Olympics to drop wrestling

[billhoward]

And, honestly, it is impressive as shit to watch but for the fact that the girls are so young that it feels creepy.

That window only get bigger.  

Anyway, a lot of things are impressive but not Olympic events.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=60GJ0dJ1xmE[/video]

a) you are a freaking fountain of knowledge
b) this was how James Bond liked his martinis prepared

[Robb]

This is the one I'm backing - at least it is timed instead of judged.

[CUontheslopes]

There's the ribbon twirling gymnastics event that remains. The sport that will live forever is women's beach volleyball.

Rythmic gymnastics is part of the larger umbrella of "gymnastics" - it isn't up for debate. And, honestly, it is impressive as shit to watch but for the fact that the girls are so young that it feels creepy.

It's boring as hell to watch and a joke. Frankly I think all gymnastics is questionable as a "sport". Anything that is 100% judged should not be in the Olympics. The Olympics should not be open to subjectivity. The 100m dash? Javelin? Any judges there?

[Weder]

There's the ribbon twirling gymnastics event that remains. The sport that will live forever is women's beach volleyball.

Rythmic gymnastics is part of the larger umbrella of "gymnastics" - it isn't up for debate. And, honestly, it is impressive as shit to watch but for the fact that the girls are so young that it feels creepy.

It's boring as hell to watch and a joke. Frankly I think all gymnastics is questionable as a "sport". Anything that is 100% judged should not be in the Olympics. The Olympics should not be open to subjectivity. The 100m dash? Javelin? Any judges there?

If you're going to eliminate subjectivity, there go all the team sports ... and the fighting sports ... and ...

[Josh '99]

There's the ribbon twirling gymnastics event that remains. The sport that will live forever is women's beach volleyball.

Rythmic gymnastics is part of the larger umbrella of "gymnastics" - it isn't up for debate. And, honestly, it is impressive as shit to watch but for the fact that the girls are so young that it feels creepy.

It's boring as hell to watch and a joke. Frankly I think all gymnastics is questionable as a "sport". Anything that is 100% judged should not be in the Olympics. The Olympics should not be open to subjectivity. The 100m dash? Javelin? Any judges there?

If you're going to eliminate subjectivity, there go all the team sports ... and the fighting sports ... and ...

I think there's a distinction between subjective determination of an objective question by an official (did the soccer ball go over the goal line? was player X tripped by player Y or did he fall on his own?) and subjective judgment of a subjective question (how pretty was that ribbon-twirling?).

[ugarte]

There's the ribbon twirling gymnastics event that remains. The sport that will live forever is women's beach volleyball.

Rythmic gymnastics is part of the larger umbrella of "gymnastics" - it isn't up for debate. And, honestly, it is impressive as shit to watch but for the fact that the girls are so young that it feels creepy.

It's boring as hell to watch and a joke. Frankly I think all gymnastics is questionable as a "sport". Anything that is 100% judged should not be in the Olympics. The Olympics should not be open to subjectivity. The 100m dash? Javelin? Any judges there?

If you're going to eliminate subjectivity, there go all the team sports ... and the fighting sports ... and ...

I think there's a distinction between subjective determination of an objective question by an official (did the soccer ball go over the goal line? was player X tripped by player Y or did he fall on his own?) and subjective judgment of a subjective question (how pretty was that ribbon-twirling?).

Your unfamiliarity with the objective criteria of a judged sport /= the lack of objective criteria

[Trotsky]

The Olympics should not be open to subjectivity.

Rudolf Carnap never got laid.

The Olympics is a celebration of athletic commitment and achievement.  The human world is FAR bigger than mere mechanistic measures of space and time.

I'd prefer an Olympics that was entirely subjective to just another boring time trial.

Some sports lend themselves to "objective" measures.  That's great -- the world needs ditch diggers too.  But other sports are subjective, thankfully.

[css228]

There's the ribbon twirling gymnastics event that remains. The sport that will live forever is women's beach volleyball.

Rythmic gymnastics is part of the larger umbrella of "gymnastics" - it isn't up for debate. And, honestly, it is impressive as shit to watch but for the fact that the girls are so young that it feels creepy.

It's boring as hell to watch and a joke. Frankly I think all gymnastics is questionable as a "sport". Anything that is 100% judged should not be in the Olympics. The Olympics should not be open to subjectivity. The 100m dash? Javelin? Any judges there?

If you're going to eliminate subjectivity, there go all the team sports ... and the fighting sports ... and ...

I think there's a distinction between subjective determination of an objective question by an official (did the soccer ball go over the goal line? was player X tripped by player Y or did he fall on his own?) and subjective judgment of a subjective question (how pretty was that ribbon-twirling?).

Your unfamiliarity with the objective criteria of a judged sport /= the lack of objective criteria

Yes, track and field is full of judges. Lane judges, start judges, zone judges. Ever seen a team disqualified for a late handoff, or a 100 m guy dq'd for going out of their lane? Not to mention the photo judges that lead to the runoff that didn't happen at last year's US Olympic Trials.

[Trotsky]

I think the point was that subjective judgment calls enforcing rules ("did he stray out of the lane?" ) are different from subjective judgment calls about aesthetics ("was that double Axel beautiful?" ).  The former are about inexact measurement of quantities.  The latter are about non-deterministic qualities that give some people agita.

Personally I defend the latter as of equal or even greater value, but they are different things.

As an aside, who decided quotation mark followed by a closed paren should be an emoticon?  That's stupid. (Age, I realize this was not you.  I am just howling at the wind.)

[Towerroad]

I put the chances of wrestling being dropped from the games at close to zero. Too many countries of disparate political orientations compete at the highest level. US, the former Eastern Bloc, the Middle East (Iran and Turkey in particular)...

This is a shakedown of the wrestling federation.

Lets hope so, wrestling is an ancient elemental sport practiced around the world. If you took athletes from the ancient games and put them in the ring with modern athletes you would still have a contest regulated more or less by the same rules. This is shameful

[Swampy]

I think the point was that subjective judgment calls enforcing rules ("did he stray out of the lane?" ) are different from subjective judgment calls about aesthetics ("was that double Axel beautiful?" ).  The former are about inexact measurement of quantities.  The latter are about non-deterministic qualities that give some people agita.

Personally I defend the latter as of equal or even greater value, but they are different things.

... snip ...

So would you be OK if hockey were judged by the aesthetics of the extra pass or the deke around the last defender rather than whether or not the puck actually crosses the line?

If this were in fact the case, Cornell would have to give back lots of hardware from the early Schafer. (Unless there's an aesthetic to clutch-and-grab.)

[Trotsky]

I think the point was that subjective judgment calls enforcing rules ("did he stray out of the lane?" ) are different from subjective judgment calls about aesthetics ("was that double Axel beautiful?" ).  The former are about inexact measurement of quantities.  The latter are about non-deterministic qualities that give some people agita.

Personally I defend the latter as of equal or even greater value, but they are different things.

... snip ...

So would you be OK if hockey were judged by the aesthetics of the extra pass or the deke around the last defender rather than whether or not the puck actually crosses the line?

Nope.  As I said in the other post, some sports are appropriately evaluated by objective criteria, some are not.

As I'm sure you understand, the larger rant is against the "what can not be measured is not important" fallacy that briefly (but damagingly) fooled people with its false profundity in the 20's through 50's.  Thankfully, outside of a few last holdouts among naive engineers and crackpot economic cults, it died off in the late 20th century.  Seeing it revived in the silly comment about "no subjectivity in the Olympics" above merely made it briefly relevant again, if only to refute and toss out.

All of which belonged on JSID, though, so, never mind.

[Rosey]

As I'm sure you understand, the larger rant is against the "what can not be measured is not important" fallacy

I don't think that's what Swampy is saying. I'm all for appreciating things that cannot be compared quantitatively... but competing for tenths of a point of beauty in the eyes of a judge is absurd: subjective, arbitrary, and pointless. The only sports whose outcome I care about are those with objective criteria determining their outcome. (And the closer they get to arbitrariness, like the unfathomable foul rules in squeakball, the less I give a crap about the outcome.)

That doesn't mean figure skating or gymnastics aren't fun to watch (I especially marvel at the strength of male gymnasts... how the F do they do some of that stuff?), but having a competition between them on the basis of a judge's opinion is dumb, so I frankly couldn't care less who "wins".

[Trotsky]

That doesn't mean figure skating or gymnastics aren't fun to watch (I especially marvel at the strength of male gymnasts... how the F do they do some of that stuff?), but having a competition between them on the basis of a judge's opinion is dumb, so I frankly couldn't care less who "wins".

Interesting point.  I would like to argue that the reason we have competitions in subjective activities is in large part because of the same illness -- the need to rank order and have an ultimate "winner" in everything.  I don't know whether that's the rot of modernity or just the usual profit intrusion that can make a buck on the dullard denominator of TEH CHAMPINEZSHIP!!!1! (e.g., the replacement of the Bowl system with a national championship).

I'd like to argue that, but the Greeks (who had their heads on straight about this sort of thing) awarded prizes for the best tragedy in their competitions, and fuck knows how you do that, so it might just be that a rooting interest always spices things up.  Either that or the Dionysian games were just an excuse for betting pools.  "Take Sophocles and give the points."

So yeah, I'm sympathetic to your argument.

[RichH]

That doesn't mean figure skating or gymnastics aren't fun to watch (I especially marvel at the strength of male gymnasts... how the F do they do some of that stuff?), but having a competition between them on the basis of a judge's opinion is dumb, so I frankly couldn't care less who "wins".

Interesting point.  I would like to argue that the reason we have competitions in subjective activities is in large part because of the same illness -- the need to rank order and have an ultimate "winner" in everything.  I don't know whether that's the rot of modernity or just the usual profit intrusion that can make a buck on the dullard denominator of TEH CHAMPINEZSHIP!!!1! (e.g., the replacement of the Bowl system with a national championship).

I'd like to argue that, but the Greeks (who had their heads on straight about this sort of thing) awarded prizes for the best tragedy in their competitions, and fuck knows how you do that, so it might just be that a rooting interest always spices things up.  Either that or the Dionysian games were just an excuse for betting pools.  "Take Sophocles and give the points."

So yeah, I'm sympathetic to your argument.

That bolded bit. Following the argument, some part of my psyche had a grain of the "Americans hate ties" thing, and that brings it into stronger focus. We can't just sit and appreciate the best performances in the world as long as there are medals to win. Then there's outrage at the suggestion of a slight against the emotional favorites. Ice Capades? Oh, that's fine to enjoy for the sport, because there's nothing shiny at *stake.*