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| Confused? So are we! |
Freud, digressing on societal power relationships, warned us: don't let the father know he is dead.
This influenced much of the political discourse surrounding the questions of empty ideological systems: the USSR in its final stages is one example (some would argue present day capitalism is another). These structures, although already devoid of the internal system of beliefs that brought them forth were maintained by a constant reenactment of everyday operations... A never ending going through the motions... The system had crumbled, it was dead, yet it did not know it, and so it was kept in place and its power pervasively regulated the everyday life of those who were subsumed by it.
FIG's code of points is no different, it is a empty system. Its original goals and premised have been lost somewhere along the way. Yet judges, gymnasts, coaches, federations and FIG still are going through the motions in fear that if someone stops and really looks into it, they will realize it is dead... big time!
Here is why I think the code needs to be reevaluated at the risk of crumbling and taking everyone down with it:
1. Parity: Before the open-ended code of points was instituted all events were worth the same: 10.0. Today vault allows for very high scores, while floor has just been brutal. Bars also allows good gymnasts to score very high, but because the deductions are also so severe especially on handstands I think it balances out. Beam I feel is the most balanced piece of equipment, although the deductions are there and are usually taken, it allows gymnasts that are doing decent difficulty and have good execution to score well.
This breakdown does not allow gymnasts that have good bars, beam and vault, and exceptional floor to compete with a gymnast that has a great vault and is decent in the other three events etc... It is just not as fair as it once was, the all around is not truly an all around competition under this system because the weight of each apparatus in the final score is not the same.
I find the recent edition of the code even more problematic, the changes in this code has made things much worse. As we know Nastia Liukin beat Shawn Johnson's Amanar with her bars, but 1. floor scoring was not so severe as it is now and it did allow Liukin that had less difficulty than Johnson to score well, and 2. her 10 skill bar set helped her make up the score. This quad the bars (and beam) have been dropped to routines of 8 skills and as such makes the very high (above 7.0 like Liukin used to have) score very difficult to achieve and a deficit on vault very difficult to make up.
Many thought Komova had proved that was not the case by beating Weiber in qualifying with a DTY, but truthfully the vault scores in qualifying were much lower (about 0.3/0.4) than they usually have been and in the team final and AA those were raised again making Komova's chance of beating Weiber if she had not made mistakes nearly impossible. With the mistakes Weiber was beatable and nearly lost, but that is another story. If the scoring on vault was kept in the level that it was in qualifying Komova would have had no problem winning after Weiber's UB mishap. That is the second problem I see in the code.
2. The judges just don't know how to apply it:
- The inconsistency of the scoring in the 2011 World Championships showed that this system has some serious issues. The difference of scores from one day to another or from one gymnast to another is simply unacceptable and hampers the whole system.
Vanessa Ferrari with this nearly flawless floor routine - she had one small hop in landing the last pass and a shuffle of the feet in the third, scored 0.1 lower in execution than Weiber in this routine where she had deductions in three out of her four landings as well as a step out of bounds.
Aly Raisman scored 8.2 in execution for this routine with a lot of form issues while Huang Qiushuang scored 8.133 in execution with some minor deductions.
This are just a few of many possible examples. The vault scores from day 1 of qualifications to team finals rose in average 0.3. FIG's technical committee apparently told the judges that they needed to raise the scores for this apparatus after day one. The whole competition is just compromised by this as the scores from qualifications are suppose to be the table setters for the rest of the scores, they are supposed to let the gymnasts know where they stand. What about the gymnasts that were in the bubble to qualify for the AA and were counting on higher vault scores to do so? Yes I think the scores vault allows are too high, yet that is how the scoring system has set them so that is what the gymnasts are expecting to score and so they tailor their routines accordingly.
- E scores are still taking cues from the difficulty: the big problem with the old scoring system was that it did not reward higher difficulty. For instance when Tatyana Lysenko was performing the DTY, others like Shannon Miller were performing the FTY and both vaults at one point were out of a 10.0 difficulty. What the judges did was to start taking deductions from perfect routines that were easier to allow for those that were performing more difficulty to be rewarded. As this posed an obvious problem, FIG tried to manage the 10 system to make it more suitable to the changes in the sport but were not able to do so, and to remedy that they created the open ended scoring system.
Now the score is split in two panels, the execution and difficulty. In this system the E panel should disregard whether routines are more or less difficult when scoring as the D score will account for that. Yet, as we have seen over and over again, they are incapable of doing this. Gymnasts with extremely high difficulty like Weiber's beam, Mustafina's Amanar etc are deducted more lightly than gymnasts performing very clean simple skills.
Jordyn Weiber scored 9.216 for execution, Porgras 9.1 and Afanasyeva 9.0 in these vaults.
Afanasyeva has serious bent legs in this vault and lands completely to one side, a mandatory 0.1 deduction, Weiber has a very big step (at least 0.3), bent arms of the top of the vault as well as bent knees. Porgras on another hand sticks the landing, right in the middle and with pretty good form: her legs are nice although she could have kept the feet pointed a bit longer, but this is a great vault. So why are these scores so similar, and how can Weiber score higher than Porgras, and Afanasyeva so close to her?
3. The human cost: injuries, injuries and injuries. I can still hear the outcry of pain from Rebecca Bross after her vault at Visas as well as Mustafina's tears at Europeans. It is just awful. As part of the gymnastics community (and as a loyal fan that is so involved in the sport I include myself here) we have become complacent with this scoring system, and with this, we have become negligent. Not many years ago when a gymnasts got seriously injured, like Kupets when she torn her Aquiles in the 2003 world championships, commentators and fans alike talked about how unlucky, and later how brave and determined she was to come back from such a thing. Many saw that as a career ending injury.
Today we talk about ACL tears as part of the sport, every day routine kind of stuff. No gymnasts really seems to have "shed their baby teeth" until they have gone through a serious injury and recovered. This needs to be reevaluated, fast!
4. The audience: A lot of people today talk about how the audience is shocked about the scores because as lay people they just don't get it. I do not believe this is true. If the scores were consistent and compatible with what the audience sees out there on the floor, they would get it. People get rhythmic gymnasts and figure skating that have much more complicated scoring systems than gymnastics. This is a excuse FIG uses because this code is just such a mess.
The real problem is that the inconsistencies in the scores, from one apparatus to the other, from one part of the competition to the other, from one gymnasts to the other, leaves the audience, and even the experts as some point, grasping for straws. The gymnastic audience is a very well versed one and they do get it, the judges are the ones that seem to not be getting it right now.
5. Is it taking the sport in the right direction?
This is something I wonder everyday. This open ended scoring system was supposed to help the sport grow, but has it?
It has hampered artistry, increased the amount of serious injury, and made the audience infuriated at the results more times than one can count. Yet the gymnasts are still incredibly young, the amount of new skills being presented has in no way increased from what it was before and you still have these "compulsory" skills and combinations that every single gymnast is performing because code whoring is the only way you can get ahead.Where is the originality, the longevity, the parity, the innovation this code was suppose to bring us?
With the advent of social media and the internet, the failure of the FIG scoring system to deliver fair and consistent scoring and a transparent and reliable process has been broadcasted worldwide.
What we saw in the men's team final in a small scale and in the women's AA in a gigantic scale shows how problematic this code really is.
To me it is not about whether Weiber deserved to win or not, it is about the dead silence in the audience and the completely dumb struck BBC commentators (not the NBC because as I have mentioned in another article they already knew the results before they recorded that so the seemly unaffected way they go through the final results is in fact a well simulated, well rehearse bunch of crap!) when the result came out, followed by the mad dash on twitter, facebook and all other available chat rooms.
We have had controversies before, but it was when the Cold War politics was well and running in gymnastics. The open ended scoring system has preached to us an illusion of objectivity and the reason it still stands is because of how well constructed this illusion is. It is time for us to admit that this system is as ineffective, as bias, and as subjective as every other one gymnastics has had, and leave from there to try to fix it.
This code has failed gymnastics, and it is time we acknowledge it. The father is dead, it is time for him to know it!
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