Olympics

xacto posted his opinion about the Olympics and he had two qualifications for vetting an event for the Olympics:

1) Determining a winner for the event had to be objective.
2) The event had to be athletic.

I agree with the first point; if someone is to be crowned the champion of an event, they should win without any question of how they achieved their victory. xacto's conclusion is that this would rule would disqualify a number of events, but I disagree. I think a lot of these events could be modified to be absolutely objective. Just use computers as judges. Publish a formula for calculating the score, set up a bunch of lasers and cameras and let a computer calculate the score. In addition to this, make athletes in these so-called "subjective" events submit a technical specification of what they'll perform (e.g. triple-twist, double-flip, followed by a double salchow) and factor the completion into the formula along with an evaluation of degree of difficulty.

But this raises another question. A lot of sports use human judges: basketball, soccer, football… If we are truly going to be consistent with making the competition objective, would we do away with human referees here too? Many sports purists would be horrified at this suggestion. They claim that there needs to be a human element in the game, that having human judges is part of the tradition of the sport. I think these claims are legitimate but when these same sports purists critique other sports as "subjective", it seems hypocritical.

The second point, determining the athleticism of a sport, seems subjective to me. All sports seem to evoke a level of stupidity.

You have 11 guys on each team dress up in impact absorbing material because the players slam their bodies against each other so hard that this ensures a degree of "safety". One team tries to make an oblong ball cross over a line while the other team tries to stop them. Sometimes you can kick the ball between two sticks and score that way too.

Or how about this other "sport" where you hit this little white ball with a stick. The opposing wears these pieces of leather to catch the ball. If they catch it, you leave the playing area. But if they don't catch it, your goal is to touch four white bags, in order, to score a point. If you want, you can inject chemicals into your body to help yourself heal faster. For some reason, people that play this sport think this is unfair.

I was eating dinner with my brother at some cafe in Oakland. We were having a conversation about art and I made a passing comment about a piece that was hanging next to us. I can't envision the piece exactly in my mind but I remember my comment, which tells me that it was probably a mixture of brush strokes and brush spatters, displayed with an indiscernible purpose, named in such a way to provoke a pseudo-intellectual response. "Ok, so that's something that I don't really consider art. I think art takes skill and I could do something like that." To which my brother wisely replied, "Ok, so you do that."

We kept on talking about the subject and he conceded that there are many pieces that probably don't require that much skill to do, but his point was well taken: It's not until you try to do something then you realize the difficulty and the skill that it takes. Athleticism is often determined by how people feel about a sport.

Both of these qualifications come down to the issue of subjectivity. The public outcry against pure objectivity (i.e. no human judges in any sport) would be too great, thus, to be consistent, it wouldn't be fair to subject every sport to this rule; the competitors themselves would have to agree to these rules. In reference to the second rule, determining the athleticism of a sport is going to subjective, no matter how you try to view it. It boils down to how much interest is in a particular competition.

I was at family camp one year and it became a big deal for the English-speaking high schoolers to play an "official" basketball game against the Cantonese side. I thought this was the stupidest idea ever because:

1) It pitted people against each other based on your background.
2) It didn't unify folks together.

I thought a better suggestion would have been to mix up the teams; it would have challenged people to communicate better with people they didn't know and I think it would have brought more unity.

The Olympics purport to bring the nations together but I think they are really a way for countries to show which one is the best without having to fight a war. Secondarily, I think that the Olympics are about individual athletes gaining glory and possibly wealth. It's really not about athletic competition, but that's the cynic in me.