ahead of the rest of the pack. If these two phases were treated the way figure skating treats scores--convert the times to ordinals and round them off to the nearest .5, that skater could very easily end up in 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th place!

Genie