It's not the olympics without judges being made of FAIL

[lizardbeth]

SAME START VALUE. One with a screwed up landing. Guess which one ended up with the gold? yeah.

That tie-breaker system is fucked, man. Apparently FIG IOC decided that record-keeping double medals in gymnastics was too taxing or something. Poor Nastia. But boy, is she a clone of her mom, or what?

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Think how fast Usain Bolt might have gone if he didn't stop and wave to his mom in the middle of the 100m? ok, I exaggerate slightly, but, day-um. Talk about making it look easy.

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Speaking of day-um, I'm fairly sure that the final lap of the men's 10000 m was run faster than I could do it. Without running 9,600m before it. I ... should be in better shape.

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I missed the first showings of trampoline yesterday somehow. How can this be???? Luckily there's supposed to be more later.

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Yawn. Mom-in-law left today after a two week visit, and that, on top Small Person vacation and late night Olympics-watching is making me SO tired.

And unable to write fic - it makes me itchy.

Comments

[telscha.livejournal.com]

Is in shock cos GB is 3rd on the medals table now but thats cos we're brilliant at cycling and sailing and rowing.

otherwise its China all the way. Think they just have to smile at the judges and oh look they win again.

[reneedy.livejournal.com]

That women's tie-break makes NO sense. It completely defeats the point of having a huge panel of judges. Basically it came down to what one judge thought. Plus I didn't realize the insanity of the panel composition until Tim pointed it out. That to be fair they don't include judges from the countries that are competing, but that means you only have judges from countries with crap gymnastics programs... yeah that makes sense.

Only competing with that for my outrage was how much of an asshole Jenn Stuczynski's coach was. She's only been vaulting for 4 years and she wins the silver medal and you ream her out on national television? The Russian who won broke the WR TWICE that same night. It wasn't even close. She jumped 10 inches higher than Jenn. So um, sucky coach, lighten the f*** up.

[greycoupon.livejournal.com]

I saw that last night and I was so confused...I had taken some medicine that made me bleary and was wondering if this was some kind of show piece skit that I was missing the humor from.

I think she showed restraint in not punching him on international TV.

[reneedy.livejournal.com]

Well she looked like she was about to cry. I couldn't believe she said in the interview later that she was looking forward to seeing her coach and her family. I mean seriously girl, get yourself a new coach. That dude is bad news. He even reamed her out when he knew he was wired for sound! That shows an unbelievable lack of empathy or ability to self-censor.

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

THAT COACH! yes, what a jerk! I had to mute it after he started off with something like "well, you did what you always did." And I'm like - dude, it's over, what's the point of haranguing her?

And I hope the IOC reconsiders its stance on the tie-breaking. Paper said that they wanted tie-breakers in subjective judging contests, but as you point out, this particular method makes it even MORE subjective, not less. I just felt so bad for Nastia - the confusion on her face when the standings bumped her down to second.

[reneedy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was heartbreaking watching all the confusion. It's especially annoying as it's not true for the world championships, where they do award dual gold medals. So it's a special every four years rule that female athletes probably never have the occasion to learn as repeat olympics for women gymnasts is rare.

I actually feel it makes even less sense to have tiebreakers in subjective judging contests than in timed/scored ones. I mean at least if its timed/scored you can have them play another round or run the race again. But under current IOC rules we can have two "world's fastest men" but not two uneven bar champs.

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

Plus it's a new rule - as one of them pointed out, Liukin himself shared a gold way back when. So it was probably even more confusing, when he'd been one of the sharers in the past.

At least the vault tie breaker kept the whole pool of judges, they just threw out one of the scores (I think the lowest, but whichever - lowest or highest attempt, leaving one). But making a medal depend on one judge scoring a 9.1 or a 9.0 - how is that good? Don't get it. And I don't know why sharing is suddenly so awful, - it's still an average not just one biased judge. And yeah, so many sports CAN share; they said for Phelps' 100m butterfly - even if Serbian dude had proven he'd touched at the same time or even slightly before, Phelps would've shared the gold anyway.

gah! makes me so mad!

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm really glad when someone else wins over the chinese, especially in gymnastics. I was rooting so hard for Poland on men's vault yesterday! :)

And that's definitely a rather nice haul of gold there for UK! :) I know nothing about all the different sailing events, other than the US generally sucks at them. ;)

[telscha.livejournal.com]

We suck at everything lol. This is our best olpymics since 1908! We won our first athletic medals - a gold and a silver - for almost 20 yrs today.

[jupiterinmo.livejournal.com]

I'll admit to some bias, being from Iowa, and watching the all-around and the commentators saying that the judges "must not like the look" of Shawn Johnson, when hello, she looks just like Mary Lou Retton in body type (built like a brick wall, seriously.), and listening to the judges talk about scoring craziness. I just happened to flip on the TV last night, and that cooked it for me. I know what happens tonight (won't say here in case of spoilers), and I couldn't be happier, but I'm kind of done with this. First the Chinese girls are underage, and now this. I feel another Russian-judge/Ice Dancing issue coming on. :(

And yeah, I would have told that coach some mighty fine words, too.