so i’ve been following women’s gymnastics and it seems the judges blow. the us is getting much lower scores than they deserve and china is getting way higher scores than they deserve. what is going on?! these errors have cost the us both medals and medal colors. this is bull crap. last night on vaulting the chinese gymnast fell on one of her vaults and still out-scored the us gymnast alicia sacramoni to knock her out of a medal which should have been higher than bronze in the first place.
I don’t mean this as disrespect to you and I say it as one who looks forward to watching the Olympics every two years.
Boo hoo.
i just feel sorry for the people who train they’re whole lives and then get screwed. it’s not right.
The judges are a mix of nationalities, not only Chinese. If the USA gymnast lost… well then she prob didn’t deserve to get the medal.
The scoring is linked to the difficulty of the move, so you can falter a bit on a high difficulty move and still outscore another person who does a faultless low difficulty move.
When in China judge better for the Chinese of suffer the wrathe of the communist nation 
actually the chinese did not deserve many of the scores they got. they did do an awesome job. i am not putting the chinese down. their gymnastics are just amazing. and yes it is true the judges can not be from the same country as any of the competitiors but for some reason their scoring was crap. if you watch the news they have experts on there saying the judging was crap.
Not really sure why you’re moaning about not get some medals… The USA, specifically Michael Phelps, smashed the very long standing record getting 8 Golds in a single Olympics … deservedly so !!
I could be going on about how were have been dually discriminated against having only gotten 1 medal so far, but the sad fact remains that we have just not been good enough at this Olympic Games, even though our athletes have broken many African records at the games already.
I have sympathy for them as well. But in these events where there is subjective judging this is bound to happen.
Somewhat off-topic, but what I find truly admirable is that there are so many athletes who work as hard, simply aren’t as good, and still show up to compete with the full knowledge that they will almost certainly return home without a medal. I suppose coming in with lower expectations makes it easier. Still that they do what they do with no external displays of glory reminds me that being the best person I can in my own mundane, anonymous life is worth it.
I didn’t watch the contest but…
…You mean american (thus perfectly objective) experts?
Absolutely non offense intended because I can clearly imagine myself in such a situation:
“My” athlete loses
“Their” athlete wins
“They” are judges (wich is wrong, as said above)
=> It’s not fair:(
Now take a step backward and think about the impact of this issue on “your” everyday and future life. The athletes train a whole life for that day, as you said, so they had a whole life to understand the fact that there is a human factor in judging.
When I was a judoka and a judo referee I thought many times that I had lost “because” of judging mistakes… Just as I know I certainly made many judging mistakes as a referee. No (human) referee, no sport.
[edit]I wrote this post way before Jjuggle posted but the webmaster is american so I had no chance:p 
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I noticed some pretty bad judging in the Women’s gymanstics as well. I do not think the Women’s Chinese gymnasts deserved as high of scores as they received on some events, but as others have said…in a subjective sport, bias is bound to happen. In men’s gymnastics, however, the Chinese team did exeptionally well and deserved the high scores they were given. They blew away the competition for sure.
“It’s called gymnastics not gymnicetics”
I have noticed the judges favour those with natural talent, which seems unfair.
Two words.
“Paul Hamm”.
Now sit down and quit your whining.
I juste googled him… pretty interesting actually…
Let’s go for a “they started first” argument now.
Google = Sources = Pseudo-Credibility when you whine
Here’s a questionable gripe:
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldOfSport/idINIndia-35078320080819
Either way, I think we can all agree that there’s a strongly East Asian time zone bias driving the schedule of games.
Indeed… But I don’t remember of any contest going till 1 or 2 AM during Atlanta games. I think they made more effort on the schedule so that Europe and America could see the events on decent times than during Atlanta’s games.
All of the judges are from countries that don’t have athletes who can perform at the level of the top athletes. That automatically adds an element of “crap” to their ability to judge. They don’t have the experience of even seeing, let alone judging, such routines unless they get to do so at international competitions. To me it’s a weak point in the system. But they might prefer that type of weak point over the possibility of national bias if all competing countries are represented with their own judges.
I would do it in a heartbeat. They got to compete at the Olympics! Surely this helps boost the status of their sport at home so it can grow more toward a possibly stronger international and Olympic presence in the future.
In the 1980s I went to Germany three times to train artistic bicycling. This international training course was timed to be in the 2 weeks leading up to the Indoor Cycling World Championships. I wouldn’t say they made us compete, but it was important to the organizers to have new countries represented at the event. The idea was to spread the sport to new countries. So in 1982 I came in 15th out of 17. (17th was Peter Rosendahl). Oddly enough, we all got trophies!
I wouldn’t say convoluted, just sucky. High and low scores are removed to determine the final results. This gets rid of any “off-base” numbers that may be in there. But apparently Olympic Gymnastics no longer allows for ties. So if the scores are tied, the next-lowest number, out of all the scores, is removed.
But some judges tend to score with lower numbers while others tend to judge high. This method, to me, seems to result in a result that’s more random than based on anything in the routines. In other words it would probably be simpler to program the computer to flip a coin instead.
I believe we have a better system to resolve ties in Freestyle Unicycling. If the total score is a tie, you take just the technical half of the score and average the placing points from those. This favors technical over presentation (in a tie), but it’s a known choice we’ve made, and the results remain as accurate as the actual judging.
In that gynmastics event from last night, there were questions again about how one or more of the judges scored the routines. This scares me, as it makes me wonder if we can ever solve the problem of lame judging in unicycling competitions. Mostly what we have today is lack of experience due to lack of competitions, though there are other areas that can be fixed…
There was a small poll on the news yesterday asking people which sports should not be in the Olympics. I don’t even remember the results, but someone made a comment about getting rid of all judged events from the Olympics because they are more about performance than physical ability. Just got me thinking about what the Olympics really should be about. Any thoughts?
I think that you probably don’t know as much about gymnastics as the judges do. Can you imagine non-riders judging unicycling? I can tell you right now that the person who rides backwards will beat the person who coasts, and the person that jumps an 8 set will beat the one who fifthflips a 4 set.
The judging may be fair for all you know.