Falling hard for you

Great story in Slate about how the new scoring system has pretty well eliminated whatever small pretense of "art" had remained in figure skating: "The hardest maneuver in figure skating -- a quadruple axel -- can get you up to 16 points with a perfect landing. But if you blow it, you'll still get 10 points -- more than you'd earn for almost any other move. To put this in perspective, you can fall on your ass trying a quadruple jump and still get almost twice as many points as you would for executing a flawless double." Hence, you're seeing a lot more falls this Olympics than ever before.

They may as well rename the sport. Figure skating? Ha, the "figures" were eliminated years ago. "Ice Gymnastics"? "Skate Acrobatics"? "Fear Factor On Ice"? It's really no different than the similarly mis-named "Freestyle Skiing", where the athletes use a ramp to launch into the air and try to execute a ridiculous number of spins and twists. The only difference is that the skiers don't have to wear a frilly costume, AND they get to wear a helmet.