Driving, gymnastics, break dancing (ESPECIALLY break dancing)… Anything that can’t be timed or measured or otherwise objectively decided should be removed from competition.
How do you quantify “style”? How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion? How do you fairly compensate for what your personal opinion considers “worth” more when it comes to a trick or routine compared to another?
Swimming, running, jumping, throwing things a distance are all things that can be measured and ruled against a standard that every competitor uses. It’s fair and it’s removed from any bias.
The Olympics are supposed to be about competition between athletes and shouldn’t be affected by popularity or politics, which anything with an interpretive aspect to the result will suffer from.
So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.
Genuinely convinced this is an uninformed opinion, not an unpopular one. Go look up the criteria, watch some videos and commentary from people who are experts, and learn about each of the sports you’re lazily criticizing.
Also, as another commenter said, the Olympics are absolutely also about art and style - the ancient Greeks were a civilization captivated by aesthetics. If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to watch.
Trying to remove subjectivity from any human endeavor is a fool’s errand.
There is still subjectivity in racing. When fouls are committed it’s still a human who has to check the infraction and interpret the rules.
According to an algorithm which could be expressed as a few lines of code. What is the algorithm to judge “style”?
Deciding upon a distance, starting method, surface, and season for the race all introduces subjectivity
Variation in objective race conditions does not equal subjectivity. People can have subjective preferences about what type of race would be best to run, but once decided, the outcome is objective. One person factually reaches the finish line first. They are objectively the winner.
One thing I didn’t learn until this year was that gymnastics is scored two ways. Execution starts at 10.0 and has points deducted for each error. Difficulty starts at zero and increases based on the composition of the required elements, and how they are connected.
Besides, gymnastics is one of the original Olympic sports
Yep. Olympic Gymnastics is actually a pretty poor example. The skills all have specific point values and the judges don’t have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to interpretation. There are specific penalty ranges for things like not having your toes pointed, not having straight legs, legs apart, one foot out of bounds, two feet out of bounds, etc.
That said, I think artistic gymnastics (the kind you usually associate with the Olympics) has an artistry score outside the Olympics, but that might just be acrobatic gymnastics.
The founder of the modern Olympics vision was that it be a celebration of art as well.
The society that separates its scholors from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
The idea of some kind of “purity” in physical competition is robbing ourselves of the completeness of the human experience IMO.
Judges sports are ok if the judging can be objective. If the commentators can’t explain the difference between an 8.0 and a 9.0 score then it’s a problem. Many sports have made changes to address this, which has been beneficial to their sports.
It’s also why break dancing was such a bad event. They kept repeating the criteria, but couldn’t really explain anything about why a person won or why it was so one sided most of the time.
