Olympic Games

Olympic Games

Well, the Olympic Games are on again.

It happens every time; in the weeks leading up to the Olympics, I always say to myself, "I'm not going to watch 24/7"... and then, from the opening ceremonies until the flame is put out, I'm glued to the TV. I find myself watching sports I never would otherwise, like synchronized diving (which, for a subjectively-judged event, is nonetheless pretty cool) and ... well, they've damn near crammed pretty much every remotely-physical human activity from ballroom dancing to ping pong in there.

Citius, Altius, Fortius... while I understand that ballroom dancing may be a mentally exacting and physically challenging endeavour, I fail to see how it falls into any of the categories fo Faster, Higher, Stronger.

For events like javelin and weightlifting and cycling, an athelete is competing against the others in an event that can be objectively measured, by the measuring tape or the stopwatch or the scales. Events like wrestling and ping pong and boxing (more on boxing later) pit one athelete directly against the other, with only the winner advancing.

I believe that certain events need to be eliminated from the Olympic Games, purely because there is no objective way to measure the performance of the atheletes. There is no "prettier" in the Olympic motto. Ballroom dancing is one of these; in the Winter Olympics a good example is figure skating.

The big problem with my position is that people watch figure skating and diving and some of these other subjectively-judged events, they tune in their TVs and get big ratings. There is no way that they will be eliminated from the Olympics, because they pay the bills.

Boxing presents a quandary; The only way to eliminate judging in boxing (other than the referee) is to force the fights to go to a knockout. That option has been abandoned for the simple reason that even if one started with only eight competitors instead of 32, there is no way that the winners of the first matches would be physically capable of a enough consecutive fights to fit within the Olympic timeframe. Such fights could go for Sullivanesque lengths, in the tens of rounds instead of only four. So, the only way to incorporate boxing in the Olympics is to have judges counting landed blows. Boxing has improved in this regard since Seoul, with a computerized voting system between multiple judges keeping track of the score in real time, for the audience to see.

The thing to do is to follow boxing's lead: to have the score voted on by the judges in real time, displayed for the crowd to see as the performance unfolds. Torvall and Dean may have deserved their sixes, Nadia Comanechi may have deserved her tens - with such a real-time voting system, their scores would have started at 6 and 10 respectively, and stayed there for the duration - displayed in real time for the home viewing audience.

Hmm... something like that might even enhance the sports in question.