I also think there was a bit of controversy over one of Apollog Anton Ono’s wins in the 2002 Olympics.
I don’t remember the year (I think it was Sydney), but by far the lowest of the low happened during the women’s gymnatics all-around. The horse for the vault was set too low, completely messing up a number of vaults (and of course wrecking the remainder of the routines for the unfortunate gymnasts).
The officials caught the mistake. And allowed the contest to go on and become official. They did nothing.
Okay, I trust I don’t have to explain that allowing the contest to begin with such an unbelievably glaring mistake is a colossal embarrassment for just about every serious sports league in existence. Imagine if an official at the Super Bowl found out at halftime that the goalposts were a foot too narrow or the balls were underinflated, how incredibly embarrassing it’d be for the NFL and the years of outrage that would follow. But no matter what kind of sport it is, if it is an actual sport, one thing is absolutely ironclad: If anything…equipment, officials, conditions, anything at all…does not conform to regulation, there is NO CONTEST.
No, it’s not easy to do this. Results for big matches have been changed. Championships have changed hands. There have been lots of bitter feelings. But if you’re an official, you have no choice. No vault, no all-around. And if it ultimately means that no one takes home a medal, well, that’s bad, but still better than awarding them for OUTRIGHT FRAUD.
That all-around was when I finally decided that these guys just don’t give a damn. This was a ruling straight out of the WWE.
No. Spare me the rationalizations and sugarcoating. Tell it to someone who cares. This was a completely illegitimate contest, and you damn well know it. If you’re okay with it, you’re okay with fraud. Maybe that’s normal for gymnastics fans. Would certainly explain why there wasn’t more of an uproar over this.
As for the '02 pairs figure skating finals…look, I like a feel-good story as much as anyone else. But there is no way I’m ever going to accept the double-gold result as legitimate, and you know why? Because the Russians won the short program, which counts for one-third of the score! Just got completely thrown out; they may as well have not even showed up for that part. (And I’m not even the one who brought this up; I found out about it from CNNSI.com.) Fixing an injustice and manufacturing a bogus result out of whole cloth are two different things.
To sum up, I think that something that every aspiring Olympian needs to know from day one is that the officials simply do not give a damn. Everyone knows that the system is hopelessly corrupt from top to bottom, and nobody’s doing a thing to change that. If you compete in the Olympics, there is a chance that you will be utterly screwed out of a medal for no good reason, that you will turn in the performance of your life, clearly superior to everyone else, and some worthless scumbag will rob you. For blind nationalism, greed, misguided principles, or sheer damn spite. Or, just as bad, one of your opponents will be utterly screwed, giving you a medal that you did not earn, forever tainted and worthless. And there is no recourse, no justice, no recourse, and there will never, ever be (the Canadian synchronized swimmer was an unbelievably lucky fluke, and it took YEARS), and all your questions will be ignored and your protests shot down. Every Olympiad is like this, no event is safe, and it’s never going to change. Believe it.
P.S.: I don’t like the word “controversy” either. It smacks of irresponsibility, if not snivelling cowardice. “Well, I suppose the judges could have been completely out of their minds…yeah, you can see why the fans would be upset, heh heh.” I’d really like to see Olympics coverage take a black-and-white approach to this. Either they made the right call or they didn’t. And if you don’t know, just admit it! For example, in the case of the disqualified Korean short track speed skater, I don’t know enough about the sport to determine for sure if the disqualification was the right call. But I don’t see controversy here; I’m just trusting the officials’ judgment. (From what I saw and how the commentators described cross-tracking, it looked, at least, that this was the right call, but I certainly wouldn’t have raised a beef if he wasn’t disqualified.)
Here’s the problem I had with that event. The Canadians were scored in first place by four of the nine judges; the Russians were scored first by the other five. The controversy centered around the score given by the French judge, who was said to have traded her vote in the pairs in return for higher marks from the Russian judge for the French team in ice dancing.
The breakdown was along political lines, with the judges from Russia, China, Poland, Ukraine, and France placing the Russian pair first. The Canadians were placed first by the American, Canadian, German and Japanese judges. So why was only the French judge questioned? If her score was biased, what about the other four judges who placed the Russians in first?
The only thing I can figure is that nationalism among the judges is accepted practice. It’s as if the French judge was supposed to be the swing vote; the only one unbiased. If the skating federations are willing to let other biases go unquestioned, it casts doubt on the fairness of the whole sport.
Because of stuff like this, I generally turn my nose at any Olympic sport that does not have a clear method of objective judging. Pretty much anything where “art” comes into it at all, anywhere, anyhow, any way, is little more thna dance competition: it might be good, the performers might even be capable of great physical feats, but it isn’t a sport. I even accept team sports, although I’m not personally interested in them. But I cannot accept so-called “sports” where judges get to routinely make bad calls with little verification. To me, there’s a difference between judges make a mistake in applying the rules (they are human, it happens), and when judges have the power to totally ignore them with little or no oversight.
I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a purely objective sport. Just this past week there was a protest in the women’s skeleton. The Americans and Canadians (I think) filed complaints that the British slider had an illegal aerodynamic aid. There were some ridges on her helmet; quite small, about half-an-inch long and maybe a bit bigger than a toothpick. A judge ruled that they were an integral part of the helmet, and allowed its use.
Athletes, especially at the top level like this, want any advantage they can get. They’ll exploit any gray area in the rules that they can find. At some point, someone has to interpret the rules. Maybe a different judge makes a different ruling.
The thing is, there’s no question but that snowboard halfpipe (to take one judged sport as a random case) is an example of extreme athletic ability. People have, throughout history, wanted to be able to compete based on their athletic ability. People have always wanted to say: “You think you’re the best? Well, watch me!” So that’s why there have been contests throughout the ages involving every different kind of athletic ability.
Now some kinds of abilties are easy to compare with, for example, a clock. If person A says he’s a faster runner that person B, they race against each other. But if person A says he can do more flips in a snowboard than person B, there’s no way to give person A the win unless there’s a (hopefully) impartial person to see both of them perform.
So the point is that judgement is a necssary part of some sports, and that’s because athletes love to compete against each other, and without judges they can’t do it.
You either failed to read what I wrote, or you utterly failed to comprehend it. Let me put it in small words:
Artistic merit has no place in sports.
Judgement can be used to properly apply rules.
It should not be used as a replacement for objective standards.
Are there any events other than Ice Skating that actually explicitly judge on artistic merit? My understanding is that snowboarding, skiing moguls and ariels, etc are actually being judged on proper execution–there is a theoretical “perfect” version of whatever trick is being done, and the judges are trying to score how close the execution came to that perfect version.
Ski jumping, but then too the idea seems to be that the person who jumped farthest *must *have had the best technique.
The Grego-Roman at the 2008 Olympics caused some controversyhere in Sweden.
It does look like both Abrahamian and Swedish wrestling got seriously hosed.
The 1988 Seoul games had one other boxing controversy I remember well. New York Times link, and summary:
The arena where the boxing matches were held had two rings. Matches went on simultaneously in both rings. One ring used a standard bell to signal when a round ended, the other used a buzzer. In the match in question, both fighters (Todd Foster for the USA, Chun Jim Chil for South Korea) were instructed to listen for a bell.
Two minutes into the first round, the buzzer for the other ring sounded. Chun, thinking the round was over, dropped his hands and began to walk to his corner. Foster, knowing that the round was not over, clocked Chun with a left hook to the face. For some reason, the ref jumped in to separate them, and while the ref’s attention was diverted, Chun’s corner signaled him to drop to the canvas, which he did (it was clearly an act).
Oh, the stupidity that thereafter ensued. Apparently some judges wanted to disqualify Foster, for throwing a perfectly legal punch before the round had actually ended. Eventually it was decided that they’d have to re-do the whole fight, which apparently went on with less than one hour’s notice to the fighters, rather than 24 hours later as they’d initially planned. The rematch resulted in Chun being knocked out in the second round.
That’s why I kind of like border-cross and skier-cross. Yeah, it’s sort of a trash sport - but it is absolutely objective. Nothing that happens on the hill matters, all that counts is who gets across the line first. Basically “Chinese Downhill” (points for recognizing the reference).
That’s really not artistic merit though. It’s technique. But it is subjective. As for the one that jumps the farthest, once you get much past the K point, it’s difficult to stick the telemark landing. Today’s team competition had a few examples of this, especially with Schlierenzauer nailing a 146.5m jump, but losing a lot on style for a wobbly landing (total pts: 145.2). The highest scoring jump for that round and the day, Anders Jacobsen, was 140.5m, with a nicely executed telemark landing (total pts: 145.4).