The Other Worlds Shrine

Your place for discussion about RPGs, gaming, music, movies, anime, computers, sports, and any other stuff we care to talk about... 

  • Why figure skating will never be a real sport

  • Somehow, we still tolerate each other. Eventually this will be the only forum left.
Somehow, we still tolerate each other. Eventually this will be the only forum left.
 #162919  by Zeus
 Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:37 am
When the inventor of a compulsory portion of a program says "I have no idea why they got that low of a mark" after the strong rumours of a deal between nations to fix the results, you see exactly why any "sport" where the results are based on judges can never be considered a real sport

http://www.thestar.com/sports/sochi2014 ... ogram.html
 #162947  by Flip
 Wed Feb 19, 2014 11:11 am
I cant stand judged sports. In fact, it might be safe to say any judged activity is not a sport, which supports your theory.
 #162951  by Eric
 Wed Feb 19, 2014 12:41 pm
Flip wrote:I cant stand judged sports. In fact, it might be safe to say any judged activity is not a sport, which supports your theory.
Boxing?!
 #162955  by Zeus
 Wed Feb 19, 2014 6:19 pm
Eric wrote:
Flip wrote:I cant stand judged sports. In fact, it might be safe to say any judged activity is not a sport, which supports your theory.
Boxing?!
Boxing is a hybrid. It's a sport with defined win-lose parameters (aside from a judge saying "you can't go on") until the final decision at the end, if required. That's pure judgement. But before then? It's almost pure sport
 #162961  by Don
 Fri Feb 21, 2014 1:37 pm
Seems like now the women's figure skating has a similar issue where the Russians are accused of awarding gold to their own guys that didn't deserve it.
 #162962  by Julius Seeker
 Sat Feb 22, 2014 6:55 am
In all seriousness,

Sports like MMA, kickboxing, and traditional boxing have a fairly established criteria of how they determine fights by judging decision.

First they go on a round by round point system. There are three judges total in traditional boxing. Each fighter has 10 points to lose per round, point deductions occur as follows:
-1 point for a foul
-1 point for knockdown
-1 point for losing a round

A round loss is typically determined by ring control and strike numbers and quality. A glancing jab is not going to hold weight compared to a straight or uppercut. The fighter who lands more significajt punches and controls the center of the ring most of the round will be seen as the clear winner. Although occasionally there is doubt, when one fighter lands more hits, but the other controls. It's up to the judges, but sometimes you'll get a 10-10 round. One last thing, it a fighter dominates the round, but fails to knock down the other, and the other fighter knocks him down - the fact that the knocked down fighter dominated is ignored and be will still lose the round 10-8.

In kickboxing and boxing, often 2 or 3 knockdowns in a round means a technical knockout; for example, in kickboxing it is usually 3 knockdowns. In tournament competition this is lowered to 2 knockdowns with the exception of the final bout. In MMA a technical knockout occurs after X-amount of consecutive undefended strikes when a defense should have been executed. This is typically because in the past fighters suffering too many knockdowns in a bout had passed away during or after fights; sometimes they would even exit the fight appearing fine only to die 2 days later from a swollen brain.

With sports like gymnastic routines, ice dancing, and such. I am not as familiar, but I do know the judging is fairly rigid as well. There are routines set up, and they score them on the success of executing the routine, I.E. did this person do a triple-axle and a double flip? How was their form? Did the move transition well? That sort of thing. In a way, it is similar to boxing.

The vast majority of the time when controversy arises is because people don't understand the criteria, and may not even understand the scoring system at all; and if the judges score things differently than how those people want, there is controversy. When it comes to judging at the Olympics, the panels are typically made up of multi-national representatives - this will typically drown out any bias if a judge has it. Displaying bias can be disasterous for a judging career though, if they cannot defend it, it is career suicide.
 #162963  by Don
 Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:27 am
The problem is that there's always an artistic section which might as well be 'which girl is the best looking'. It puts things in a hard spot because if you want to say it's a sports then they should just haev people jump around for a minute and see who jumps the best. If it's supposed to be artistic then you should vote for whoever looks the best.
 #162967  by Don
 Sat Feb 22, 2014 5:58 pm
From what I can tell people think Yuna had a higher artistic, but then you might as well say don't bother computing if you're not good looking, because that's what artistic is.

They should try to make it more like gymnastics where there's no artistic portion of stuff even like floor exercise so you can just grade people on how well they jumped and stuff. You shouldn't have an advantage in a sports for being better looking than your competitors.