Posted on 07/30/2012 8:36:30 AM PDT by tonyome
Did anyone else watch the Olympic women's gymnastics last night? One of the young girls on the U.S. team is black. She is a great gymnast, but during last night's competition, she fell off the balance beam, and took several steps out of bounds on the floor exercise, yet beat out a fellow teammate to advance to the All Around final, even though her teammate made far less mistakes in her routines on the balance beam and floor exercise. I know nothing about Olympics Gymnastics judging, but even one of the NBC commentators remarked that her floor exercise routine "was scored much higher than I thought it would be". In my opinion, I think the judges gave the girl a break because she was black. Some people might be offended by that comment, but it looked fairly obvious to me.
The fact is that the scoring refinements over the years have made gymnastics much less subjective than they've been in the past. Start value minus deductions means the pressure to award "perfect 10s" is gone and the judges can critique each routine on its own without having to worry about having to balance difficulty vs. execution; they're now focused solely on execution, with difficulty already factored in.
Of course, you still have the chance for getting a biased/crooked judge, but there's only a handful of sports that can operate with no subjective officiating, and those come down to raw timing and accuracy events.
Sorry, but very poor example. The outcome of the game is decided on things that players have done. There can be occasional disputes over balls and strikes, but you're either out or your not.
Ballet, figure skating, and floor routines are truly a fine art, but not a sport. If you think not, then tell me why ballet is not a sport.
And if ballet is not a sport, then tell me the real difference between the two: Lots of hard work, routines to be memorized, then done over and over again . . . to music on top of it all. Can't find a difference.
It’s a judged sport. Everything is subjective, nothing is absolute, it’s why people make fun of judged sports.
My take on this is that I don’t think there’s blatant affirmative-actioning going on with Gabby. She’s definitely a tremendous performer and deserves to be up there. Sucks that Wieber has to be robbed because of the limitations of the rules.
At the same time, I’m pretty confident that our good old pal Big Lefty Media gets excited more than usual when a black person has a chance at gold, especially in a sport that they have not been dominant in. As Rush said, the media is desirous to see a black person do well. They savor the moments when they can say “X is the first black to do Y”. I couldn’t help but notice the SI cover with the US girl’s team, and they stuck Gabby front and center.
During an interview following the routines, Gabby was asked how she deals with the nervousness of competing in the Olympics. She smiled broadly and proudly responded that she “meditates on Scripture”, and said, “The Bible really helps me out.”
She deserves affirmative action just for that.
She is a great gymnast. Go, Gabby!
You demonstrate one of the real evils of affirmative actions (I'm not saying you're evil, I'm sure you're a fair, good guy since you're a Freeper): it makes us suspicious of individual achievements of members of the groups benefiting from this awful law (mainly African Americans). Other Freepers have pointed out that while in the floor-ex she stumbled, she was that great doing very hard routines in the others to come in second.
College Football is subjective, too.
I can’t tell you why ballet is not performed as a sport; other forms of dancing (most notably, ballroom) are, though not at the Olympic level.
And the umpires’ decisions, while in most cases clear-cut, do affect the outcome of a baseball game. But it’s really the strike zone, which varies from umpire to umpire (and to hear pitchers and catchers complain, from pitch to pitch!) that has a major impact on what pitches get thrown and their locations, and which dramatically effects the outcome of the game.
In the other sports I mentioned, the style of officiating often can affect how a game plays out. Referees who clamp down on defensive holding allow offenses to air it out more freely in football, while those who let a lot slide result in forcing teams to adapt their game plans accordingly.
So it is with gymnastics, figure skating, etc. The judges don’t directly affect the performance at the time, but the competitors (especially at the top levels) know the judges and what they’re looking for, and adapt accordingly. How is that fundamentally different?
Whenever you get judges' results like 98.5, 97, 99.25, and 98.3 from any kind of a panel, you do not at that time have a sport. You have opinions of a performance, and not an honest rendering of the actual performance . . . and that's what it is . . . a performance.
It actually gauls me when people get all choked up over one low result of 4 or 5 panelists and have them consider that a sport.
Baseball is never decided on a panel of opinions.
I love the olympic gymnastics!! Do you have any idea how much talent that kind of movement takes? It’s amazing what those gymnasts can do.
Bela Karolyi was spot on last night on NBC. He said the rule limiting all-around competitors to two per nation is absurd. There’s no way Jordyn Wieber isn’t one of the 24 best gymnasts in that competition, but she’s aced out by a stupid rule.
If we want to talk about rules, that’s the one to talk about, not affirmative action. Let’s see the best compete.
I did watch it but I don’t think it was unfair. Going into the floor exercises, Gabby was quite a bit ahead of Jordon (if I am getting their names correct ) Even with the deductions she received she was still able to hold on to her lead. It was the total of the rotations that is considered.
Not to mention the courage, I mean me getting on a balance beam and flipping? I don't think so.
Yes I do believe it.
Someone had to be cut but I get a bad feeling this little girl would have won the gold had she not been.
IMO, every judged sport should do what diving does. They throw out the high and low scores and average the rest. Prevents low balling or scoring your favorite higher.
Well, thank you for your subjective opinion. ;)
No idea if affirmative action is alive and well at the Olympics, but Douglas was well out of bounds during the floor exercises - both feet, several steps.
One thing I did notice was that she did not receive as much "love" from her fellow American gymnasts as the others did.
It could be the announcers thought she didn’t do as well because they have latent racialism.
Anyway, the real affirmative action in gymnastics is the stupid rule that only 2 people from a country can be in the all-around competition. This means it’s not the 3 best people who will get medals, instead we will make sure more countries get a chance to send athletes to the finals even though they have no chance of winning.
If there was just a “winner”, it wouldn’t matter — if you can’t beat 2 of your own teammates, what chance did you really have to win? But they hand out bronze medals to the 3rd-place competitor, and now it is possible that the 3rd-best person in the world isn’t even allowed to compete.
It’s worse because gymnastics is an inherently subjective grading system, and who knows whether that 3rd-place girl was cheated somewhat by an incorrect subjective decision.
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