Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Infamous Tie

Ahhh, shades of Evan and Johnny at this past Nationals. What do you do in the case of a tie?

Personally, I say award two Gold Medals...but that's just what I think!

Much like figure skating, when two gymnasts tie...they don't award duplicate medals...there always has to be some kind of crazy tie-breaker situation that always seems to split things the wrong way!

Love Evan to pieces...one of my favorite skaters...no way should he have won Nationals. I was there...it was quite apparent who skated better. In the crowd where I was siting we thought Johnny had pulled it off by no less than 5-10 points. Then the scores...the tie...and Evan gets the Gold...ugh!

From St. Paul to Beijing...it's the Olympic Final on Uneven Bars. Nastia Liukin and He Kexin are dueling it out. Both have good routines...only Nastia's is better than good, it's great. The scores...the tie...Kexin gets Gold? Another crazy tie breaker.

Only in figure skating...tie breaking makes sense (most of the time). Evan won the free so he won the Gold (debatable...but understandable). For the Uneven Bar final there was this crazy if there is a tie instead of just taking the high and low scores out we'll take the high and two lowest scores and whoever has the best score then is the winner meaning (do you see how this run on sentence is just a nightmare!) that the outcome of the competition is based upon only three judges interpretation and two of the three judges has never even had an Olympic medalist in gymnastics in their country!

I'm not the biggest fan of figure skating's point system, but it certainly beats out gymnastics.



4 comments:

Ice Mom said...

I agree with you, Aaron! I thought Nastia rocked last night.

Thanks for the insight on scoring

Aaron said...

It's so funny, you would think that when that happens the judges themselves would be like "whoa...somethings not right because we all just saw those routines" and fix it...but they just sit there as if all is well!

And why didn't they file a protest?

Anonymous said...

They didn't file a protest because American team knew what the tie breaker deal was. Unfortunately for Nastia, she got the bad end of the stick. The ruling went by the book. I think what would have made better sense would be whomever scored higher on the prelim would get the gold instead. Kinda like Vaulting. They had to do two and if it is a tie, then whomever got the highest vault score of the two wins. Since they don't do two uneven bar routines, it then makes sense to go back to the prelim and count that one as the backup routine in case of a tie.

In any case, I'm not sure why Olympic doesn't allow dual gold. I bet if the Chinese had gotten the silver in this case, IOC would have no choice but allow 2 golds. Host country always get the advantage. Especially when the host country like China that has huge economic power (and potentially surpass US in 10 or 20 years). The only reason why IOC rewarded the Canadian figure skater gold was because Americans protested and since American companies are the ones that pay for the existence of IOC, IOC had no choice but give 2 golds. Essentially whomever holds the moola holds the power.

Anonymous said...

Nastia was robbed! The interesting thing is that other Olympic sports don't mind ties...I wonder why gymnastics is so averse to it? It's too bad, because the tie-breaker they finally had to use to award the gold to He was pretty obscure...