7D.2 - equal ranking of the three technical scores
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The Technical part of the judging is broken into three subcategories. These subcategories are weighted as follows:
Quantity of Unicycling Skills And Transitions 25%
Mastery And Quality of Execution 37.5%
Difficulty And Duration 37.5%
Why not have them equal? Easier for judges to understand and I personally believe the best routines from the technical judging perspective has many skills and transitions.
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I understand this point! And also think it would be easier for the judges to understand their rankings.
but on the other side: I saw many routines with so many tricks on a medium level and they didn’t take any care of the quality... just to have as much tricks as possible.
I prefer routines, where the quality and mastery of the tricks is in the center.
Just my opinion: For me it is more important that the quality and mastery is on a good level. The quantity of the tricks doesn’t tell if it is a good routine or not.
But I would love to hear what the other think about this point...
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I think it would be good to have equal weights for all three categories.
It would be up to the rider to balance the quality and quantity in the routine. As falls are counted separately (making up 10 % of the overall score) and mastery still is one third of the technical score, I think that riders would still put a lot of emphasis on the quality of their routine and refrain from putting a large number of tricks in the routine that they do not really master.
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I agree with Kathi's opinion.
The quality, mastery and difficulty of tricks tells much more how good the rider is in technical means. In my opinion the quantity should not be judged equally to mastery and difficulty to prevent riders just putting as many tricks as possible into their routine. And on top of that the quanitity is somehow also considered in quality since the rulebook says that a routine only gets a high amount of points in difficulty when having many difficult skills.
Regarding the understandability of technical judging: I think it's not difficult for judges to understand how technical is judged since there has been the change to 10 points each subcategory last time. There is only a different calculation afterwards.
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I think quantity is what makes a routine fun to watch from a technical standpoint: if the rider can show tricks at all times during the routine, switch between them fluidly and rapidly that is amazing and not repeat tricks it is an amazing feat. There'll obviously be tricks that are "not the best" amongst them but the overall difficulty of the routine does increase. Also, it's simply harder to complete a routine where one is doing tricks all the time as it's more exhaustive and gives less chance to catch ones breath.
There's a well known tradeoff between taking a chance and doing a lot of tricks during one's routine or doing fewer tricks to have a higher chance of completing them. As such I think it makes sense to prioritize the quantity category.
With that said there could perhaps be added language that not only does the quantity of tricks matter but also how much of the routine is doing tricks. Two riders might each do 20 tricks but one could do them faster and have several "regular cycling breaks" whereas the other is doing tricks longer and is thus "in a trick" during the whole routine. I would rate the latter higher but it doesn't explicitly talk about this in the rules.
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I also understand both sides, but have to agree with Kathi and Nina a little bit more.
In my opinion it's the quality of the tricks what makes a good routine, not the quantity. Personally, I think a routine with less but difficult tricks in a good quality is worth more than a routine to which for example basic tricks have been added just to increase the number.
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I would not want to see a routine packed with a large number of low level tricks either. If this happened, I would expect a judge to give much lower scores in the other two areas, which would add up to a lower score overall.
The name of the score is "Quantity of Unicycling Skills And Transitions", but in the text of the rulebook there is discussion about "Variety". A routine with a high Variety that has tricks done with great mastery and difficulty should score more.
I'm not suggesting competitors should pack their routines with many basic tricks as this will give the whole routine lower scores overall.
Giving equal weight to the three scores is simply rewarding only a small bit more the routine that has more quantity and variety.
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I don't think that a rider who packs their routine with a ton of basic tricks would really loose points in mastery and quality of execusion. It's harder to perform a good execusion with difficult tricks than with the basic ones. In Germany tricks already tend to get shorter and changing that rule would probably increase that effect.
I can understand your idea behind it Connie. While judging you normally don't have the time to calculate your scoring and i'm sure not every judge knows the exact weighting of the categories. In Germany we mostly judge with tablets and that's really nice it shows your ranking with the weighting of the categories calculated inside right away.
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I would like to add something to Lisa's comment: When you look at rule 7D.2.2 Mastery And Quality of Execution it says: "If a rider is showing good style during difficult skills, the Mastery score should be high", but I don't think that this sentence alone is enough to prevent a routine with possibly even very simple tricks from achieving a high score in mastery and quality of execusion. Because all of the listed aspects (duration, stability, speed, synchronization, fluidity of transition) are especially easy to fulfill with simple tricks. And also the table 7F.1 Technical Judging Grid gives no reasons not to distribute high scores also for routines with very simple tricks.
Right now quantity of unicycling skills and transitions together with mastery and quality of execusion are 62.5% of the technical score - In my opinion, this value is too high overall, as the difficulty of the tricks is practically not taken into account. Weighting all three categories equal would mean that we give the two categories even more weight (66.6%) without taking difficulty into account ans I don't like that.
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Jan, I'm not sure I understand your point about the percentages, can you clarify?
I guess the question comes down to, if we're looking only at the technical score, should a routine that has lower difficulty, many skills, performed well score the same as a routine with high difficulty, fewer skills, still performed well? In my opinion, the routine that has fewer skills but much higher difficulty should score higher. If we change the percentages to be equal, the two routines above would score similarly and I think that's incorrect.
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I agree with Patricia and the opinion, that a routine with fewer skill but higher difficulty should score higher, than a routine with lower difficulty and many skills.
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Please remember that this section includes "Variety".
If a routine has high difficulty, fewer skills AND low variety, then I think it should score lower than a routine with medium difficulty, medium skills and high variety.
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I'm sorry I didn't get to answer until today.
Patricia, I completely agree with you that in your example the routine with the higher difficulty should score higher - that was it what I wanted to express with the percentages. In addition, with the percentages I wanted to make clear that a large part of the score currently goes on the quantity of unicycling skills and transitions together with mastery and quality of execusion and a - in my opinion too small - part on the difficulty of the tricks. Because it is clearly easier to perform many easy tricks with a high mastery and quality than difficult tricks.
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Does anyone have more thoughts on this? Do we want to change anything with the percentage distribution?
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I still believe that a routine with high variety and many different skills/transitions can show excellent mastery, difficulty, and duration for a winning routine.
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I have to agree with Connie here. Packing a routine with tricks and transitions still require a different mastery of many different tricks and is simply a different way to show off ones skills on the unicycle. Learning tricks to show off higher mastery is similarly a way to display a higher quality of riding.
I think there's a rush many places to constantly learn new tricks and never to learn any trick to perfection. For any rider at any skill the choices to become better are always the same:
– build more mastery in the tricks they already know (mastery)
– learn new tricks at a similar level to the ones one know (variety)
– build upon the tricks one knows to learn harder tricks (difficulty)
I don't think the rules should favor either strategy. I want people to learn as many new tricks as possible without thinking if they're "harder" – ie, variation should be important.
As a spectator I think a lot of riders end up over-investing in difficulty (I certainly have in the past) and forget mastery. That's a shame since it makes it harder to also be presenting while riding, a key part of freestyle.