The quarter turn nobody could see
At a training camp for U.S. figure skaters, Andrew Torgashev landed a quad toe loop that looked clean from the boards. A tablet running an app called OOFSkate disagreed: by its reading, he came down a quarter revolution short. The app measures rotation, height and airtime from an ordinary camera, with nothing attached to the skater. Its builders are two former college swimmers who came to skating when NBC asked for a way to explain jumps to viewers as they happened.
A call the eye was never built for
Rotation is one of the most contested calls in the sport. A technical panel gets a fraction of a second, from a fixed seat, to decide whether a blade came down where it should, and a medal can turn on the answer. The International Skating Union has been testing a six-camera computer-vision system to put measurements in front of those panels. Paolo Pizzocari, a former international judge, describes the problem in one line: "Our brain is not predisposed for this kind of work."
Where the line was drawn
Nobody involved wants the camera scoring the performance. Jacob Blindenbach, one of the app's builders, warns that taking people out of the loop entirely makes users angry and the results worse. The measurement settles what the body did. The judges keep what it meant.
The same split inside an organization
Leadership teams lose weeks to disputes that feel like disagreements about direction and turn out to be disagreements about fact: which draft the client signed off, whose total is right, whether a request went out before the cutoff. Seniority and memory settle those by default, and both are unreliable instruments. A record, a timestamp or a reconciled figure settles them in minutes and frees the room for the questions that genuinely need judgment.
Two habits make this operational. Sort an open dispute before anyone argues it: is it about what happened, or about what to do next? And when it is about what happened, put the measurement in the hands of the people doing the work early, the way the app is used in practice sessions long before anything is scored.
Some of those conversations are still hard to have well: Practice the conversation that settles a disputed fact →
Keep reading: What a Formula 1 pit wall shows about judgment and speed · AI Vision in Sports
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Sources: Associated Press, "Harnessing the power of AI to help revolutionize Olympic-level figure skating," December 1, 2025. Reuters, "Figure skating brings in AI to track jumps, spins amid judging controversies," February 11, 2026.
Written with AI in the loop: my idea, AI drafted and sharpened, my judgment on the way out. Every word is mine to stand behind. — Darren