Listening to the Zito and Jen show on WXLO this morning I learned that Shannon Miller, the gymnast, lives in our humble state, in the even more humble town of Grafton. She’s up here attending school. That’s pretty cool, actually. They got to talk to her about some of the Olympic gymnastics controversy, and hearing it from the point of view of someone who was IN the Olympics as a gymnast, it turned things a bit for me. I guess that’s why people with experience should be the ones out there explaining it, not leaving it up to the Couch Potato fans to complain about. She said that South Korean gymnast Yang Tae-young, the one who people are saying should get the Gold because his starting score was too low, actually made a mistake that should have had points deducted but didn’t. She said it should have been an automatic 2/10s deduction, and that might have dropped him out of the top three altogether.
Gymnastics doesn’t allow for instant replays, there are scoring mistakes made ALL the time, and the gymnasts just have to trust that for every time it works against them, there will be a time it works for them. If they are going to look back at Tae-young’s routine, they have to also take off the deductions, wouldn’t you think? And while they are at it, replay everyone else’s routines so you can score THEM appropriately.
I can’t believe the international gymnastics federation is asking Hamm to give his gold medal to the South Korean. Rubbish. You count on the subjectivity of human judges and hope that they see and note every little thing a gymnast does, and you have to take the scores you get. The judges weren’t coerced into voting one way or the other the way they were in that skating controversy. It’s like umpires in baseball. They make some bad calls, but that’s the way it goes. Period.
