Carolina Kostner ranked #1 on ISU??!!

I wasn't sure where to post this, but I happened to browse to the ISU World Standings for Ladies today and found that Carolina Kostner is currently ranked #1!

http://www.isufs.org/ws/wsladies.htm

Huh? I thought. Didn't she do pretty badly at Skate Canada? If it had been Yu-Na Kim at #1, I wouldn't have thought about it twice, but because it was Kostner, I looked at the numbers closely and was like, hmm, each of Mao's numbers is bigger than Carolina's!

So then I put it in an Excel spreadsheet and added it up! Looks like the ISU has a calculation error (unless I'm wrong about how it should be calculated). All of Kostner's points got a 100% weighting, but I think it should be 100%/100%/70%.

Also - I think they haven't even updated Mao and Yu-Na's point totals from the end of last season! The numbers just don't add up!

Under my calculations, with the 100/100/70% weights, the standings are

#1 Mao 4158 pts
#2 Yu-Na 4036 pts
#3 Carolina 3934 pts

But I'm not 100% sure this is how you calculate it. Anyone else have an idea?

[I did send an email to ISU, but who knows if they'll even see it. (Yes, I'm a crazy obsessed fan.) ]

ISU rankings are severely flawed (Joannie 10th and Sarah Meier 6th), Batsuchan, so I wouldn't take it seriously.
IIRC, they take into account 100% of the previous season, and CaroK basically competes in more competitions (e.g., Nebelhorn, Finlandia) and places in them compared to the other skaters in the top 5 or so. Naturally, she'll accumulate more points because of that although the competition in these events are far less tight and challenging than those in the Grand Prix events/Euros/Worlds etc.

She also placed first in the Karl Schäfer Memorial this year (again, a very weak field, on par with Junior Grand Prix level events, as far as scores are concerned). That gave her a boost in the ISU rankings as well. The icenetwork rankings are calculated on a better scale, however, so may as well just go there instead.

I do give Carolina props though for participating in more events than necessary every year (is the Italian Federation requesting her to do that? I can't help but feel that way just so she has the #1 rank for ISU standings). I'm really not surprised she is an up-and-down skater as a result of this - she is a college student as well and travels back and forth between Germany and Italy too!

I have no idea how the scores are calculated...

At first I thought that Carolina might be in first because she won gold at the Nebelhorn Trophy and Karl Shaffer Memorial. Neither Mao, nor YuNa competed any level B internationals event this season... But you are right, the scores do not add up. Either the claculating process is really weird, or they indeed made some mistake. (Or maybe I'm just bad at math ).

Hopefully if it's a mistake it will be sorted out.

Unless ISU finds some way to broadcast their ratings directly to peoples' dreams while they are sleeping, I really don't mind.

Hehe, thanks for all your replies.

clovera - always a great source of info! Yes, perhaps there is some strange way of calculating the score. I actually thought the icenetwork way was more confusing, with events dropping out and being added in all the time. Plus I was a little annoyed that Yu-Na Kim got bumped to the top even though Mao hadn't competed yet. I think they should wait to recalculate standings until everyone has completed their GP assignments.

And I guess I really shouldn't really care about the standings, but it just gave me a shock to check out Mao's page on Wikipedia and find that she was no longer #1!

(And a small part of me thought, OMG, I didn't believe all those "Carolina Kostner is a judge's pet" conspiracy theories, but maybe there's some truth to it! )