I turned on breaking to scoff. I stayed to marvel, ended up watching the whole men’s final. I get some people had a problem with it, but my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it; especially the charismatic Frenchman Dany Dann, who won silver. He was a delight to watch.
Are there any Olympic events that currently use that scoring system? I thought they were all replaced with execution-difficulty-penalty triplets.
There are subjective judgement calls by officials in every Olympic event. Obviously some events are more subjective than others, and the line for what’s “too” subjective is itself subjective. For me, if the athletes are doing something that’s clearly beyond the skills of almost all others, then it’s interesting enough to be in the Olympics.
What’s that all about?
I heard they had planned to do the hokey-pokey at a future event, but turned themselves around.
Racists are trying to delegitimize the sport by focusing on the worst performance. Raygun was awful, and received no points accordingly. That’s as it should be. What makes me sick is that I am certain there were Australians who could have given a better showing and were shoved out due to her academic credentials, which is the opposite of what breaking is about.
Now check out some of the better qualifying rounds.
I don’t agree with all of the judge’s decisions, but if you want to argue that these folks aren’t athletes then you need to provide us some footage of yourself coming even close to these performances.
I don’t have access to the IOCs rules book.
On the screen of my TV,
I just see people’s names. Their names. Not their nicknames or some Bullshit they created in their head.
I didn’t make it up. It’s what I saw. My eyes don’t lie. And I watched hours and hours of the games.
I’m willing to grant them a pass because it was for display and a try-out, only.
If they get a opportunity to be real Olympians they’ll need to up their game.
Don’t be so sure
I’m thinking Raygun could have actually turned in a routine with traditional moves to score above 0.0, but knew she was totally outclassed by her competition, and decided to be weirdly artistic instead.
Oh. I admit that because I don’t like those sports, I don’t watch them, so haven’t kept up.
One way to handle that is for the Olympics to have some kind of qualifications that the dancers need to have participated in earlier competitions and placed above a certain level. For instance, I believe snowboarders have to have finished higher than 30th place in a certain number of sanctioned competitions in order to be eligible for the Olympics. This ensures that the participants are at a competitive level and are not just picked based on some random criteria or fraudulent means.
No one should be arguing these breakers aren’t athletic. What’s being argued is if this should have been included as an Olympic-level event. Cheerleading is also very athletic, and requires skills and moves and such, but I don’t see anyone seriously arguing that it should be included as an Olympic event.
Why should anything be a Olympic event?
Looking forward to twerking being an event at the 2028 L.A. Games. Much artistry involved.
And a great opportunity for right-wing outrage.
The next event!
Exactly.
Yeah, this all seems to me like weirdly arbitrary forms of snobbishness.
All these events exist in modern competition only for the entertainment of spectators. So some spectators like to watch certain events where superiority of technique is determined by specialist evaluation. Others like to watch events where technical superiority is determined by some simple quantitative metric easily evaluated by a layperson (how far, how fast, etc.).
Great, so have some events of each kind, and everybody’s happy. What’s the problem? Are we running out of Olympic capacity or something because there are too many different types of events, or what?
I’ve been saying this for years. It (almost) broke my heart when they added style points to the ski jumping competition.
Do go on… Beckdawrek. If that is your real name.
I’m not on TV as an Olympian for that very reason. (I’m not an athlete, either)
(Beck is what I’m called, everyday, it is part of my name.)
Yeah, the objections to events using stage names for competitors make even less sense to me than the other objections. Why should I care how a competitor is identified for purposes of competition? Give ‘em all numbers or call them Alpha Beta Gamma etc., if they’re happy I’m happy.
(Also, equestrian events, for example, AFAIK have always been recorded with names of both rider and horse, and lemme tell you, those names are not how the horses identify themselves! 
Now THERE’s some “bullshit” that some random person “created in their head”, if you like.
If it doesn’t bother me to read, say, that the 9th-place finisher in eventing team dressage was “G. Ugolotti and Swirly Temptress”, then it doesn’t bother me to read that the silver medalist in breaking is “Dany Dann”.)