Olympic “Sports”

Published August 18th, 2008

sport - noun. an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.

A very general definition of sport. And how does a sport differ from a game, or an exhibition (of athletic ability)? It’s all semantics and I admit that.  But for me to take a sport seriously as a sport, I need a little tighter definition. So to me, a sport is an athletic contest with a clear, objective winner. Anything else is essentially just a game or an athletic display. A subjective system simply encourages debate and little else. Sport only needs a scoreboard and/or a clock. A game needs a panel of judges. It really comes down to objective results vs. subjective results. There is no doubt that many games have extremely athletic participants. I’m not taking anything away from their skill and talent. But they’re simply performers, not contestants. I don’t believe a true sport needs to have an artistic component - you can look as ugly as you want doing it, as long as you get the job done. If, somehow, the rules call for you to look good, there must be objective ways to measure it and objective penalties for failure.

Let’s take a look at a few well-known sports/events. Track and field is easy - those are sports. They’re either timed or based on the distance you can throw something, or how high or far you can jump. You need to be athletic and the results are objectively measured. No problem there.  How about the big 5 - football, baseball, hockey, soccer? Pretty clearly all sports. You can score objectively in all of them. Tennis is clearly a sport too.

Boxing (and by extension MMA) and Golf are two interesting cases in this discussion. Let’s take Boxing/MMA first. Clearly it is athletically demanding, so no problem there. In olympic competition, you can score in boxing objectively - land a punch with the white part of the glove, get a point. And knocking a guy out is pretty objective. However, in pro boxing - and pro MMA - fights end. After a certain point, it “goes to the judges” - and suddenly we’re in a grey area. Judging is based on things like “aggression” and “ring control,” and rounds are scored 10-9. Unless, of course, one fighter dominated - then it might be scored 10-8. Or 10-7. Sometimes a takedown in MMA or a knockdown (but not a KO) in boxing will allow the round to be 10-8. But that’s all optional - subjective. Fighters realize this and many will express a goal of not letting the judges decide a fight - because you just don’t know how they’ll score it. So boxing/MMA is borderline, but leans towards a sport. Golf is simply just borderline. Golfers need to have exemplary concentration, skill and hand-eye coordination. They must make precise swings over and over. Their game is objectively measured, in strokes taken. They must walk about 5 miles a day for 4 straight days, no matter the weather conditions. But all in all - that might not be enough. They don’t carry their own bags, so that makes it a little easier. And lots of people can walk 5 miles a day 4 days in a row without worrying too much. Holding concentration during all of it is probably the hardest part. So golf sits right on the border. It might just barely be athletic enough, it might not. But scoring is objective.

So now we come to some of the most popular Olympic events. Swimming is just track and field in the water, so that’s sport. It’s a race against a clock. But diving? SYNCHRONIZED diving? Gymnastics? All are subjectively judged. Now I realize - I’ve heard the argument before - that the judges know how a routine should be executed and there are standardized deductions for faltering. But those are minimum deductions. Wavering on the balance beam might be a tenth of a point - but it could be more if the judge so chooses. Same goes for diving. And don’t even get me started on synchro diving - they’re not synchronized to each other, they’re each synchronized to a shared clock. In theory, they should be able to dive separately and still match each other. Once they go, they can’t fix it half way. As cool as it looks - and it does look cool - it’s a gimmicky thing.

Since these sports are judged subjectively, every spectator is allowed to reach their own conclusion on the level of skill displayed. An artistic component is up for infinite interpretation. And it is just this problem that has reared its ugly head in this years Women’s Gymnastics Uneven Bars event. Two competitors tied - they were given the same subjective evaluation- and so the decision had to go to a series of tiebreakers. Each hinged on subjective decisions made by the judges panel.

“But as it turned out, the computers had to go to a third tiebreak before determining the winner.

First tiebreak is the start value. Identical.

Second tiebreak is the deductions taken by the middle four judges. That was also the same.

The third tiebreak — hang onto your hats, for your brains are about to explode –was the average of the three lowest of the four counting judges’ deductions.”

Yikes. Flipping a coin would be better. Or how about sharing the gold? It’s happened before. The scoring was essentially random:

The final tally was arrived at by using the Polish, New Zealand and Brazilian judges’ deductions for He, and the Australian, New Zealand and Bulgarian’s deductions for Liukin. The Australian judge, Helen Colagiuri, must have been watching another competition. She scored He’s execution three-tenths of a point higher than Liukin’s, despite the step He took on her dismount. None of the other five judges scored He’s execution higher than a tenth above Liukin, and two of the judges — from Poland and Bulgaria — had Liukin’s execution score two-tenths higher than He’s.

But the real “duh” quote for me is this:

In other words, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Either that, or there’s some big time politics involved. Either way, the judging in gymnastics at these Olympics has been wildly erratic at best.

No kidding! It’s all subjective. Anytime it’s close there’s no reason to believe that the person who won gold actually did better - it’s just opinion. Get a different panel of judges, and maybe it’s reversed. So what’s the real point? If you can’t score subjectively, you’re simply at the mercy of someone’s opinion. And in mine - that’s not sport. That’s an athletic art contest.  You can argue the score, but it doesn’t matter, it’s just someone’s opinion. In a sport, you could argue a call - and that call could be decided by looking at a replay. Objectively, without a doubt. Either the runner was safe, or out. That was either a ball, or a strike. Whether the ball was moving above 95mph, or the runner had good form doesn’t matter.

I realize some people disagree - but to me it’s an important distinction. Some athletic contests have real winners. Others simply have individuals who charmed the most people. That’s what is most disappointing about the olympics for me - awesome athletic displays (gymnastics, diving) are marred by the fact that there’s no real winner.

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