Well, this is becoming the theme of my Summer Olympics blog— gymnastics scoring sucks! So, here are the reasons I can come up with (feel free to add your own in the comments).

1. Tie breakers— Really? A tie breaker? And the tie breaker protocol doesn’t even make any sense! You drop the highest and lowest scores, as usual. Then you drop another score, look at the remaining scores, and the gymnast with the highest score from the remaining three scores wins. Confused? Yeah, so was Nastia’s Dad, and he’s a judge. And it’s not even the same tie breaker procedure for different events within the same sport. The gold in the men’s vault was also decided by a tie breaker, but in that event you just take the highest score out of the two vaults (which at least makes some sense).

2. No perfect 10— no explanation needed

3. Difficulty scores— meant to make things more fair but really just makes things more confusing

4. Inexperienced judges— Because there can be no judges from a country that is competing, you end up with judges from countries with horrible gymnastics programs judging the finals. And, apparently, in their programs falling down isn’t a big deal!

5. Judges bias against American gymnasts— Can it really be coincidence that China always seems to benefit from “voting irregularities”, and it never seems to help the Americans?

Those are my beefs. What are yours?

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