Now it looks like Paul Hamm shouldn’t have gotten the gold. They’re saying that just because the judges screwed up, there’s no rule to re-instate the medal. Personally, I think that since it was a legitimate screw up they should correct the standings. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
StG
just to suppliment StGermain, Sportsline has an article about it. The right thing to do is fix the mistake in my opinion.
At the least, the S. Korean should be awarded a gold as well. Poor guy.
Seems consistent with what they did with the Canadians in the Winter Olympics. Although there’s nothing that can be done to bring back that moment, I hope the guy gets his due.
That sounds like a good solution. This is why I’m not really all that crazy about having anything with Judging in the Olympics. I enjoy watching a lot of it and actually doing a lot of it but I’m still not sure it should be there.
Just as a quick aside about the Japanese men’s gymnastic teams’ hair… I don’t know if this is the case in Japan, but in Korea it is a superstition to not cut your hair during exams and stuff for good luck. So possibly they follow the same thing?
It’s a bummer about the judging error though. Now nobody feels happy. Paul Hamm has to feel like his medal isn’t fully earned. The former silver medalist now realizes that he’s actually a bronze medalist. And the bronze medalist knows he should be wearing gold but isn’t because of a technicality.
Yes, I kinda wonder how the gymnasts who did NOT fall on their asses and flail about on the floor LOST. Its’s a puzzler, to say the least. Well, to the untrained eye, it looks kinda … fixed.
Evil Captor, liirogue - The Koreans weren’t flawless, they consistantly made small errors which added up. Paul Hamm made a large error, but with the way the sport is scored, they have specific amounts deducted for certain errors. It may seem subjective, and to an extent it is, but there is some logic to the way they come up with their scores, they don’t just pull them out of the air. They have a start value, the top score that specific routine can get. Then for each error, big or small, there is a pre-determined amount that must be deducted from that start value. So Paul Hamm made a hugh error, but it could only affect the score a certain amount, and all the other routines had far fewer small deductions.
StG
Yes, remember all the comments during the broadcast about “a tenth here, a tenth there”. Also remember the mistakes of the Chinese and Korean gymnasts in the last two events. Someone missed a grip on the high bar, and someone else took an extra swing on the parallel bars. Both are 5/10ths penalties, I believe.
I’m not defending the scoring mistake, BTW. I’m just pointing out that one HUGE mistake (Hamm’s 9.1ish on the vault) can be canceled out by several smaller mistakes throught the course of the night. If Hamm had nailed the landing on that vault he would have crushed the rest of the field. As it was, he took one big hit while everyone else took several minor ones. The results ended up being very close at the end.