Sandhu Leads the Hard Way

While figure skating experiments with new judging and scoring systems, Emanuel Sandhu earned the lead in the Skate Canada men’s competition Thursday the old-fashioned way: by performing a difficult and dynamic program that brought the crowd at the Colisee Pepsi to its feet.

The 21-year-old Canadian landed a fine quadruple toe loop-triple toe loop combination jump in his short program, the first phase of the men’s event. Under the interim judging system in use this season, 10 judges are chosen at random and a computer randomly selects seven marks to determine each part of the score. A range of marks is displayed without correlating them to judges; Sandhu’s marks for required elements ranged from 5.3 to 5.8 and for presentation from 5.6 to 5.9.

The system has been criticized for giving judges anonymity, but Sandhu didn’t mind. “That was never my concern,” he said. “I’m happy I skated well. This is another step up for me.”

Takeshi Honda of Japan was second, followed by Stanick Jeannette of France. Derrick Delmore and Ryan Bradley of the U.S. were seventh and eighth, respectively.

Although the competition’s luster was dimmed when Olympic gold medalists Sarah Hughes and Alexei Yagudin and bronze medalist Tim Goebel withdrew because of injuries, it’s noteworthy as a testing ground for a proposed cumulative scoring system. As proposed, 14 judges give skaters points based on predetermined values of elements, but only seven judges’ marks will count. That panel won’t determine the winners here, but the system will be evaluated later.

Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin of Russia, fourth at the Olympics and second at the world championships, lead the pairs event, ahead of Qing Pang and Jian Tong of China and Anabelle Langlois and Patrice Archetto of Canada.

In ice dancing, Elena Grushina and Ruslan Goncharov of Ukraine were the leaders after the compulsory dance.