Olympic Team Skate Scoring Redux, Part 1

Last night, the figure skating team competition kicked off at the Olympics. Four years ago I wrote a post about changing the scoring system in the second half of the competition to make it more interesting.

To recap, the scoring now is that ten teams compete in Men's, Pairs, Women's and Ice Dancing short program and the scores in each competition producing a ranking which gives them points (10 for first, 9 for second, etc.). At the end of the short program, the bottom five teams are eliminated and the remaining five do the long programs. I have no beef with this part. However, the scoring in the long program is where things fall apart.

In the long program, the five teams complete, receive scores and then get a point value based on their finish. The problem is that they get 10 thru 6 points for the finish and it's added to their existing total from the first half. This means that teams in front have little to fear from teams at the bottom as they usually can't make up ground enough. My wife and I's proposed solution was to change the points awarded from 10 thru 6 to an even award (10, 8, 6, 4, 2) based on place. This would make a mistake in the long competition much more devastating and could pull a team with a high score back to the pack or pull a team in last place up to the front.

To test this, I'm going to keep track of the scoring as done now and compare them to what they would be if the scoring was done in the alternate way.

For the first phase, it would be kept as is so the scores will show no deviation at the moment: