this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Unpopular Opinion

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Trying to remove subjectivity from any human endeavor is a fool's errand.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Racing is pretty objective. Clocks don't give opinions.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

According to an algorithm which could be expressed as a few lines of code. What is the algorithm to judge "style"?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Deciding upon a distance, starting method, surface, and season for the race all introduces subjectivity

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

One could use something like a panel of experts, that could, maybe, hold up their verdicts in an easy understandable format, numbers, perhaps.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The Olympics itself doesn't get judged enough on its destructive impact wherever it goes. Measure that. Also, OP hates ice skating.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

This take reminds me of the family dinner scene from Whiplash

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

And give up Raygunning?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Can’t give up those boys in tights and bikinis! Maybe they should be in the nude again? Actually, the idea of “most graceful” is indeed a competition, so snap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

affected by popularity or politics

You seem to assume that everybody is corrupted. Judges etc

The "Olympic spirit" thinks exactly the opposite.

You should try to think about it this way: Not all of them come from where you come from.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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?

So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.

So guess we would have to remove things like baseball, fencing, football, boxing, rugby, tennis, karate, basketball, wrestling… basically any opposition sport where a judge has to make subjective determinations of edge cases, such as calling balls/strikes, in/out, off/on-sides or determining whether an act is sufficient to warrant a foul, or whether an infraction or series thereof is egregious enough to warrant an elevated penalty. We can’t have events where officials might be affected by perspective, bias or poor judgment.

So that leaves us left with: races, target sports, feats of prowess (jumping, throwing & weightlifting) and… Golf, I guess. Though, maybe golf counts as a target sport…🤔 With all the time and space freed up from getting rid of all the subjective sports we can add more objective ones, like chess, hot dog eating and cubing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

So, @[email protected] you gonna expound on any of the discussion that systematically disproves every single one of your complaints?

Nah. I knew you wouldn’t. Because you don’t care about logic or reason or scoring or competition. You don’t even give a shit about the Olympics.

All you care about is how your feefees are offended.

Good thing facts don’t care about your feelings.