I love the Olympics. Anyone who knows me is probably aware of this fact. I spent a great many days during the past two weeks watching the Olympics (sometimes several sports at a time, due to my handy computer), checking out Olympic news on the internet, and getting a little teary over athletic accomplishments. Here is my problem--it's the new (artistic) gymnastics scoring system. Why would you create a scoring system that is:
A. Unintelligible to even the educated gymnastics viewer (what was wrong with the perfect 10, people?) to the point that after a routine, you are saying "15.575--is that a good score? I don't know? What did the other girl get?"
B. Rewards crappy difficult performances over perfectly executed "easier" performances. Given that even the most experienced and supposedly favored athletes bobbled on simple skills, rewarding a gymnast who lands ON HER KNEES after a difficult vault with a medal seems ludicrous. The gymnastics federation, or IOC, or whoever is in charge of international scoring needs to figure out a better balance between difficulty and artistic talent, before some girl ends up breaking her neck because she tried to throw in a more difficult skill to raise her start value to an astronomic levels. Although, with the current system, she would probably get a gold for her efforts...I just wouldn't want to be accepting my medal from a stretcher.
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