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.
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.
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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.