Nope, sorry, this isn’t an article about China, or Tibet, or Taiwan, or freedoms (or lack of freedom) in any of those countries.  This is about the Olympics themselves.

I humbly suggest that we remove a handful of sports from the Olympic calendar.  These sports all have one thing in common:  The scoring is done by judges.  This is a huge differences than standard refereed events, where the actions of the players determine scores (or times) that are verified by officials.  This is where the competition is held, and the judges scores are the only method of determining a winner.

This doesn’t remove many sports from the list, although it removes many of the most popular:  Diving and Gymnastics would be cut here.  Sorry.  Dressage would disappear from the Equestrian events (although I wouldn’t mind that remaining as an unscored, pass-fail qualification for other events).  This is a much bigger deal in the Winter Olympics, where the four Ice Skating events are arguably the premier showcase of the games.

It’s not that these aren’t real sports (ask any competitive gymnast what their training schedule is!) it’s just that if you can’t have some non-subjective criteria, then it’s just an invitation for conflict to put it up on such a grand scale.

Yeah, I know this is more a rant than the usual semi-researched litter I usually write.  But the Olympics gets publicity on the controversy, and for a sporting event to [even unitentionally] benefit from it’s scandal is disappointing.

And merely having a judging process invites scandal.  Cold-war tension and ‘that nameless East German’ judge possibly made gymnastics into the premier sport it is today.  It’s very hard for a judge to change the results of a race.

There is one class of sport here that I simply can’t classify – combat sports such as Boxing, Judo, and Wrestling.  The scores are declared by a referee or judge, but are certainly based on events in the ring.  Any comment on whether these are ‘judged sports’ is welcome.

At any rate, enjoy the games!