Another Day, Another Controversy

Yesterday it was a badminton scandal, with eight players (from four teams) being sent home for trying to throw matches in the hopes of getting more favourable matches subsequently. It was pretty pathetic to watch. The poor referee was pleading with them to just play, to actually attempt to hit the shuttlecock. Instead they just kept swatting it limply into the net or batting at it so halfheartedly that the longest rally was a mere four shots. Talk about unsportsmanlike conduct!

Today we're back to gymnastics again, the women's all-around finals this time. That would be the event where the best aren't all competing because their countries' teams were too strong and had too many good athletes. Anyway, the U.S.'s Gabby Douglas was awesome and deservedly won the gold medal, followed fairly closely by Russian Victoria Komova. And the two of them were followed by the second Russian, Aliya Mustofina and the second American, Aly Raisman.

In fact, they were followed identically by those two. Now in other sports, if there were an exact tie, all the way down to the thousandth of a second or point, they would share the bronze medal (and I'm positive I remember shared medals in previous games, although perhaps not that recently) . But for gymnastics, that would be too generous, apparently. So there's a whole complicated procedure to prevent ties from happening. You drop the lowest scoring apparatus, one at a time, until the tie is broken. In the highly improbable case that it isn't, you then go by the highest execution scores and, if it still isn't, by start values. At that point - which of course will never happen - a tie would stand.

So in the end, because Mustafina's three best events were better than Raisman's, she got the final medal. It just seems so petty. To tie to the thousandth of a point was already pretty remarkable, showing they were both worthy of a medal. Why not give it to them both? Would it really have done any harm? I think, along with the "maximum two qualifiers per country" rule, this is another area the Gymnastics Federation really has to take a look at. As with all other sports, don't you really want the best competing, and don't you really want to reward deserved achievements even if they do cause the slight inconvenience of an extra medal? Hopefully by the next Olympics things will be just a little bit different, just a little bit better.