Well, okay.
It’s like I said, they don’t require me to approve of the rules of events.
I’ll live with what they say they’re gonna do.
I doubt you are old enough to remember when style points were added to ski jumping. They go back to the very beginning of ski jumping competitions.
Guess what. Raygun’s real name is Rachael Gunn.
Anyways, because of this thread I have now watched a bunch of break dance competitions. Just enough to be an expert as it happens.
I have concluded that the sport it worthy of being an Olympic Demo Sport and Raygun’s performance was an embarrassment.
My personal suspicion is that a lot of the distaste for judged or specialist-evaluated events is rooted in aversion to what I call “showbiz cooties”.
That is, a lot of sports enthusiasts like to feel that they are watching something more inspiring and more “real” than a mere show put on to entertain an audience. Of course, all public sports competitions are nothing BUT a show put on to entertain an audience, and without the audience none of them would exist.
But to a lot of viewers, that reality has distasteful connotations of exhibitions that are somehow “staged” or “scripted”: the aforesaid “showbiz cooties”. They think of it as implying some kind of WWF-style kayfabe, which naturally they oppose. (Same reason they don’t like “Sports” and “Entertainment” categories combined in journalism.)
But there’s no reason that an entertainment performance can’t be about honest athletic competition with no predetermined outcome. That’s essentially just a form of style-specific improv.
So you (generic “you”) aren’t really protecting your preferred “quantitative-metric” sports from “showbiz cooties” by insisting they ought to be separated from specialist-evaluation events like figure skating and breaking.
Yep. She’s a PhD… she has a dissertation about Break Dancing.
But she Cannot break dance.
0/0 is bad scores.
Fine, she was there to promote the skills in the dancing. Ummm, She set the art back 20 years. All by herself.
Australia should not have sent her. I’m sure there are better Breakdancers in Australia.
Right, but I think hajario’s point was that “Ray-gun” is just as valid as an approximation for the real-life name “Rachael Gunn” (Ray Gunn, get it? 
) as your handle is for your name.
I bet she didn’t sign “Raygun” to her dissertation.
True, but is there a reason that one’s dissertation-author name and one’s Olympic-competition name need to have exactly the same format? I’m not seeing it.
Well it was put in at first…
Because, I say so. 
Not really, I just want to know their real names.
Like I said, if the IOC wants to allow the use of their nicknames, I’ll be fine with it.
They undoubtedly don’t give a shit what I think.
Fair enuf, but I think all the official results on olympics dot com and the like do include competitors’ legal-type names. So you can know!
Kind of. The way they score it is there are nine judges and each judge gives one point to the best dancer of that round. In each of her rounds the one competitor was judged better than she. Theoretically, the second best dance ever would get zeros against the best dance ever.
But
I agree with this.
I also think her outfit was unfortunate. She looked cute as all get-out, but cute was not what was called for. The effect was that of a perky gas-station attendant.
I guess I was (almost) heartbroken when I learned that style points were part of ski jumping.
Well, yeah; having more events in the Olympics means more athletes (coaches, officials, etc.), which means more venues and more housing in the host city. It’s already hugely expensive to host the games, so there has to be some limit on which events are in, and which are out. There are plenty of sports whose players and fans would like to be in the Games.
Fair, but that kind of overpopulation issue doesn’t seem in any way dependent on what kind of new sport event is included in the Games.
I seriously don’t see why not. That sounds like it would be great for the Summer Olympics. I really like the idea.
It seems to me we have an argument about whether judged sports belong in the Olympics every two years.
My feeling is: Some judged events are extremely popular and have been part of the Games since the very beginning. No way will they be dropped.
I’m skimming this and mis-read that as “better Beckdawrekers in Australia”
I doubt it.