I think there are lots of tiny errors, such as how far apart your hands are or other minor things that we don't really see. All of those tiny errors could add up to being more than the one big error in an otherwise flawless routine.

well then the judges should have to note what the errors were that received deductions and provide them to all the tv analysts so they can show us viewers in replay. we have the technology for it - no reason not to

I think that the TV analyists (or NBC) just doesn't care to go into that much detail about things.

Of course, Kerri Strug's moment was a a bit manufactured and unnecessary due to Bela Karolyi being unable to do math and NBC needing some promotion. Her first vault score was good enough to win the gold and her second vault score was virtually identical to her first when she fell on the landing. Go figure.

Yes, it was nice to see the men's team win a bronze without two of their best athletes competiting, but I'm just jingoistic enough to believe that American's should celebrate more for winning a bronze than the team that won gold celebrated. Act lik you've been there before!

Of course, if you win gold, celebrate all you want. My favorite line of the Olympics so far is when one of the guys on the 100 relay team was being interviewed afterward and spoke of the motivation they got from "the Frenchies" shooting their mouth off. That team had an amazing victory in shattering the world record in of the most dramatic races of the Olympics and they still didn't celebrate as much as the gymnastics team.

Indian pride - we finally won a goddamn individual gold medal after 80 years! Boo yeah!


A

Of course, in my new least favorite "sport" synchro diving, there were several dives where scores ranged from 4.5 to 8.5 on a 10 scale. How can two "qualified" judges come to such radical conclusions?

We need the technology to computerize judging Epyx was able to do it in 1984 for Summer Games.

Probably worth noting at this point that none of the members of the U.S. men's gymnastics team had ever been there before.

Freaking awesome. I haven't thought about that game in years. Epyx. I was the king of skeet shooting.

Back to the thread.

I have some questions about the gymnastics. Did any of the U.S. men like that Horton guy qualify for individual gold in gymnastics? And is it an all around competition so one person does all the events shown last night or are there medals awarded for each individual event, like one for the pommel horse, one for the blue mat, etc.

There is an all-around competition that I believe is tomorrow night and then individual event finals later on. All of the scores from last night do not count as those are separate competitions.

Perhaps judge A was judging synchronity and judge B was judging technique? I'm not a syncho expert, but as little as I know, I know they have judges for seperate parts of the dive.

but even within those there can be some wide spreads. i recall one case from synchro last night where one judge had a 4.5 for execution and the others were all 6 or 6.5 -- really if you're that poor a judge that you're that far off everyone else it's kinda ridiculous - and yes i know they get to drop the high and the low but still

The first two judges are execution for one diver. The next two judges are execution for the other diver. The remaining judges are synchronization.

What I don't like about the gymnastics judging is seeing judges talking on phones, talking to each other, and having that red-shirted 'head' judge over their shoulder working on the computer with them. In a subjectively judged sport, I'd vastly prefer the judges to have no communication with anyone until after they've recorded their scores.

Nor were they expected to be even close after losing arguably their top two stars.

Gymnastics scoring seems pretty good to me. Difficulty is already weighted less than execution... i don't think i saw any difficulty score higher than 7.2 while execution goes up to 10.

Really though are people actually arguing that they felt the American team performed better than the Chinese? It didn't even look close to my untrained eyes.

DOLA, although I do think it stinks that they all talk about the scoring before giving their scores and that it takes so long to do the scoring. The extensive use of technology feels wrong too, but it makes a certain amount of sense in a sport so fast.

that to me is what's most amazing. i mean you think in an ideal world you have your top 3 (whose scores are counting on all the rotations) be hamm, hamm, horton -- throw in bavsar or artimov or springs for one rotation each or something. you never see that other guy at all, and this team would have taken silver, if not potentially pushed the chinese for gold.

I think I was watching on NBC when one of the commentators was pissing me off. After one of the Chinese guys screwed something up, he was smiling. And the commentator goes off a bit (didn't sound angry or was yelling, but still) on how he doesn't like athletes smiling away mistakes, making a joking matter out of it, and how he knows this is how some people deal with it but he doesn't think it's right.

Anyone catch that part? Seemed kinda odd to me. I don't see anything wrong with smiling away disappointment. I know I've seen in in many sports, as kind of a "I can't believe that just happened" reaction...

There is a school of thought that you can't be taking the competition seriously if you smile after a mistake. Players get ripped for it all the time. When you make a mistake, you better break something to prove that you are upset about it:rolleyes:

I agree that I like the idea of this system better. I'm glad they award points for better routines. I find it a nice improvement over the past system of "Russians and Americans start with 9.5 and score within 0.5 of that, East Germans 9.2, etc". It does, in theory, award better routines with more points and I'm happy with that.

However, I thought that there were a couple of big arbitrary decisions:

1) Routines of similar elements were given higher difficulty scores to "favored" teams. Now, I realize I'm not a trained eye so maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see. As I said before, I wish I were comparing, say, the Romanians and the Germans- two teams I have no rooting interest for or against. That way there would be no unintentional bias clouding my judgement.

2) Scores need to be balanced across all elements. C'mon- vault is big points because it's basically jump, twist, land. There are only three elements, it last 10 seconds. This isn't to say I could get my ass up on a vault and do what they do. But it's unfair to compare that to a 2 minute long floor or high bar routine unless you give bigger deductions to silly, miniscule things. I wish they were not allowed slow motion instant replay- it's unfair- but if they're going to allow it for one thing- it should be for vault to view how straight a gymnast is, how close their legs are together, etc- give more elements to a simpler aparatus.

3) The biggest- judges seemed to really adjust their execution scores based on who was going. Might as well just use the old system. Taking the college football polls or making the convoluted BCS means nothing if you take the top 2 at the end of the season and play them against each other. You just used a more screwy system to arrive at the same result.

I guess if someone can answer this question for me, this might sit a little better: is difficulty determined ahead of time or at the time of the routine? IIRC, you have to turn in your routine ahead of time so they know if you skip an element (and the announcers seem to know what's coming when). If you know coming in that your routine is a 6 and someone else's is a 7- then it's a fair system, sort of. But if that's determined on the fly, as well, then that's just unfair ("I want to give them a 15, but the execution was bad so I'll just bump up the difficulty score")

SI

Or go yell at the media and tell them how passionate you are. Around here, we call that move "the Jose Guillen"

SI

I'm sure difficulty is determined beforehand.

The difficulty is determined beforehand so you can't change your routine to include more difficulty if you need it? The German guy last night needed a big score to beat the U.S. for bronze, but he couldn't do something more difficult to possibly get a higher score? I guess it would give too big of an advantage to the team going last?

My wife and I heard that and did a doubletake, too. Sounded like stupid announcing to me. Then again, I can't stand the gymnastics announcers- put them together with my already stated feelings about scoring and you find out why it drives me nuts.

The "play-by-play" guy with the deeper voice- he's ok. Again, he's like a decent play-by-play guy in baseball: you don't really notice him but that's not necessarily a bad thing. He does his job and that's that.

Then there's the woman announcer and I think they replaced her back around 2000 with a button board that the "play-by-play" guy just presses from time to time. She/it has the following responses: "Good/bad news for the Americans", "Aw, a little step there- that will be a deduction", and "She/he didn't quite stick the landing there". Basically, she/it's a one trick pony who cheers for the Americans while sounding catty in pointing out everyone's mistakes. I imagine that means she's a former American gymnast.

Then there's the high pitched guy who just talks down to the audience the entire broadcast. He was the one who made the comment above. He vacillates between pedantic and elitist. I'm not sure which is worse.

SI

This is from a story in the NYT, but it's confusing to me when the difficulty is determined. Certainly last night the announcers knew the difficulty of routines as they were happening, but maybe it's possible to add elements. The problem IMO would be whether someone missed an element or changed their routine to purposefully leave it out.

The announcer on CBC explained that it isn't just what elements they do, but in the order as well. For example, on rings he said that going from the move where they stick their legs out straight horizonally behind them, and then upwards into having their body upside down vertically, would get more points than doing the same two moves but the other way around. Harder to go up than down, I guess.

I've been hearing about this guy since that tournament, and the two problems I've heard are that he's not quick enough at this time to be a good NBA point guard (we saw how this killed Sarunas Jasikavecious in the NBA) and also that his contract might not allow him to go NBA next year. The quickness will hopefully come as he grows into his body and trains more, but the latter he might not enter the draft next year and wait until 2010. Two things that could affect it - a huge Olympics could get the hype high enough for an NBA team to pay the buyout, and contrarily if Brandon Jennings succeeds in Europe it could lessen the hype on Rubio.Heh, as KCChief pointed out, the Karolyi's forced her out on a broken ankle even though they mathematically had the competition sewn up, and NBC hyped it incredibly during prime time even though the actual competition took place 8 hours earlier and they clearly knew by that time it hadn't affected the outcome.
I don't think anyone is saying the US deserved Gold over the Chinese, and I have no way of knowing how good Japan was on 5 of the 6 rotations. Our pommel horse and floor routines were pretty poor, and I didn't even see the US on rings (although I don't see how we could come close to China there). Specifically on the high bar I think the US was better than China, and on that one rotation (US high bar/China vault) I didn't see how China was scored so much better they went from a point back to 2 in the lead. To my untrained eye, that was our best event and we nailed our routines, yet we lost ground to the favored team.
I think you turn in a routine, but then they can lower it if you skip an element. I would think you should be able to add in elements, and I agree with Jas_lov - that 3rd German guy should have tried to add some huge elements even if he had virtually no chance of hitting them. Nobody cares if you finish 4th or 8th, go for the bronze.

Oh well, time to watch the judging on reputation favor us (although that Shawn Johnson girl is phenomenal at landings and balance.)

Beijing may be the most unappealing location for the Olympics that I can remember. It's suppose to be a huge marketing tool for these countries and cities, but it isn't working for me.

both shawn johnson and nastia liukin are legit all-around gold-medal contenders - chelsea memmel would have been if she was not injured too

I'm still not quite sure I understand synchronized diving for leading off the primetime show.

SI

I'm still baffled by all this hatred for synch diving. It seems insanely difficult to do this.

Yeah, I don't really understand the hatred, either. I do think the solo diving is more interesting, as you usually see more complex dives, but it still takes a LOT more skill than I'll ever have in my life.


I think they're at the liberty of the Olympic schedule. I guess there isn't anything else going on "at this moment" that's more interesting. If I'm not mistaken, swimming is coming back at around 10 eastern and then it's gymnastics, a little later in the Beijing morning.

/tk

I suspected it was something like that with scheduling. Again, I don't really have anything against synchronized swimming- I just figured it's not really the big draw you want to start off your big show to keep people from changing the channel.

That said, the standard of "it takes a lot of skill" pretty much goes for anything in the Olympics ;)

Without trying to draw too much politics into this, I would figure they WOULDN'T have shown that interview with GWBush fairly early in the programming the other day. ;)

/tk

Touche :p

SI

that interview was fucking painful to watch - the guy is practically a comic character

I think the Aussies got screwed by the judges on the running forward dive. The announcers were saying 9, 9.5, 10 and it was much lower than that... and then the announcers don't even mention it.

And how does any of this affect the fact that a young woman went out there on a broken ankle and stuck the landing? How does any of this affect her courage or her performance under pressure?

Be as ticked off as you want at the coaches and NBC, she still impressed the hell out of me.

I dunno... I could see the guys of the NBA being pretty damn good at volleyball too. Just talking about what was discussed earlier. The USA could be so good at other sports if they weren't so stuck on BASKETBALL. You have the WORST chance at being an NBA basketball player yet the MOST kids with supreme natural talent, want to do that.

What is the Phelps schedule like over the next day or two?

Is he going for gold tonight?

Going for 2 golds.

Who knew James Carville was so good at volleyball?

The fact that everyone is wearing a suit of similar design doesn't say much about the actual suit. My understanding is that there's quite a lot of R&D that goes into tweaking a suit or a shoe, and that a company doesn't necessarily make their new design available to everybody. Certainly, everyone is going to try to copy each ohter but that doesn't mean that they do so successfully. I think there may be a sizable advantage to teams that have access to the top companies' products.

I think races are at 10:21 pm EST and 11:19 pm EST.

At least according to the schedule on ESPN.

Here's something I managed to find about the suits. It seems there is some unfair advantage to new suits, for example, coming out although not as bad as I feared it might be: High-Tech Swimsuits Approved by Olympic Committee Promise to Even the Competition | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

#411 runs kinda funny on the US girls Gymnastics team.

Under 7:00. Wow.

If all these Chinese girls are at least 16 years old then I'm 150 years old.

Well I guess the new lesson for international gymnastics competitions is to go with as high of a difficulty as possible. If you stumble? Who cares, it won't really hurt you anymore. Gymnastics used to be about perfecting above showboating, but not anymore...