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First, after seven different men landed quadruple jumps in the long program at the World Championships last spring, the buzz in the skating world was that it would no longer be possible to stand on the podium without one. Then, after Tim Goebel landed three quads in a single program at Skate America in October, there was the dizzying prospect of quads becoming almost as commonplace as triples are now.

But is there now too much emphasis being placed on jumps, and on the quad in particular? In international competitions this season, it's been evident that the judges have been straying from the rulebook in giving too much credit to flawed attempts at quadruple jumps, and to programs that that are not well-balanced in terms of other elements besides quads.

For example, in the free skate at Skate America that brought him so much acclaim, two of the three quadruple jumps that Goebel did were quite clearly taken off from two feet. This is considered such a serious technical error that the International Skating Union rulebook mandates that the judges should give no credit at all for such jump attempts. And yet, at Skate America, it appeared that the judges ignored both the flaws and the rulebook and gave Goebel full credit for all three quads.

In the short program at Skate Canada, Alexei Yagudin completely omitted any semblance of the required footwork that was supposed to precede his quadruple toe loop jump. According to the ISU's short program judging guidelines, this is supposed to result in a mandatory 0.3 deduction in the mark for required elements -- so why did Yagudin win this event with marks of 5.8 on a 6.0 scale from six of the nine judges? Meanwhile, Todd Eldredge, who landed four clean triple jumps in his short program but did not attempt a quad, ended up in only fourth place.

While the ISU rulebook is clear that the judges should not give extra credit for a poor quadruple jump compared to a well-executed triple jump, it's been apparent that the judges have been setting the base mark for programs that include a quad to be significantly higher than for programs that do not. So, even if deductions are taken for flawed quad attempts, the skaters who try them and fail are coming out ahead of competitors who skate a clean program with only triple jumps.

Another problem is that both skaters and judges seem to be taking the most liberal interpretation possible of the ISU's rules against repeating jumps in the free skate. The rules say that "only two different jumps with three or more revolutions" can be repeated and that "no triple or quadruple jump can be attempted more than twice." The problem is that the judges have been treating quadruple and triple jumps of the same kind as "different" jumps for the purpose of this rule -- a quad toe loop is being counted separately than a triple toe loop, for instance.

This rule is supposed to encourage and reward skaters who show variety in their jumps, but this year we have seen, for example, Goebel putting three salchows and three toe loops in his program at Skate America, and completing no other jumps. This was hardly a well-balanced program, even considering only the jumps and not the footwork, spins and other elements.

Even if skaters do a complete set of six different triple jumps in their program along with one or two quads, trying to fit more jumps in a 4½-minute program means something else has to go -- spins, footwork, connecting steps, choreography. Increasingly, the trend in men's skating has been for programs to consist primarily of plain stroking around the rink, jumping, and rest breaks where the skaters pose in place without actually skating.

Aside from the technical details of what the rulebook says about the judging standards, there's also a bigger question: is this really the right direction for the sport to be going in?

Part of the problem is figure skating's curious position as being somewhere between sport and entertainment.

Even the ISU seems to recognize that the general public is more interested in skating as entertainment instead of skating as just jumping. Otherwise, why would ISU produce made-for-TV competitions with rules that restrict the number of jumps skaters can do, and emphasize interpretive qualities of the skating instead? Here's the problem: The skaters who are invited to these events are not the best interpretive skaters in the world; they are the top skaters from the standard competitive track, which is increasingly valuing a completely different set of skating skills.

Skate Canada judges might have seen faults in Alexei Yagudin's quadruple jumps, but their marks didn't reflect them.(AP)

This year, the ISU is requiring skaters who qualify for the Grand Prix Final to skate two different long programs as a concession to TV's desire to inject more variety and entertainment value into the competition. But three of the six men who have qualified for the Final -- Goebel, Vincent Restencourt of France and Zhengxin Guo of China -- are skaters who are known primarily as jumpers, who have such undeveloped presentation skills that viewers probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between one program and another if they turned down the sound on the TV. Why pick skaters to be entertainers on the basis of their ability to turn four times in the air, instead of on their entertainment skills?

More generally, the kinds of professional opportunities that become available to skaters are determined almost exclusively by their credentials in standard-track, eligible competitions. There are many fine artistic skaters who have few opportunities to tour or gain public exposure because they never were able to learn the difficult jumps they would need to be successful in international competition -- even though most of the top professionals don't do those difficult jumps once they join the tour circuit, either.

On the other hand, competitive figure skating is judged as an athletic endeavor and it's inevitable that there will be pressure on the skaters to increase the technical difficulty of their routines, and that technical advances will be rewarded by the judges. It's not realistic to expect that the standard competitive track is going to back off from the emphasis on jumps. The ISU might crack down on the judging of poorly executed quads, or change the rules to further emphasize that a well-balanced program ought to be just as critical as landing a quad, but quadruple jumps are not going to go away.

But perhaps, if the ISU wants to continue to keep a toehold in the world of skating as entertainment as well as skating as sport, it's time for interpretive skating to be established as a separate competitive discipline of its own -- one that has equal status with the existing singles events, but distinct rules and qualifying procedures.

For example, one could envision a new competitive skating discipline that bears the same relation to ice dance as the existing singles events do to pairs skating, where the emphasis is on the skaters' control of the blade on the ice, rather than on their ability to launch themselves into the air.