tagged w/ Score
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We've seen videos of goalies accidentally scoring a point for the other team, but what happened here was totally intentional and totally good for the Red Bulls.We've seen videos of goalies accidentally scoring a point for the other team, but... more
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BEIJING (AP)—Turns out, the perfect 10 wasn’t so perfect.
At least not in the minds of international gymnastics officials.
Four years after a series of scoring errors marred the competition at the Athens Olympics, fans who tune into gymnastics once every four years are in for a big shock Saturday. The perfect 10 is passe. Fifteens, 16s—maybe even a, gasp! 17—are all the rage.
“I hate the new scoring,” said Mary Lou Retton, whose Olympic gold medal came courtesy of a 10 on vault. “The perfect 10, you don’t have to say anything to describe it. The perfect 10, you were perfect.”
Even more than the 6.0 in figure skating, the 10 was gymnastics’ brand. Think of Nadia Comaneci, and you immediately think of that mesmerizing string of seven 10s in Montreal. Somehow, seven 15s doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Regardless of whether you knew a pommel horse from a pony, it wasn’t hard to figure out if a routine was good or bad. Start at 10 and count backward. The closer to 10, the better the routine. The further away, the less chance somebody’s getting a medal.
“I thought they were crazy,” Bela Karolyi said of the new scoring system. “Why? Why is it needed? It attracted so much attention. The perfect 10 was something that was cherished.
“I thought it was crazy to take it out, a humongous waste. I still feel that kind of in this way, maybe selfishly.”
But the 10 returned to its pre-Comaneci mythical status after the 1992 Olympics, with none awarded afterward in international competition. That meant judges had to get creative when it came to separating the world’s best gymnasts, with only so many tenths and hundredths of points to spread around.
That flaw in the perfect 10 was glaringly apparent in Athens, when scoring errors left fans and athletes alike unhappy. The men’s high bar, vault and all-around all had issues, and the International Gymnastics Federation finally decided it had had enough.
“Something needed to be done to try and make it more fair,” Retton acknowledged.
The FIG’s solution was an open-ended scoring system. Unlike the 10-point scale, where evaluations of artistry and difficulty had to be jammed together, each now gets its own space and, theoretically at least, there is no limit on how high a gymnast can go.
The first score, the difficulty mark, measures how hard the routine is. Starting from zero, the values of the 10 hardest tricks in a routine are added together. The harder the routine, the higher the difficulty score will be.
The second mark is for execution. Starting from 10—the FIG’s way of claiming the 10 still exists—deductions are taken for errors big (wobbles) and small (bobbles).
“I’m always thinking about that. You can still strive for perfection in the B score,” Nastia Liukin said. “I’m always thinking how to get closer to a 10 on that part.”
Put the two together, and that’s the final score.
Depending on the event, scores at the Beijing Games should range from the high 14s to the high 16s. Oh sure, there’ll be some 13s thrown out there, maybe even an 11 if someone really struggles.
But see a 16, and you know somebody is doing something right. See a 17, and you’ll have seen something really special; there have only been a handful awarded in the three years the scoring system has been used.
******More at the LINKBEIJING (AP)—Turns out, the perfect 10 wasn’t so perfect.
At least not... more
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