I’m a big fan of athletic competition. Throughout junior high, high school and college I played a number of different sports including: football, baseball, basketball, track, tennis, soccer and the mind-numbing, brow-beating game of ping pong (Forrest Gump style). So I do appreciate and enjoy watching individuals and teams dedicated to accomplishing blistering goals and reckon they will continue doing so (I needed an excuse to sound Texan).
LibertarianJackass makes what I consider, a valid point regarding events that are scored by judging:
MEMO TO PAUL HAMM: Give back the Gold Medal now! Gymnastics is an event based on judging and scoring. Your score wasn’t as high as the other guy, regardless of what the scoreboard said. You don’t deserve the medal. Have the decency and respect for the art of athletic competition and give back the medal.
Note: I am not suggesting that the various events included in this category are not-a-sport or require little athleticism and training and I doubt that LJ is as well (ask him that).
The problem is that, as the Final Round in the Men’s High Bar routine showed, if the judging was based solely upon objective criteria and zero-subjective judgment was used, all the scores for each from each of the judges would be the same (and it wouldn’t be called “judging”).
A contemporary example you may be able to relate with is with college football, the BCS. The Bowl Championship Series was started with the hopes that it could eliminate multiple first place finishes. Because coaches, staff writers and analysts can and will be biased towards various teams, an objective computer-based system was implemented to do away with a chronic problem. And it still doesn’t work for a number of reasons including the fact that the system still incorporates the human-element. Last year, you had potentially three different teams claiming to be the number one team in the country: USC, LSU and OU.
I actually advocated (and still do) that the best way to have settled that dispute last year was to hand the trophy to the Aggies, a non-partisan team in the whole affair…
Anyways, the last point I wanted to make regarding the olympics: did you check out the intermission Cheerleaders for various events like Beach Volleyball? What’s the deal with them? I’m sure the games of yore had them as well (in one of my history classes we learned that during battle, the wives and lovers would stand on the sidelines of the field and expose themselves to inspire their men — I recommend that such an endeavor become a staple of the Olympics henceforth).