Stephen Skory

Now this is what I’m talking about (click for full size):

Original here.

As a follow-up to the announcement that all judged sports are being eliminated from the Olympics, I’m publishing below an updated medal count. Unlike the medal counts you’ve seen, this one only counts the ‘real’ medals; events that aren’t ridiculous.

You’ll notice that China, which leads the gold rankings by a fair amount in the link above, is by far the most affected by this correct ranking. Indeed, only three of the American golds are improper, while 25 Chinese golds are trash, which is just less than half their total. Eliminating judged sports is not anti-China, it just happens that China focuses on those kinds of events. Many other nations, including the USA, lose a fair number of overall medals due to this modification.

(If you’re looking at this with an RSS reader, you’ll have to view the full post to see the tally.)

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I recorded the BMX races last night out of curiosity. (I’ve included some HD screen grabs of crashes for your enjoyment; click on them for the full size image.) BMX has been introduced to increase the interest of young people, those who like Xtreme sports. NBC even has a BMX crashes compilation for you to watch while you drink your Mountain Dew or get another tattoo.

This is the first year BMX is being contested at the Olympics and I’m conflicted about it. While I support any kind of cycling, in order to introduce this kind of cycling, the Olympic Organizing Committee cut two track events (the men’s 1000m and women’s 500m time trials) to make room for the BMX events. This was done to conserve the number of cycling events. According to this page there are 18 cycling events. Swimming has 34 events. So increasing the number of cycling medals wouldn’t have given it a ridiculous number of medals (unless you think swimming has a ridiculous number of events, which I in fact do). Granted, Olympic cycling isn’t as popular as Olympic gymnastics, and that only has 14 medals, but at least gymnastics takes place on different equipment. The cycling events range from 40 seconds to over six hours on four different kinds of venues that require very different types of skills and strategies. Each medal rewards a clearly different set of accomplishments. All but two of the swimming events are in the same damn pool (the 10K open-water swim is new this year) with the same equipment, only the strokes and distances change, and the distances vary by far less than cycling. It’s not clear that adding BMX is a net gain for cycling in the Olympics, and they could have very easily increased the number of cycling events, in my opinion.

Of course, cycling has the Tour de France every year, while swimming has ?

I think the best thing that can happen is if BMX becomes a kind of gateway drug into cycling. Get the young ones into the sport and then push them into the real hard stuff, like the velodrome and road cycling. Then they’ll really be hooked and there’s no going back.

Breaking news: These sports will be immediately eliminated from the Olympic games, due to the fact that they are incredibly lame and arbitrary. Any sport that is judged is “inherently flawed and unfair,” the UN ruled today, and subjecting the worldwide public to these events will be deemed an “act of cruelty.” Any medals already awarded in these sports in the undergoing Olympics will be reclaimed and turned into equipment for legitimate sports, like weights or shot puts (much like turning ’swords into plowshares’).

• Boxing: A borderline event, it does have a clear scoring system, but matches can be called when “in the referee’s opinion, (a boxer is) being outclassed or excessively punished.” Also, boxing is brutal and thuggish.
• Diving: Until and unless the diving competition becomes quantifiable (e.g. splash height and distance in the belly flop competition), diving is prohibited from the Olympics.
• Equestrian: While this isn’t always judged, any Olympic sport that uses another animal is so obviously disqualified it needs no further comment.
• Gymnastics: The king of judged sports. Incredibly popular world-wide. This event pits tiny men and girls (and they’re almost entirely girls, see the “16″ year-old Chinese girl) in events where grace and style are actually part of the scoring. There have been scoring controversies every year. Until and unless scoring can be done by an objective computer, this event is banished to the WE channel between reruns of Hallmark movies.
• Judo & Taekwondo: While these are awesome events, they are judged. An electronic scoring system, similar to fencing, would be acceptable.
• Modern Pentathlon: See equestrian, above.
• Rhythmic Gymnastics: See gymnastics, above. Also, no real sport needs a ribbon which one twirls artistically.
• Synchronized Swimming: While the world loves a pool full of young women in swimsuits (see Baywatch), any sport set to music and that has choreographers is clearly eliminated from the Olympics. Dancesport isn’t in the Olympics, and Synchronized Swimming shouldn’t be either. (*)
• Trampoline: Most don’t even know this is in the Olympics. So most won’t miss it.

The UN also ruled that in evaluating future Olympic sports, the IOC will only consider events that Stephen Skory cares about.

(*) With apologies to my good friend Chris S., it seems to me that Dancesport is hijacking the word ’sport’ like so many humanities hijack ’science.’ If dancing was obviously recognizable as a sport, it wouldn’t need to append the word at the end. We don’t call it Baseballsport. Or Physicsience.