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Patrick Chan (Wikimedia Commons)

Ottawa, Ontario’s Patrick Chan successfully defended his World Men’s Figure Skating Championship Saturday in Nice, France. It is quite the accomplishment for the 21 year-old Chinese Canadian who is still very young in the sport and will be knocking on the door towards greatness at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia two years from now.

But in watching Chan’s performance as well as Japan’s Daisuke Takahashi, it remains very clear that figure skating judges continue to over reward strong footwork, artistry and presentation, and under reward the technical skills of each figure skater, such as the jumps, even with the new scoring system in place.

The bottom line is that Chan fell once with a minute left on his program during a rather simple Double Axel. He also stumbled slightly on another jump. Still, he did deliver two quads successfully. Takahashi meanwhile was technically cleaner, but the judges went with Chan’s artistry instead.

Interestingly, Chan wasn’t the only Canadian to make some slight errors and come away as champion this week. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir made some minor mistakes in their ice dance long program, but came away victorious.

The state of Canadian figure skating is strong however. Along with Canada’s two Gold medals, Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje of Waterloo, Ontario finished fourth in the ice dance and Meagan Duhamel of Lively, Ontario and Eric Radford of Toronto finished fifth place in the pairs.