Driving, gymnastics, break dancing (ESPECIALLY break dancing)… Anything that can’t be timed or measured or otherwise objectively decided should be removed from competition.
How do you quantify “style”? How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion? How do you fairly compensate for what your personal opinion considers “worth” more when it comes to a trick or routine compared to another?
Swimming, running, jumping, throwing things a distance are all things that can be measured and ruled against a standard that every competitor uses. It’s fair and it’s removed from any bias.
The Olympics are supposed to be about competition between athletes and shouldn’t be affected by popularity or politics, which anything with an interpretive aspect to the result will suffer from.
So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.
Genuinely convinced this is an uninformed opinion, not an unpopular one. Go look up the criteria, watch some videos and commentary from people who are experts, and learn about each of the sports you’re lazily criticizing.
Also, as another commenter said, the Olympics are absolutely also about art and style - the ancient Greeks were a civilization captivated by aesthetics. If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to watch.
Trying to remove subjectivity from any human endeavor is a fool’s errand.
Racing is pretty objective. Clocks don’t give opinions.
There is still subjectivity in racing. When fouls are committed it’s still a human who has to check the infraction and interpret the rules.
According to an algorithm which could be expressed as a few lines of code. What is the algorithm to judge “style”?
Deciding upon a distance, starting method, surface, and season for the race all introduces subjectivity
Variation in objective race conditions does not equal subjectivity. People can have subjective preferences about what type of race would be best to run, but once decided, the outcome is objective. One person factually reaches the finish line first. They are objectively the winner.
What about point deductions for faults, like a minor collision or improper cornering? It happens in (for example) motocross all the time. It’s not like there aren’t other criteria.
Everything you mentioned can be rigorously defined in terms of time, position, velocity, angle. If, in a certain race, the rules are poorly defined, or if the relevant information is not known to the judges with sufficient precision and accuracy, or if the judges are incompetent, then sure, subjectivity could be introduced into some particular race. But it is possible in theory to eliminate subjectivity from racing, if care is taken to do so. It is not conceivably possible to eliminate subjectivity from an aesthetic judgement about “style.”
Surely you can understand how taking a corner in a different way is an obvious indicator of style and how the criteria can allow for variation from the expected angle, velocity, etc. in order to highlight the skill required to drive in a specific fashion, even if that fashion is meant to highlight the flashiness of a particular move.
While I don’t disagree with your assertion that it’s possible to eliminate subjectivity, I really don’t understand why you would want to, and it would ruin the sport. That is, I suppose, an unspoken part of my previous comment. It is factually part of the sport that stylistic driving tactics are more impressive on a technical and visual level, and that cannot possibly be made less subjective. It’s part of the culture of the sport.
Each sport is different, I think that’s cool. Making everything objectively about numbers so that each sport can be directly compared and athletes can be evaluated based entirely on algorithmic calculation based on statistics takes a lot of fun away and makes it lifeless. Maybe you could look into competitive accounting? That truly is a thing.
If you can define style rigorously in terms of measurable properties, so that there can be no possibility of disagreement between two equally qualified judges of style, then I have no problem with style being used as a criterion of winning a sport.
If you can’t define style objectively, then whether you win or lose does not necessarily depend on how you performed. It depends, at least in part, on the arbitrary opinion of whichever judge happened to be in charge that day. You can try to learn what each judge likes and adapt accordingly, but a judge’s aesthetic preferences could change unpredictably, and even if they didn’t, the game has still become “predict what this judge will like” rather than “perform best within these parameters.”
That, to me, ruins the sport and takes the fun away. You can have all the beautiful displays of athletic artistry in a stadium you like, but if the difference between winning and losing is some guy’s vibes, then don’t call it a sport. It’s a pageant.
The founder of the modern Olympics vision was that it be a celebration of art as well.
The society that separates its scholors from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
The idea of some kind of “purity” in physical competition is robbing ourselves of the completeness of the human experience IMO.
One could use something like a panel of experts, that could, maybe, hold up their verdicts in an easy understandable format, numbers, perhaps.
The Olympics itself doesn’t get judged enough on its destructive impact wherever it goes. Measure that. Also, OP hates ice skating.
Can’t give up those boys in tights and bikinis! Maybe they should be in the nude again? Actually, the idea of “most graceful” is indeed a competition, so snap.
And give up Raygunning?
This take reminds me of the family dinner scene from Whiplash
affected by popularity or politics
You seem to assume that everybody is corrupted. Judges etc
The “Olympic spirit” thinks exactly the opposite.
You should try to think about it this way: Not all of them come from where you come from.
