I spent a good deal of time watching the Winter X Games over the past few days. All I can say is ‘Wow!’. The things that these kids are doing on skis, snowboards and snowmobiles are just ridiculous (in a good way). I found the whole tournament to be far superior than anything I’ve seen at any Winter Olympics. The Olympic events all seem so plain vanilla now. Screw the Olympics, consider me an X Games fan! And keep in mind that I’m pretty much the only person I know who hasn’t ever gone skiing, snowboarding or snowmobiling.
I love the X Games! I still hear some people saying that those competitors aren’t real athletes and those sports don’t belong in the Olympics. I say “you try it and then tell me they aren’t athletes!” I can’t even stand up on skis.
How can anyone say that they aren’t athletes? I’ve only watched the Winter X Games, but in general, they’re more athletic than many of their Winter Olympic counterparts.
Fun to watch, but I don’t know how I could call them sports. This fellow’s blog post is not very well written, but his point is good: subjectively scored “sports” are easily rigged, and there’s no guarantee of objective judgment. These types of things are best watched for aesthetic grace and the “ooooh!” factor, but with any expectation of fair competition turned firmly to the “off” position.
This, of course, also applies to the Olympic Games.
I read the blog, and I have to say that the guy is a complete idiot. First of all, he watches the very last event of the whole competition and feels like he knows enough to make a judgment.
While I agree that subjectively judged events leave quite a bit of room for error (and fixing), there appears to be an accepted hierarchy of jumps and tricks. I’m just a recent convert, but even I could tell that White’s last run (his 3rd, btw, not his 4th per the blog) was superior to all the others. I’ll also add that many of the X Game events actually do have an objective portion, where maximum and average jump heights are displayed and accounted for, unlike the figure skating, diving and gymnastics events at the Olympics.
I guess I disagree with your last point. Although the scoring is subjective, there is definitely an expectation of fairness. That’s not to say that the final results are always “correct”, but the judging certainly strives for that goal. As for the “perfect score”, I suspect it’s merely symbolic. Kind of like a perfect 10 (or equivalent) in figure skating or gymnastics.
This was a (somewhat, if not “very”) serious problem at the first one or two “summer” X-Games; the events were so new that the judges all had their own “standards” of how to score the events.
However, with pretty much every judged athletic event, eventually there is a standard of which tricks are worth how many points, and how they are supposed to be done. Note that it took the international figure skating community until something like 2005 (and one or two too many incidents where they had to try to explain to people how A was ahead of B after both of them had skated, but then after C skated, B ended up winning) to figure this out (and even at that, the 2010 men’s Olympic champion was decided by the electronic equivalent of a dice roll).