It’s official.
We are as bad as Figure Skating.
You can win a medal with a full fall.
… Cheng Fei next… almost stuck the 2 1/2 a beautiful vault. 6.5/9.575. Second vault – Cheng – She put her knees down and then her hands. She just cannot do that vault all the time What a shame. She was just a little short on the landing and couldn’t step forward. 6.5/8.55 Average 15.562… ahead of Alicia, that was a surprise….
Her second vault was really, really bad. With a fall. And she still won the Bronze medal.
I’m not saying the judging was bad. … But I wish it had gone the other way and Cheng Fei had finished 4th.
I’ll post that video when I find a link to it.
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The judging was bad and she was overscored relative to the rest of the field. She wasn’t “a little short.” That vault was doomed from the start and there were a whole host of deductions (many of which were obviously not taken) before she even touched the mat.
And it’s even more shameful than figure skating, since the skaters have several opportunities to mess up, and especially in vault finals, you’ve got two skills to perform, and that’s it. Completely screwing up half of your entire performance should never end in a medal. It’s a disgrace, and casual fans don’t understand how it can happen and are turned off to watching gymnastics because it doesn’t make sense to them. And that’s unfortunate.
Rick, what do you think of Chusso’s vault? Many have criticized her leg form.
P.S. Who won in figure skating with a fall?
For once Oksana Chusovitina had pretty good form, I thought. And excellent amplitude.
I have no problems with that medal.
And I LOVE the story of her 5 Olympics. And no plans to retire.
Sasha Cohen fell twice in the first minute of her free skate at the Turin Olympics in 2006 finishing with a silver medal, behind Japan’s Shizuka Arakawa.
But, living in Canada, I’ve seen that same story happen perhaps a hundred times over the years in competitions of all levels. A fall, formerly, was not a big deduction in figure skating.
Oxana Chsovitina at the Clermont-Ferrand Euopeans in 2008 fell in her second vault….it wasn’t a simply fell…But she made 2 big steps and she finished near the judges but she win the gold medal!!!
Almost as bad as Ferrari winning AA with a fall. It makes absolutely no sense. This new scoring system has denied so many great gymnasts of medals and awarded so many inconsistent gymnasts with medals.
Funny thing this Olympic judging. The athletes are being held to the most ridiculous of standards, sometimes to the point that the judging deductions seem beyond what is humanly and biomechanically possible. Apparently the Olympic judges themselves do not have to meet such stringent standards as is evidenced by the scores being awarded by the panels. Why is it that the biggest competition in our sport can be officiated by myopic incompetents?
In each and every FIG exam that I have ever attended we are required to come up with an “accurate” score that matches the “expert” panel in less than a minute (40 seconds is the norm if memory serves me right). Why is it then that every score at the olympics takes 5 minutes when the panels are full of officials who had to pass their exams under the afore mentioned standards? I find it appaling that Pavlova has to take a score of 0.00 after standing at the end of the runway for who knows how long because she broke some golden green light judging rule, even though every judge likely saw and evaluated her vault, yet the same panel can be slow as dirt and yet still throw scores that are so out of line that even the most ignorant of spectators rolls their eyes in disbelief? Without similar repercussions! WTF?
I say, let’s publish the actual scoring (what deductions were taken by each judge). I think with training, they could do it quickly.
It would eliminate some of the wiggle factor where judges (for instance) take off for one thing but not another when both were wrong. With practice, the judges should learn to do this quickly. Also, it will allow gymnasts to work on the actual places in their routine where they are getting gigged. Also, there is a LONG history of cheating and collusion in international judging and while I think things are moving to be better, there are probably a lot of judges that are still unethical. Just as the new code has helped us be more objective, so would listing actual deductions.
Good idea TCO. That would also go well with what I have also suggested locally that we at least abolish the cheat sheets that the judges use (more like a checklist of deductions) In my opinion if the deduction does not jump out at you during the routine then you shouldn’t be taking it in retrospect when you go down the checklist.
Right, TCO.
George and I were both FIG judges for many years. And judges are touchy about showing scores to anyone other than the coaches.
But time has come for as much transparency as possible. Let’s show everything, including statistical analysis of judge’s performance at major competitions.
@ Rick,
good suggestion with the juding performance. My coach is our state wide competition coordinator and as all our meets are judged with the help of computers we do run a database that shows how much a coach was “off” compared to the final score. E.g. you can see that one judge clearly favours his/her gymnasts. This is always very interessting to see
should be done at any level 
[...] worst medal despite a fall I can recall was Cheng Fei at the 2008 [...]
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