Quote:
Originally Posted by ISiddiqui
What some people feel is messed up  . I actually like making difficulty and execution added together. Difficulty will never meet execution (unless someone tries an OMG, WTF routine), but it encourages more risky attempts. |
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