Mad Minerva Awards Dual Golds for Bad Olympic Judging
A couple days ago, I posted up my picks for the bronze, silver, and gold medalists in Olympic judging lunacy. This seems to have been received with much amusement by my target audience, one member of whom wrote me: "Keep it coming!" And alas, now I will have to, because the judging chaos in Athens has taken more bizarre turns.
Mad Minerva now awards a dual golds (she doesn't believe in taking back medals without just cause) to the International Gymnastics Federation and to IOC bigwig Jacques Rogge. Reason for both: increasing rather than resolving the current chaos in the men's all-around gymnastics mess.
Dual Gold to the International Gymnastics Federation
Our first new gold goes to the International Gymnastics Federation for -- get this -- asking American Paul Hamm to voluntarily give back his gold medal as a sign of good sportsmanship. This seems to translate roughly as: "This is a big huge mess and we haven't the guts to deal with it ourselves, so let's make an innocent gymnast give up his dream to save our reputation."
The US Olympic Committee, though, still has its backbone intact and, outraged, refused to even forward this request to Hamm. It also told the Federation to do what it ought to have done in the first place -- take responsibility for the problem. Hear, hear. And here is a blurb that pretty much sums it all up:
The dispute over scores has mushroomed into a bigger debate about sportsmanship, judging and the state of the Olympics themselves. “I don’t know of any comparison in any sport anywhere where you crown an athlete, crown a team and then say, ’Oh, that was a mistake. Would you fix this for us?”’ USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth said Friday. FIG president Bruno Grandi suggested in a letter to Hamm that giving the gold to South Korea’s Yang Tae-young “would be recognized as the ultimate demonstration of fair play.” Judges scored Yang’s parallel bars routine incorrectly on Aug. 18, failing to give him enough points for the level of difficulty. Grandi tried to send the letter Thursday night to Hamm through the USOC, but the committee’s leaders declined to pass it along. In a letter back to Grandi, USOC secretary general Jim Scherr called the request “a blatant and inappropriate attempt on the part of (FIG) to once again shift responsibility for its own mistakes and instead pressure Mr. Hamm into resolving what has become an embarrassing situation for your federation.” “The USOC finds this request to be improper, outrageous and so far beyond the bounds of what is acceptable that it refuses to transmit the letter to Mr. Hamm,” the letter said. |
Oooooooooooooooooo, THEM'S FIGHTIN' WORDS!
More, I think it rather rich for these guys to talk about "fair play" when it was their judges who made the mess in the first place. And who continued to make even more grievous errors (remember the Alexei Nemov booing incident?). Give the South Korean a dual gold and get on with it! All this sniping and snarling is making things worse -- plus making trouble for the innocent athletes, who are the real victims here! (Despite what some snarky columnists have to say.)
NOTE: MSNBC has an editorial that calls for a serious end to all further shenanigans: eliminate gymnastics from the Olympics altogether. Aw, come on, isn't that a little like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, though?
Dual Gold to IOC President Jacques Rogge
For not making things any easier for anybody when the situations at hand are already far too tense. Things should never have gotten to this point. But they have, and Rogge in his latest pronouncement has not poured oil on troubled waters.
Despite judging errors that affected athletes' final medal standings, Rogge has said (when the Germans and Koreans protested their loss of medals in 2 separate instances of judging chaos):
“The IOC will not be handing out extra medals,” Rogge said. “We’ve said ‘No’ to the German NOC and ‘No’ to the Korean NOC. We’ll continue to say 'no'. “You can’t stop NOCs for asking for more medals, but the IOC will say ‘no’. We will not give medals for so-called ‘humanitarian’ or ‘emotional’ reasons.” |
NOC, by the way, means "National Olympic Committee."
And Rogge, by the way, is not only being rather off-putting to obviously distraught national committees, but also being flat inconsistent. I don't have to point out, though the article does, that the OIC has given out extra medals before:
At the Salt Lake City Winter Games two years ago duplicate golds were awarded to Canadian runners-up Jamie Sale and David Pelletier in the pairs figure skating won by Russians Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze after a judging scandal. |
So somehow those medals weren't given for " 'humanitarian' or 'emotional' reasons"?
Dishonorable Mention to . . . Rhythmic Gymnastics
Here's a big old afterthought -- I came across this story by accident while reading other Olympic news: US protest over low score denied. Here's a blurb:
The International Gymnastics Federation denied a protest over American Mary Sanders’ score in the first day of rhythmic qualifying . . . The Americans asked for an explanation of why Sanders received a technical score — the measure of difficulty — of 4.6 in hoop for her routine on Thursday. That was lower than anyone in the field except for competitors from Australia, South Africa and Cape Verde, and also lower than she had ever scored in competition. |
Note: the highest score possible on this thing was a 10. A 4.6 is considered disastrous.
As for the US delegation getting a big denial when it wanted to know what happened . . . Well, you know, maybe it was because the audience didn't boo and hiss long or hard enough for these judges to raise the score just to please the mob.