Judging Athletic Competition

The controversy over the outcome in the Pacquiao-Bradley championship boxing bout reminds us that we can expect similar controversies at the Olympic Games later this summer. While it's impossible to prevent referees from influencing outcomes entirely, perhaps Olympic officials should try to eliminate the authority of judges to determine an athlete's score in a competition, as happens now with gymnastics, diving and some other sports (e.g., ice skating in the Winter Games).

Imagine if Tim Tebow's touchdowns counted for fewer points than those of Aaron Rodgers because they were less pleasing aesthetically. There should be ways to bring more objectivity to the scoring of an athlete's performance in all sports. Indeed, there were objective measures that supported a decision in favor of Pacquaio. He landed more total punches and more power punches than Bradley, and he also landed a higher percentage of his punches than Bradley.

Scoring in gymnastics is more objective than it once was, but it's troubling that it still takes six judges to determine a gymnast's execution score. If that many judges are needed, there's too much subjectivity involved for a competition that's supposed to identify the best performance.

Comments

[Matt]

"Scoring in gymnastics is more objective than it once was, but it's troubling that it still takes six judges to determine a gymnast's execution score."

I think that "subjectivity" is the wrong way to look at it- much (maybe most, perhaps all) of the scoring is _meant_ to be objective- there are required moves (even in freestyle, usually), and then moves that are harder where "degree of difficulty" points are added (by a scheme, I believe) and then set deductions for various faults. There are multiple judges because not every judge can see every thing- this gives us a _more_ objective score, I'd say. Of course, if judges are not trying to do their jobs properly, the system won't work, but that's a different matter. In this way it's a matter of degree, I'd argue, and not kind, between judges in gymnastics and diving and, say, the referee in wrestling, or basketball, or the umpire in baseball. But the most important thing is that judges in things like gymnastics or dressage don't, if they are doing their jobs right, judge on what they "like more" or "think is better looking" as they would if they were making "subjective" decisions.

(On a completely different note, the blog would be massively more user-friendly if it enabled simple html tags so as to allows italics for quotes and the like. Nearly every blog does so, so it must be easy. Can one of the administrators please do this?)

[sugar huddle]

Figure skating may be less like ice hockey and more like ballroom dance. Why should we aspire to objective/quantifiable criteria over subjective/aesthetic criteria? I'm not convinced that the concern about judges having too much power to make subjective calls is concerning enough to warrant imposing a fully objective scoring-based regime (football model) on expressive/performance sports, in which competitors may be equal parts athlete and artist.