judges don't care about progression, will he keep doing the same run year after year?
This is why you should never, ever, ever be a judge at any major flatland contest. Ever.
I repeat. EVER.
Judges are not there to judge "progression". They are judging on difficulty, consistency, originality, and variety. You have to judge a riders contest run as if you've never seen them ride before, or you are prone to an incredible amount of bias in your judging results. This happens ALL the time regardless of what I just said, and it goes two ways:
1. The rider is popular and "stylish" which automatically puts him as a shoe in for the finals or for even placing well after the final results. This is bad because it indicates a pretty high level of favoritism. I judged a contest in New Jersey one time where Jeff Desroche literally walked all over the contest floor. The judge sitting next to me was probably the biggest Desroche fan on the planet and despite the touches, gave him a 100% score on consistancy. The videos for the event are still up on BMXTRIX if you want to judge for yourself. He was a crowd favorite, and everyone wanted him to do well.
2. Nobody has seen the rider and since they are not doing some incredibly stylish new moves, they get over looked and I've seen many judges simply brush off what they do as "not hard/original enough" despite the fact that their tricks are incredibly difficult even compared to what everyone else is doing, and fairly original as well. I've seen this in contests over and over because the rider isn't "cool" enough. Nobody really uses those words, that they arn't cool or stylish enough, but the effect is still the same. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen riders completely dicked over with flawless runs simply because the judges favored someone else (see point #1) and ended up giving people the complete shaft because that person either wasn't cool, or didn't have enough exposure to warrant the same sense of aw.
So no, you don't judge based on progression or else you get incredibly flawed contest results. If people DID judge on progression in contest runs, there would be a number of riders who do INSANELY difficult contest runs with little or no touches that would be penalized for not learning a new trick. I can see a way in which progression would be rewarded with originality, but considering that very, very few riders in the world are doing those Raph whip type things right now, I'd say he's got the originality score for those on lock down. If you still say "well he does them all the time!" then you are effectively judging a rider
against himself which is one of the worst things that you can do.
I'm not trying to be a dick about this, but this kind of mindset is a SERIOUS SERIOUS problem in contests all over the world. Money is on the line, and their livelihoods are on the line. It's only fair to judge riders based on what they do in the contest.
If Matthias has a trick in his run that he did last year that was incredibly difficult, then it should be judged exactly the same way it was judged back in that previous year. If someone else can do a
better trick than the one that he did, then the score should accurately effect the discrepancy between Matthias and the other rider not by examining the progression of Matthias over the previous year, but how the two tricks stack up against one another.
It's the only way that contests can be fair. Period.
edit: Also I'd like to add a few other things to this already novel of a rant.
You were not at the contest. You don't know what other riders pulled or did not pull in their run. If Raphael has a flawless run of all of his back wheel stuff, and Miura was there and touched 20 times, Raphael should win. Comparably, Miura might have slightly more difficult stuff , Raph should still win on consistency and originality (because there are a lot of riders doing the switches that miura and Yuki are doing, they're just doing them really fast and make it look fly as hell while very very few riders are doing what Raph is doing/has done with his style of back wheel).
Ucchie blew everyone at Voodoo away because of his style. There is a ton of his stuff that has been done before. That pumping upsidown peg wheelie thing? Raph and Jeff Desroche (and others) have been doing that for years. The pivots? Almost all of them have been done by other riders. He has a few original tricks, but not nearly as many as you'd think if you watch enough videos. He may have come up with them himself, but others HAVE done them. This doesn't take away anything from Ucchies riding of course because it's completely insane, but the main reason he blew everyone away was how he strung all of these different tricks together in his links. Yuki and Miura ride very similar, with Yuki being a slightly more "primitive" version of Miura (Miuras stuff is just... so f*cking hard and so much more complex than Yukis) yet you're very quick to point these two out like they are the yin and yang of back wheel.
Think of it like this, if you had never ever seen Raphael do any of these tricks before, you would be as equally impressed with his riding as you should Miura and Yuki's. The reason you like these two is because you don't see them nearly as much, and Raphaels links are plastered all over every single youtube video of every contest he goes to. People only dislike what he does now because of over saturation and frankly I think that's bullsh*t and does a huge disservice to his riding.
If you want to contrast and compare riders again as brazenly as you've done here, you should at least do the riders the favor of thinking about what you are comparing, and the reasons why you favor one over the other instead of just picking favorites (see point 1) and running with it. When Raph came onto the scene with his new back wheel style, everyone didn't know what the hell was going on because it was SOOO original compared to what everyone else was doing much in the same way you only get a glimpse of what Yuki is doing and think his stuff is as good as it is. Neither of these guys have changed their style of riding all that much in the last year or so, but the camera has definitely followed Raph around a hell of a lot more than Yuki and a byproduct of that is an inherent bias in EVERYONE'S perception of his riding.
holyf*ckedit3:
Alright. ONE MORE THING and then I'm done.
In that second video at 1:20 of Miura there isn't a single original trick in that link that I can see. He does that back wheel plastic man to rope a roni that Nathan has been doing since he was still riding a sparkly blue Quamen) flipped to a scuffing lardyard (There is a video on raphs myspace of him doing the same upsidown flip to coasting backyard, which is actually harder and he was the first I ever saw do it back when he was still riding for KGB because ABT hadn't even been invented yet) to some brakeless stubbleducks (lots of people do these) to a no handed upsidown time machine (I saw guys on an old KOG video from like 2001-02 doing these). It's a hard link, but there is nothing there that is strikingly original or new. Awesome stuff none the less. The second link is insanely hard, but then again, so is a lot of the stuff Raph does so it really does boil down to a matter of opinion, and the only way to get around that is to either defer to other judging categories or look at it as if it was the first time you ever saw it.
Ok, I swear I'm done.
Yuki is also doing a hell of a lot of the same stuff Raph is doing. Peg wheelies full flipped to stick Bs? Yep. Decades sans-brake? Check. Whoppers? Check. Same full pivots from stick bs? Check. They're not all that different.