The 2012 London Summer Olympics Thread

[JoeRedskin]

Originally Posted by NC_Skins

One of my friends is actually a trainer at WOGA, and this was her exact comment in regards to that dismount.

Which is why they changed the score. It did suck for the Brits and Ukraine, but it was the right call apparently.

I get what your friend is saying and I, in fact, did watch it a couple times (via DVR) when it happened to see if the guy ever, even if for a split second, got his legs together as he was going over. Maybe I missed it, but I remember thinking his legs never even got close to what one would call a handstand. As to the scoring adustment:

Gymnastics scrapped its perfect-10 high score in 2006, replacing it with one that was supposed to remove some human error by instituting one score for the difficulty achieving certain moves, alongside a second, more subjective score for execution. But even the difficulty points have to be assigned by humans. "Everybody is human and everybody can make errors," Gueisbuhler said. "The dismount of Kohei was a very tricky thing to judge. You are talking about angles, and those decisions have to be given in quick time."

Teams can only appeal—or, in the parlance of the sport, "inquire"—the difficulty portion of their own scores. They can't object to the points they get for execution, or to other teams' scores.

London 2012: Chinese Men Take Gymnastics Gold - WSJ.com

So, after reviewing the tape, I guess the judges thought he had done the required move and adjusted the difficulty of the move since they couldn't change their subjective "execution" score. Seems pretty ass backward to me. Reading more on it, the Japanese guy is sort of rock star gymnast and, it seems to me - like MJ in the NBA finals - he gets the call (or no call in MJ's case).

I still think they were robbed.