Beijing Olympics thread

[MWM]

Just found this on Wiki:

Later scoring indicates that Jones landed 86 punches to Park's 32.[2] Allegedly, Park himself apologized to Jones afterwards.[2] One judge shortly thereafter admitted the decision was a mistake, and all three judges voting for Park were eventually suspended.[1] Many observers[1][3] still believe the judges were either bribed or otherwise coerced to vote for the local fighter by Korean officials. The official IOC investigation concluding in 1997 found that 3 of the judges were wined and dined by Korean officials,[2] but the IOC still officially stands by the decision.

[registerthis]

Originally Posted by Yachtzee

But my main problem right now is, why no ties in Gymnastics? I can understand not wanting to have ties, but when just about every other event allows ties, it seems unfair to have convoluted tie breakers in Gymnastics. It seems like a sport ripe for scandal, either through use of underage athletes or irregularities in judging.

I've never really cared much for gymnastics (in the Olympics, that is--the competitors are phenomenal athletes, but I detest the judging aspect of the sport), but I found myself getting quite agitated over this arcane scoring system they have that views two gymnasts who receive identical scores as, somehow, not identical. I thought Nastia handled the situation very gracefully, but she should have been standing on the gold medal platform along with He.

[HeatherC1212]

But my main problem right now is, why no ties in Gymnastics? I can understand not wanting to have ties, but when just about every other event allows ties, it seems unfair to have convoluted tie breakers in Gymnastics. It seems like a sport ripe for scandal, either through use of underage athletes or irregularities in judging.

There were ties in the past but the IOC decided they didn't want any ties in gymnastics anymore so they came up with these convolunted tie breaking procedures that no one can figure out and even the competitors and coaches struggle with understanding them. They started the 'no tie' rules after the Atlanta Olympics but these new tie breaker rules apparently came into play in 2004. I'm extremely glad Nastia has her AA gold because that bar final would have been complete and total heartbreak if she didn't all ready have one gold medal from earlier in the competition.

[SunDeck]

I don't know how you have gymnastics without judges. The problem seems now to be with the quality of the judging, not the judging itself. After all, the elements have to be performed a certain way or there is no credit. If anything, it would be an improvement to judge less by style and "virtuosity" than by simply whether or not an athlete actually accomplishes the element she has attempted.

As for there being no ties, well that's just stupid, stupid, stupid. Both women (a term I use loosely for that little pixie from China, by the way) performed well but didn't nail their programs. From where the entire viewing world sat, that thing looked like a tie. But in their inexplicable desire to make sure there are no ties, the IOC throws out another score and reduced the judging to three scores. Three scores from people who quite possibly don't know what they are doing.
Brilliant.

[FlightRick]

Originally Posted by Yachtzee

I'd like to see golf as an Olympic sport as well. Golf is one of those sports where you have talented athletes from just about every continent and it has a much bigger following than say, equestrian events, but is not in the Olympics.

Golf *was* an Olympic event for at least 1 or 2 years in the early 1900s (found that out while wasting approximately 5 hours of my life on sports-reference.com/olympics/ last weekend; some pretty fascinating stuff there).

I'd imagine the reasons it isn't anymore are two-fold: first, every single problem you have with baseball, soccer, and formerly with basketball and hockey would exist with golf. The professional infrastructures of those sports are such that the best in the world already interact on a regular basis and do so for enormous sums of money. Trying to force a false sense of importance of a non-paying gold medal over a payday in the Cadillac Starbucks Verizon Upper-Middle Class Tosser Invitational at Wuthering Pines simply isn't gonna work. The Olympics work best as the single holy grail for the types of sports that don't have that infrastucture or fanbase except for once every four years.

Then there's second issue, which is semi-related, that we see in tennis: again, there's a mental block in terms of an Olympic medal being meaningful (though that finally seems to be changing with this Olympics). But secondly, the allocation of spots in the field are done in such a way that the field will just be exceptionally top-heavy and not a true representation of the Best In The World. If each country can only enter two players, and we all know that Russia alone has about 5 screaming banshees in the top 10 in the world, then how excited are we going to be when they have to leave half the world's top 20 out in order to make sure the powerhouse nation of Chad is represented? Same thing (to the best of my knowledge) would happen with golf, just with it being the U.S. that would be criminally under-represented.

But my main problem right now is, why no ties in Gymnastics? I can understand not wanting to have ties, but when just about every other event allows ties, it seems unfair to have convoluted tie breakers in Gymnastics.

There's no earthly reason I can think of for there not to be ties in individual event finals. There simply isn't enough "input" (2 scores -- difficulty and execution -- times 4 judges) into the scoring system to create tie-breaks that can be guaranteed to be meaningful, instead of the product of human error (which is clearly what happened on the bars). Let there be ties, and let there be shared medals in these cases.

That said: ties are distasteful, and I applaud efforts to reduce or eliminate them if it's done in a sensible and expedient fashion. I don't know *what* the tie-breaks are for gymnastics in team and/or all-around events, but I do know that there *is* plenty of scoring input (2 scores times 4 judges times 4 -- or 6, in the case of men -- events times 3 gymnasts) that *should* be able to make those events "tie-breakable" in a meaningful fashion, and thus, I think they should be. Sure, there's a greater chance that one of these scores will be a case of human error, but that error is marginalized by only being 1/48th or 1/72nd of the final tally, instead of 1/4th. No reason to ever be a tie in a team or all-around.

I think this ability to tie-break meaningfully exists in most sports, or at least, in the majority of them. Then again, I'm the kind of philistine who finds soccer boring enough as it is that it doesn't need ties working against it, too, so I think penalty kicks are the greatest and most exciting thing in the world when games come down to that, even though every soccer purist I know vomits in horror when a "beautifully played game of football" is decided by such a fluke. Get over yourselves, hippies!!!!!!

Your mileage may vary...


Rick

[15fan]

Bela Karolyi needs his own tv show.

And McCain or Obama could lock up the race for the White House simply by naming Michael Phelps as running mate.

[registerthis]

Originally Posted by FlightRick

Golf *was* an Olympic event for at least 1 or 2 years in the early 1900s (found that out while wasting approximately 5 hours of my life on sports-reference.com/olympics/ last weekend; some pretty fascinating stuff there).

My all-time favorite discontinued Olympic sport is the "Plunge For Distance," which involved someone diving off of a platform from a standing position, and then drifting--not unlike a corpse--underneath the water, without moving a muscle, for as long as they could. Your distance was marked after either 60 seconds, or when your head emerges from the water.

It was held during the 1904 olympics in Paris. Five contestants participated, and all were Americans who swam at the NYC Swim Club. Not surprisingly, the Americans swept the medals and the event was discontinued by 1908.

My friends and I used to inadvertently plunge for distance off the high dive at the pool all the time. If only we'd been born a century earlier, we might have been able to have olympic careers.

[OldRightHander]

Originally Posted by registerthis

but she should have been standing on the gold medal platform along with He.

[Chip R]

Originally Posted by OldRightHander

This could turn into Who's on First. Or in this case He's on First.

[Betterread]

Did anyone see the soccer semi between Argentina and Brazil? A Big game.
Brazil had 2 bad goal calls (argentina hand ball not called for a goal and Brazil goal called offside was wrong) even so Argentina finished effectively and Lionel Messi had a huge impact by drawing (forcing?) Anderson to mark him all over the midfield. It was weird seeing Brazil sacrifice a few midfielders (they did something similiar with Riquelme) to a marking role. It didn't help that Ronaldinho didn't show that much - has he fallen from the elite level?

[SandyD]

USA vs Japan softball scoreless in the bot 6th

Winner advances to gold medal game

[SandyD]

ok ... the women just went up 4-0 heading into the bottom 9

[NYMoose]

Anyone for throwing the javelin?

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/bei...urn=oly,101791

[Highlifeman21]

Originally Posted by HumnHilghtFreel

One thing I'm surely convinced of is that I have a crush on Alicia Sacramone, mess ups and all

At least she's legal, so you shouldn't feel bad about it.

Now if you had a thing for Shawn Johnson, that would be completely different.

[OldRightHander]

Watching some of the gymnastics in a truck stop tv lounge the other day I heard a trucker say, "I hope she's 18."