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.
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.
What about point deductions for faults, like a minor collision or improper cornering? It happens in (for example) motocross all the time. It’s not like there aren’t other criteria.
Everything you mentioned can be rigorously defined in terms of time, position, velocity, angle. If, in a certain race, the rules are poorly defined, or if the relevant information is not known to the judges with sufficient precision and accuracy, or if the judges are incompetent, then sure, subjectivity could be introduced into some particular race. But it is possible in theory to eliminate subjectivity from racing, if care is taken to do so. It is not conceivably possible to eliminate subjectivity from an aesthetic judgement about “style.”
Surely you can understand how taking a corner in a different way is an obvious indicator of style and how the criteria can allow for variation from the expected angle, velocity, etc. in order to highlight the skill required to drive in a specific fashion, even if that fashion is meant to highlight the flashiness of a particular move.
While I don’t disagree with your assertion that it’s possible to eliminate subjectivity, I really don’t understand why you would want to, and it would ruin the sport. That is, I suppose, an unspoken part of my previous comment. It is factually part of the sport that stylistic driving tactics are more impressive on a technical and visual level, and that cannot possibly be made less subjective. It’s part of the culture of the sport.
Each sport is different, I think that’s cool. Making everything objectively about numbers so that each sport can be directly compared and athletes can be evaluated based entirely on algorithmic calculation based on statistics takes a lot of fun away and makes it lifeless. Maybe you could look into competitive accounting? That truly is a thing.
If you can define style rigorously in terms of measurable properties, so that there can be no possibility of disagreement between two equally qualified judges of style, then I have no problem with style being used as a criterion of winning a sport.
If you can’t define style objectively, then whether you win or lose does not necessarily depend on how you performed. It depends, at least in part, on the arbitrary opinion of whichever judge happened to be in charge that day. You can try to learn what each judge likes and adapt accordingly, but a judge’s aesthetic preferences could change unpredictably, and even if they didn’t, the game has still become “predict what this judge will like” rather than “perform best within these parameters.”
That, to me, ruins the sport and takes the fun away. You can have all the beautiful displays of athletic artistry in a stadium you like, but if the difference between winning and losing is some guy’s vibes, then don’t call it a sport. It’s a pageant.
It’s like you didn’t even read what I said, or didn’t understand. If it were only about vibes, the judges wouldn’t need to be experts in that sport. But whatever, you obviously just want to be correct and won’t look up shit.
I’m serious about the competitive accounting, or maybe poker championships; you clearly need something crunchy in order to have fun. Almost all sports have made rules and scoring adjustments over time to accommodate stylistic approaches to competition, Olympics or not, because they’re cool and fun and people like them.
That doesn’t mean it’s simple pageantry. Not sure if you’ve ever known an athlete who was training for the Olympics (I have a cousin who was an Olympic hopeful in figure skating), but it takes a lot of work and knowing what judges look for is 100% part of it. Style is part of the scoring and that is good.
Imagine if every gymnast had the exact same routine on purpose for objective comparison. Wow, very cool and fun. So entertaining and worth watching. Gold medal for objective conformity.
I did read everything you wrote, and I said that the outcome depends “at least in part” on the aesthetic preferences of the judge, not wholly. But whatever, you obviously just want to be angry. Not sure what I’m supposed to look up here.
Doing your routine in your own style is great. Putting in work to know what judges look for is fine. Needing to know what this judge prefers over that judge is my problem. And though they are experts (I never said otherwise), there are nevertheless differences in opinion about style. These differences in opinion are sometimes (probably pretty rarely) the difference between winning and losing. And that’s my complaint.
If you can throw a javelin 100 meters while doing a spirited Irish jig, then wow. How entertaining. Do that. If you can throw a javelin 100 meters but lose to the guy who threw it 99.9 meters, but he did a Scottish jig while he threw it, and the judge is from Scotland, you’d be upset. Wouldn’t you?
TBH, I don’t really watch any sports at all, but if I did, you’re right, I would be more inclined to watch competitive accounting or poker than figure skating, for this very reason.