Russian Gymnast Says Women's All-Around Was Fixed

[emw]

it does sound like sour grapes: does she even have some specifics on her claims? where/when exactly was she robbed?

On the other hand, am i the only one to think that Hamm should give back his gold to the korean guy? I mean, he objectively had the highest score. Doesn't Hamm feel uneasy about keeping the medal?

Technically, he objectively was screwed on a .1 degree of difficulty potential on his routine. Given that he performed items that were more difficult than the assumed starting score, the judges may well have given him better marks to start with.

The problem with gymnastics is that it is impossible to have an objective score. The fact that the Korean gymnast's starting score was off by .1 points is indeed a sad fact, but in the end, when reviewing the tapes, it is quite possible that the .1 point that he may have been awarded had the judges (and the Korean officials) been on the ball could easily have been taken away due to other errors in his routines.

Judges will always miss some things - it's a given in sports such as this, and outcomes will always be questioned since the final result is not simply a matter of how far, how fast, or how accurate. It's like reading a Car and Driver review where the disclaimer says that despite the fact all scores add to 95, in the end they may award an 87 because of "intangibles."

You can't get away from those intangibles in this sport - it's something from which every gymnast has benefited. And vice-versa.

 

[Daveman Deluxe]

One of my friends on Khorkina Svetlana:

"She needs chocolate...after she gets an emergency intravenous feeding or two...thousand. Sheesh! No wonder she's so damn cranky, Lord knows she's pretty docile for being so malnourished. If I were that starved, I think I'd just march onto a Russian military base and launch the damned nuke--get it all over with. "I am HUNGRY... so DIIIIIEEEE!" So, you know, maybe I should just let it go... at least she's not killing us all... bitch."

God bless friends that make these things lighthearted and fun.

 

[Don't panic]

Technically, he objectively was screwed on a .1 degree of difficulty potential on his routine. Given that he performed items that were more difficult than the assumed starting score, the judges may well have given him better marks to start with.

The problem with gymnastics is that it is impossible to have an objective score. The fact that the Korean gymnast's starting score was off by .1 points is indeed a sad fact, but in the end, when reviewing the tapes, it is quite possible that the .1 point that he may have been awarded had the judges (and the Korean officials) been on the ball could easily have been taken away due to other errors in his routines.

Judges will always miss some things - it's a given in sports such as this, and outcomes will always be questioned since the final result is not simply a matter of how far, how fast, or how accurate. It's like reading a Car and Driver review where the disclaimer says that despite the fact all scores add to 95, in the end they may award an 87 because of "intangibles."

You can't get away from those intangibles in this sport - it's something from which every gymnast has benefited. And vice-versa.

I agree with much of what you say, and I am not advocating to reverse "judgment calls". Judges can make mistakes and they have to decide quickly. Plus, as you said there are the "intangibles". To go and review in detail one's performance whould be futile and unfair, unless you give the same level of scrutiny to everyone.

But in the korean guy's case (who, unlike the russian, didn't complain) it wasn't a "judging mistake", it was a technical mistake by the judges, which could be easily corrected WITHOUT changing any of the judgment calls.

So, in this case, I think the correct decision would be to calculate the score based on the correct parameters, and assign the gold to the poor guy.
The way judges assign scores, is that they start from a value given to them (10, 9.9, 9.8, whatever) and then SUBTRACT the mistakes, the glitches, and the "intangibles"). So I don't see how he would have NOT gotten a better score if the judges had started from the higher value.

In any case all these controversies really hurt the credibility, and it would be about time they re-work the rules of judging so not to leave space for this blunders (another one just in: judges changes decision in the high bar following booing by the crowdlink)

 

[Makosuke]

Now that's a crying shame to read. I was really pulling for Khorkina; she's a bit on the overly serious side, but she has defied all standards of age, size, and build in the sport. Heck, any female gymnast who's half a foot taller than anybody else out there and can show up for her third Olympics and still perform at a world-class level deserves some serious respect.

(By the way, she looks rod-thin for her size, but there's obviously a lot of muscle in there, and I've always thought she looked much more graceful than the shorter gymnasts. Keep in mind that she's way taller than everybody else, so she'll look much skinnier even with similar muscle mass.)

I respected her even more after (unlike every other gymnast of the night) she charged into her final mat pass smiling and looking cheerful (everybody else seems to get a vicious determined look right before starting their tumbling).

There's always room for error during objective judging, and I'll certainly buy bias, but really, the decision seemed pretty fair. I'd have loved to see her get a gold, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see her get one with her performance (though the bar routine was a bit generous), but really, she did seem to be outperformed this time. So it goes.

And now she goes and makes a big stink about it. I was impressed that she seemed to have gracefully accepted silver at the time, but now it looks like the determination she was talking about so much beforehand got the better of her.

Sad when a great athlete just can't handle "loosing" (if you can call a silver medal in your third Games "loosing") gracefully.


[On an unrelated judging note, I much prefer the diving system, where you see the scores and difficulty rating seperately; gives you a clear idea of how much of the final score was based on how well the routine was done, and how much on the difficulty of the routine itself.

It was also rather funny when I first started watching diving; during the Chinese divers, the Chinese judge was consistently getting his/her score thrown out for being higher than everybody else, and the US judge the same for being too low. I was assuming national bias until some other divers went, at which point I realized the Chinese judge just rated EVERYBODY high, and the US judge rated everybody low (including US divers in both cases).]