August 23, 2004
More Olympic stupidity
The P-bar competition was totally out of control. I don't really blame the judges; it's the judges' job to, as objectively as possible, count bobbles and steps and violations, each of which takes off a certain number of points. Now that we saw a four-way tie for the bronze, the job of the international gymnastics federation is to re-point the P-bar rule book to make there be a wider spread. They'd also need to redistribute the points a bit so that the clearly cleaner and superior routines will get more points, which tonight they did not.
And the stupid commentator needs to SHUT UP. Seriously. He went on and on about how amazing it was that there would be a tie, especially since they measure scores into the thousandths of a point. If he were typing this he'd be using acronyms like OMG! and WTF!!1. And it's not even true: the precision only goes to eightieths of a point, that is, eighths of tenths. Every score ends in 00, 12, 25, 37, 50, 62, 75, or 87. And the judges themselves only have precision of halves of tenths; the rest comes from averaging. So it's not that astonishing. (This "false precision" problem is also the root of one of my big objections to how the metric system is used.)
I'm also a little sad that Mohini wasn't judged higher on her floor routine, but her start value was only a 9.7, so that's understandable. Ah well.
"I suspect jesus is 100% digestible. What you poop is just non-jesus substrate." --Zach Miller
Posted by blahedo at 10:10pm on 23 Aug 2004