What it measures
The ISU World Standings reward placements over two seasons, so a skater who misses events drops, however well they skate. Season's best rewards one great day. The GOE Index rating asks a narrower question: what total does this skater post on a typical day right now? It is measured in points, on the same scale as the scores you see on the kiss-and-cry screen.
The formula
For each skater we take every completed ISU event with a free skate in the last 2 years and average the totals, giving recent results more weight:
A result from 240 days ago counts half as much as one from today; a result from two years ago counts about an eighth. Events where a skater did not reach the free skate are left out of the average, because a short-program-only score is not comparable with a full total.
Who gets a rating
- At least 3 completed ISU starts in the 2-year window.
- At least one start in the last 400 days. Skaters who sit out longer drop off the list until they compete again.
- Only ISU Grand Prix, Grand Prix Final, European, Four Continents, World and Olympic events count for now. National championships and Challenger events will be added later and marked as such.
Skaters competing as Individual Neutral Athletes appear under “AIN”, as in ISU results.
How we tested it
We built each candidate method on events before 1 July 2024 (2,503 head-to-head pairs) and then asked it to predict who finishes ahead in every pair of skaters at the events after that date (5,142 pairs), using only results known before each event.
| Method | Pairs called right |
|---|---|
| Rating combined with Elo | 80.7% |
| GOE Index rating (time-weighted average total) | 80.6% |
| Best total in the previous 365 days | 78.9% |
| Elo on head-to-head results | 77.3% |
| Points by placement, ISU World Standings style | 75.7% |
Brier score measures how good the predicted probabilities are; lower is better. Combining the rating with Elo adds 0.1 points, which is within noise, so we publish the simpler method.
What it does not do
- It does not know about injuries, new coaches or changed jump content until those show up in scores.
- Totals from different events are treated as comparable. Judging panels differ, and we do not adjust for that yet.
- It does not replace the ISU World Standings, which decide Grand Prix assignments. It is our own calculation and carries the “GOE Index metric” badge everywhere on the site.
The full code is versioned with the data. If you think a number is wrong, tell us.