Laura,

Yes, after the'02 Olympics when the Canadian pair Jamie Sale & David Pelletier along with the Russian pair Elena Bereznaya & Anton Sikhurlidze shared the gold medal in pairs, a new scoring system got developed. It supposedly will stop cheating by the judges. There was some scandal that a French judge cheated and another judge or maybe it was the French judge was tapping her food in signal to another judge or something. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the details of all that, but it was talked about as "a judging scandal".

There is no more 6.0 as a perfect score with the eligible skaters. There is all kinds of things they look for and score on now, and each element has a "rank"...i.e., it can be a level 1, 2, 3 or 4 spin, jump, spiral, etc. The higher the level, the higher the scores. I still don't understand it all nor do I understand totally what constitutes a harder move, etc. I mean, obviously, a triple jump gets more points than a double, but all the rest of it...I don't know. It seems to have taken a lot of the beauty and showmanship out of skating.