Last weekend, the cubing community received the news that YiHeng Wang had achieved a 2x2 world record average of 0.83 seconds, his counting solves of 0.85, 0.87 and 0.77 are incredibly fast indeed, however, it seems that not all is as it first appears.
It has been over 4 days since this record took place and results from the competition have not been uploaded to the World Cube Association page just yet and there have been accusations of him sliding, reminding the community of the controversy last year.
Last year, YiHeng Wang achieved an average of 0.78 and this was counted as the world record for nearly two months but was highly controversial, the WCA regulations had previously said that any inconsistencies had to be visible with the human eye and that they wouldn't use later video footage to DNF solves, however, many cubers pointed out that YiHeng Wang's solves used a technique called sliding, where his hands slided off the timer so that he actually applied a few turns to the cube before the timer actually started. Eventually, the WCA was forced to discount YiHeng Wang's 0.78 world record average and allow framecounting and other techniques to verify results.
A cuber from Brazil made a video framecounting YiHeng Wang's average and it seems very clear that he has slid back into his old ways, most of the solves seem to be about 0.2 seconds slower than the official timers when framecounted. I suspect this result will be DNFed, however, it just raises more questions about the future of 2x2 as an event because it is becoming very difficult to draw the line as to what is and is not sliding.
One proposal has been to switch to 4pad mode on the Speedstacks G5 timers, however, this is controversial because it would lock the World Cube Association into Speedstacks monopoly for many more years to come, forcing them to only use one brand of timers for even longer than they anticipate. The World Speedstacking Association switched over to 4pad mode a few years back and reset all the world records, if cubing did that too then many cubers would be very unhappy.
