By Calvin Palmer
The Women’s Uneven Bars Final in Beijing became shrouded in controversy when America’s Nastia Liukin and China’s Kexin He tied with a score of 16.750. In other events, when two competitors tie in a winning position they share the medal. A case in point is the Women’s 100m Final; Sherone Simpson and Kerron Stewart finished in a dead heat for second place and both received a silver medal.
In gymnastics, where the ultimate arbiter is not the clock but the subjective ratings by a panel of six judges, when two competitors tie in a medal position a tie-breaking algorithm is initiated.
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has established six tie-breakers and He edged Liukin for the gold medal on the second level tie-breaker – the average of the three lowest of the four counting B-jury deductions.
The judges in gymnastics comprise two panels. The A panel scores a competitor on the basis of the actual routine. The A score starts at zero. The B panel makes deductions based on how the routine is executed. The B score starts at 10.
Liukin’s B scores ranged from 9.3 to 8.8; her deductions ranged from 0.7 to 1.2 points. He’s B scores ranged from 9.3 to 8.9; her deductions ranged from 0.7 to 1.1 points.
The first tie-breaker drops the highest and lowest deductions and averages out the remaining four deductions. In this case, Liukin and He both had an average of 0.975 points for the middle four scores. The second tie-breaker drops the highest deduction and averages the remaining three scores, which gave He an average deduction of 0.933 points to Liukin’s 0.966 points, hence the gold medal went to He.
Those rules were not introduced five minutes before the Uneven Bars Final began. They were introduced in 2006 . So why Liukin had a puzzled look on her face escapes me. It is clear neither she nor her coach and father, Valeri, had done their homework.
Liukin looks a reasonably intelligent girl to me but could be forgiven for not having the rules and regulations at her fingertips because her focus is on her performance in the competition. But her father, as her coach, should have known. I cannot think of a professional coach in any field of sport who would not know the rules of the sport in which they coached.
When Liukin looked to her father as if to say, “What is going on?” Instead of giving her an equally baffled look, he should have said, “They have implemented the tie-breaker and your deductions must have been higher.” It is as simple as that.
Liukin’s mystified look, it was only lacking an indignant “Whatever,” only served to light the fires of American paranoia that started with the NBC commentators and quickly spread to the American print media. For all their whining and complaining, there is no escaping the rules that govern the competition. And those rules were applied accurately.
Failing to find any wrongdoing in that quarter, NBC proceeded to call into question the competency of the judges. In order to avoid any bias, the judges selected cannot be a national of one of the competing teams. NBC suggested that because the judges do not, therefore, come from the United States, Russia or China, countries with a long tradition of gymnastics, they are somehow unable to judge competently.
NBC even went on to say that of the six judges, four came from countries that had never produced an Olympic medalist. Excuse me, but what has that got to do with their ability to judge? It was almost as if NBC was implying that the judges were people who had just walked in off the street.
And then of course the American media had to find someone to blame. When the score sheets were tallied, it emerged that the Australian judge, Helen Colagiuri, separated the two competitors by 0.3 in He’s favor. The other five judges separated the two gymnasts by 0.1 or 0.2 points. As I write, I expect Stealth bombers are on their way to Sydney to mete out retribution for Australia’s treachery.
The system of scoring may not be perfect. How can it be? It involves humans. But the tie-breaking was applied in accordance with the rules and the decision should have been accepted with good grace. And it was by Liukin, eventually.
It is the American media that needs to take the stars, and stripes, out of its eyes and report with a little more objectivity. Had this issue involved a Ukrainian competitor instead of one from the United States, I doubt there would have been little more than a murmur of complaint.
Clearly, the sport of gymnastics needs to undertake a PR campaign to explain the complexities of the scoring before 2012 and the next Olympic Games in London. And maybe commentators should offer an explanation at the start of each event. It took research for this article for me to discover the intricacies of the scoring and judging. Even now, I am still baffled by the concept of the start value but am able to see how it can play a part in the final score and nullify some of the more easily discerned errors a competitor makes.
The simple solution to avoiding this kind of controversy in the future is to award two medals if two gymnasts have exactly the same score. That principle applies to the World Gymnast Championships, according to the FIG rules, but not to Olympic competition. It is up to the sport’s governing body in America, along with the governing bodies of other countries, to press the IOC for this sensible change.
2 Comments
August 19, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Nice piece Calvin, and lots of it news to me too.
But I have to say, re. this:
I cannot think of a professional coach in any field of sport who would not know the rules of the sport in which they coached.
that football managers come out every week saying they’d like someone to explain what active and inactive means in the offside law. (Though this may be a slightly different point.)
August 19, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Thanks, Stephen. It was the featured blog under the heading of women’s gymnastics at one point today. I don’t know if it still is.