If there was one comment that really made the Wight Jewels’ day, it was the Finnish belief that they had just watched a Swedish team skate, rather than one from the UK, because the performance was so much better than they had seen in the past from UK synchro teams. The Jewels took their honorary Swedish status as quite a compliment.

Wight Jewels finished the junior short programme in fifth place with 29.24 points, pretty much where they’d expected to be placed based on results attained this season by the competing teams.

The Jewels are ahead of Team Rhapsody and Team Moonlights of Sweden, in sixth and seventh places respectively, and behind Festa Aboensia of Finland in fourth. Convivium and Team Spirit of Sweden are in first and second places respectively, and the USA’s Synchroettes in third.

Scores are not what was expected, not only from the Jewels’ point of view but also from the top Swedish teams. Both Convivium and Spirit scored noticeably less than at the Vattern Cup, held only two weeks ago. The Jewels’ score of 29.24 after deductions was down on their result for the British, but with two falls and what appears to be a lower scoring event, not out of place. Convivium at 43.82 were 8.47 points down on their Vattern Cup score of 52.29. Team Spirit at 42.41 were down 4.48 on 46.89 at the Vattern Cup. Synchroettes achieved 41.43 at the US event to decide entries for the worlds, yet scored 38.98 today.

One of the real oddities was that the Jewels’ TES of 18.90 at the British championships was higher than Convivium’s TES of 14.50 today, illustrating perhaps best of all the real lack of consistency between IJS events caused by having different technical specialists and judges. No one could reasonably suggest that the Jewels, even in honorary Swedish mode, could beat Convivium on a simple comparison of TES between two different events. Using the IJS as a basis for determining season and personal bests begins to look unreliable considering the variables involved, and no more valid a measure of performance between competitions than the old 6.0 (RJS) system.

On the positive side for the Jewels, their technical elements were all called, even if the total scored of 12.30 was down, and the programme component scores (skating skills) were up on the British results at 18.94 compared with 15.74. The higher skating skills marks in particular are a real boost to morale heading in to the now much-practised long programme.

Results: http://skatesweden.wehost.se