Slashdot Mirror
New Olympics Scoring: No More Perfect 10.0
Dekortage writes "If you watch the Olympics gymnastics this year, you may be confused by the new scoring system which will let athletes score 14, 17, or even higher. The new rules are 'heavy on math' and employ two panels of judges: one for technical difficulty, which adds points up from a score of zero; the other for execution and technique, which starts at 10.0 and subtracts for errors. The two numbers are then combined for the final score. As one judge put it, 'The system rewards difficulty. But the mistakes are also more costly.' The new rules were adopted after South Korea protested a scoring at the 2004 Olympics." Now I'm sure that no Slashdot reader will intentionally watch any "sport" that has judges determine the winner, but their wives/girlfriends might seize control of the remote because they want to know who is the best at that ribbon-twirling thing.
but if you take something - say ice skateing and make it so that x gives y points.. then everyone will just learn to perfect the move with the highest y and then you will just see a chain of them for the lenght of the event..
it is perfectly acceptiable for it to be subjective - this is why there is more than one judge - and they do have guide lines for quality and preformance..
while i agree it might be better to call it a compitition than a sport - i do belive it has just as much a place in the Olympics as sports.
pure artistic stuff i don't think is right for the Olympics but if it is a good hybrid between art and athletics then go for it.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Well, no, there is no requirement that the Olympics have everything that qualifies as a "sport" under whatever definition applies.
That aside, Ice Dancing. Seriously.
I've always thought the olympics should include breakdancing. It already has a large body of international practitioners, qualified judges, it requires massive amounts of skill and it looks awesome. That may just be me.
Yes, but you'd scare away all the old people and rednecks who'd wonder "why dem young dark kids is on the telly havin's a seizure"...
Seriously, though, I love to watch it as a performance (except when they make a movie out of it).
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Not everyone eats crappy food and has a sedentary lifestyle. Particularly not the sort who end up as Olympic athletes, who on average have a lot more time to train and a lot more research on how to train effectively than at any time in history.
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