Gymnastics scoring

While I now understand the new scoring system I am still not in favor of it. I still don't think it needed changed. The problems in Athens all had in competition solutions. The all-around paralel bars score could have been contested and it wasn't. That is no ones fault but, the team that didn't take advantage of the option available to them. The scoring problem in the mens high bar also had an available fix but, the overseeing judge didn't do his job. What needed to be done was some retraining of judges and reminding teams of the options available to them.

The scoring system was not as as confusing as people want to make it out to be. The truth is if you watched gymnastics more than once every 4 years you most likely had a pretty good understanding of the system.

The biggest problem now is that people aren't having their difficulty scores altered in competition as much. Meaning if they change an element it doesn't really matter anymore where as before it would have automatically lowered your score. The other problem is that with the execution score the routines have actually become rather boring. A lot of people are putting more emphasis on flawless execution of easier moves rather than doing higher scoring elements. I really give credit to Nastia Liukin for having such a difficulte routine on bars. A 7.7 difficulty score is pretty much unheard of these days.

See what people don't get is that you used to do every difficult move you could along with interesting combinations to get your start value to 10 and then you had to do every element you said you were going to do and do it perfectly to get that 10. Not the case anymore and that's sad.

The execution score needs some serious work. The thing is that people are not being treated as harshly on execution now as they were when it was all one score. You used to lose all kinds of points for small form breaks or not getting all the way vertical on a handstand. Now though it's like they only watch to see if you execute the elements and as long as the element is there you get credit. Doesn't matter if you did it perfectly straight or not. And seriously no way should someone land flat on their back on vault and still get an execution score above 8. That is a major flaw in the system. They really need to re-evaluate that.