> It’s been speculated that the decision is a tactical one. Partly to deter other gymnasts who, frankly, do not match Biles in ability, from attempting the dangerous move, and partly to ensure that Biles does not score far beyond her peers by performing challenging moves other gymnasts cannot risk.
Score her fairly, and let her run away with it. That's the whole point of this level of competition - it's not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun and working some energy out. If she's got no one who can rival her, that's amazing and awesome.
> it's not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun
You don't get it. It's about being so above the others that you can have fun again and getting away with it.
Quoting her:
> "they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me,”
She's above the competition now. She is not there to win anymore.
It's hard to explain. When I read HN, I see the modern equivalent of corporate paper pushers who want to play nice and dream to excel at society game playing by society rules.
This is not the hacker spirit of the old days, which was about doing daring things. Modern ""hackers"" want to learn the framework of the day to put it on their resume linking to github that show they are teamplayer. This way they get a coveted FANG job then get 2.5 kids and a dog, a 401k, rince and repeat as happy cogs of society until the day they die. Lame.
No wonder why they don't get it!
It's a disease of the modern life ""hackers"": they don't want to bite the hand that feed them. To be fair, I don't expect much from people who need a day job to survive. They just want a ""fair"" competition of people playing by the rules, just like they do now, instead of admiring excellence, like they did before.
Simone is not afraid to stand above. That's a spirit I respect and admire.
> This decision from the International Gymnastics Federation is similar to their past low score-valuing decisions for debut moves by Biles, something she has spoken out against at length.
Doesn't seem like she sees the under-scoring as fun.
Like what, she should just quit the thing she's been dedicating basically her whole life to it and became the best of the best in her field? Why do you think it's just a question of "choose to quit if you don't like it"?
Of course she cares about what they think but it's completely out of her control, it's more of a sign of her being aware of her own power limitations and pushing through in other ways where she can have control rather than accepting whatever the committee decided.
The alternative is not to quit the sport, I think the alternative would be to play by their rules and make less riskier and outlandish routines and get higher scores.
Um maybe re-read the comment you are replying to. It seems you both agree that Simone should be scored according to her talent. I think you're being downvoted because you mis-read the comment you are replying to.
The whole point is to generate an exciting event that an audience will watch. Multiple competitors having a chance of winning makes an event exciting. So does one superstar doing incredible moves, of course, but these two need to be balanced.
Barring a mistake or injury, she's gonna win regardless, as she's done consistently since 2013. Might as well fairly recognize by how much she's doing it at this point.
That’s ridiculously unfair. Imagine, in the next few moves, Simone injured herself or something, but still demonstrated superiority to the others throughout the competition, but loses because of the silly scoring system they implemented just for her.
She’s better. Let’s just recognise her greatness fairly. If other athletes feel bad about it, so what? If the audience wants it to be competitive, even when it isn’t, so what? She’s better and we should just recognise (and appreciate) reality.
Love her attitude though. Just does the moves anyway “because I can”. She’s great. Maybe a bit of an ego, but who cares? She backs it up, so who can say anything? Love that.
> The whole point is to generate an exciting event that an audience will watch. Multiple competitors having a chance of winning makes an event exciting
Disgusting. Do all the competitors also get to have a trophy in the end, like in modern day schools?
If you want everyone to have a chance, next move is to give them handicap. Make them wear lead belts. That'll be fun for you maybe?
Me, I want to see the top competitor crush the others after utterly dominating by doing daring moves
You can’t compare Simone Biles to Michael Jordan. If Michael Jordan could shoot 3 pointers with 90% accuracy from his own half court, then that would be a more accurate comparison.
Simone Biles has a unique combination of size, strength, and skill that truly makes her the greatest gymnast ever and probably going forward in time as well.
There are people who rival, and perhaps exceed, Jordan though - Curry, Bryant, Abdul-Jabbar, LeBron James, etc. "One of the greatest" and "by far the greatest" aren't the same.
It seems like you don’t understand exactly how different Simone Biles is from every single gymnast before her. She is an anomaly in the field of gymnastics. She can physically do things that no other gymnast, male or female, can do because of how short she is, how strong she is, and how skilled she is. If she were of regular gymnast height, her skill would still make her one of the greatest gymnasts. But add on the fact she is so short and so strong, it means she does things no one else would dare to do.
I love Michael Jordan. He is my favorite basketball player ever. I’ve watched him play basketball live. But he is no Simone Biles.
The question isn’t whether Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history. The question is whether any gymnast in the future can ever do what she can do right now. Unless children become genetically engineered to be gymnasts, there may never be another gymnast as great as Biles.
Or, her strength and height inspire people like her to step up and the gymnastic game is changed forever. This feels like a fatalistic approach which we don't do in so many activities.
she's 4'8 - that's not like an extreme left end of the curve dwarf height on a global scale, is it?
NBA centers are all 7 feet tall which precludes most people from being NBA centers, but there's a whole world and somehow they manage to fill the jobs.
It seems most GOATs are eventually supplanted because things that are unfathomable become table stakes, think like triple axels in figure skating. Forever is a really long time.
Is she actually better than the best men, or is that an impossible comparison to make? Several men have landed this move before, though I've no doubt there are some things she does that no man can do as well.
Team makeup and drafts are different. In leagues with a fairly static line-up of teams and relative ease for players moving between teams season-to-season, they're designed to prevent the league from rapidly sorting into permanent winners and permanent losers (like, the kind that gets shut out and embarrassed by mid-tier teams routinely, not that just loses more than half the time), the latter of which will tend to wither and die. It's basically a risk reduction scheme for all parties spending money on the teams (the owners; cities that build stadiums).
I don’t think that’s a fair statement, put broadly. I don’t know anything about gymnastics, but most competitive spectator sports are specifically designed by their sanctioning bodies to level the playing field to make them more interesting to watch. This is often cited as an explicit reason for rule changes in these sports. Viewership is an existential consideration for many of these organizations.
There is no artistic portion to the score in this event! It's form * dd (degree of difficulty). That's why there's controversy, they've changed the way they score this one move for this one person.
Sure, it may be a controversial change to this competition —- I am saying that state of being a “competition” has nothing to do with whether rule changes might be spurred by a particular competitors dominance.
In a show there is casting. In a sport there is not. All members in good standing have to qualify. It's mostly past results that get them to higher levels of competition, not anything else.
Contrast this with wrestling. That is a show. There are always tweaks to the rules in these sports to make them interesting but not to the blatant disadvantage of one competitor.
Imagine if they made Tiger Woods play an extra hole all those years. That's what this feels like.
Pro sports definitely has casting. It isn't run quite the same way as casting for a movie or show, but there are definitely similarities.
Pro sports are entertainment.
Usain Bolt drew massive crowds wherever he raced, and no one doubted for a second he would destroy the competition. They came to see an elite athlete the likes the world had never seen. Just like they want to see Simone Biles.
And the idea of 'fixing' competitions to tinker with the odds of winning trying to optimize the event like it's a slot machine to perfectly trigger the crowds fun levels is super creepy. Like if social media were put in charge of the olympics.
From my limited understanding of gymnastics, judges are there simply to tell the audience what they already know - i.e. who gave the best performance. The excitement of watching athletes perform does not come from the judges, it comes from the athletes' performances. This is not the x-factor where the judges are themselves part of the entertainment. I don't think anyone derives excitement from the decision of a judge that did not already exist at the time of the performance.
I strongly disagree. Did Usain Bolt’s performance make his races less exciting to watch? Did Michael Schumacher make Formula 1 less exciting to watch? Michael Phelps? If anything, these superstars, along with the proper recognition, is what brings new people to get excited about their sport, both as spectators and competitors.
Point taken, and agreed with, but F1 is a traditionally pretty bad example for this. They regularly, including during the Schumacher days, changed rules to try and make things closer.
F1 definitely does NOT keep things balanced. Though they do try, but they have to balanced engagement from fans, well-funded teams, and teams with less financial backing.
> It’s supposed to be a racing competition not an engineering one.
Then why is all the prize money distributed based on the Constructors' championship, which is effectively which team does the best engineering? Indycar is the racing competition; F1 is car design competition that is judged by the racing ability of the cars, drivers and teams combined.
In these recent discussion about Biles, I've seen this exact conversation a few times. People say that gymnastics organizers need to keep it competitive to have audiences, and people disagree and say the organizers shouldn't worry about that. They should worry about fairness. This implicitly accepts that a dominant competitor at the top level decreases viewership.
Is that true? I don't think so. And, I think there's lots of obvious evidence it isn't. Did people stop watching swimming when Phelps was dominating? No. Did people stop watching cycling when Lance Armstrong was dominating? No. Those sports had a huge increase in viewership, at least in the US where I was at the time. It's not even limited to the home country. I certainly hear more about sprinting after Usain Bolt than before.
If we extend to team sports there are even more cases. Remember when everyone around the world stopped watching NBA basketball because of Michael Jordan and the Championship-Era Chicago Bulls? I sure don't.
So maybe gymnastics is totally different, but that seems odd. I can pull examples from local sports, worldwide sports, team sports, individual sports, big money sports, small money sports, fighting sports and even auto racing. There's nothing about gymnastics that seems different from all other sports.
Maybe this is an unsatisfying conclusion, but I don't know why people keep thinking this, that you need evenly matched competitors for the audience. There are people who keep commenting it, and the judges act like it's true. And maybe an upsetting conclusion to some, but after writing out this whole comment I can't come up with a better answer than "she's a Black woman". So maybe that's it.
If someone can name a case where a dominating competitor decreased the popularity of a sport, I'm genuinely very interested to hear about it.
What makes an event exciting is seeing someone bringing it to the next level and doing stuff nobody has ever done before. The competition can’t keep up? Their problem. Let the next generation train twice as they do so they can get to that level one day.
That's not at all how it works. Golf is what it is today because Tiger Woods was unstoppable. Basketball exploded in the 90s because Michael Jordan was untouchable.
Sports categorically do BETTER when they've got a massive superstar. Both because some people tune in to see what amazing, unbeatable performance they put out, and because some are dying to see them choke and lose. This is literally no different, Biles could try one of these moves and break her leg and be out of the competition, she's absolutely beatable even doing moves the others can't. It's all about execution.
Ronda Rousey's annus mirabilis in 2015 made women's MMA and MMA in general explode. And you know what the biggest thing for that was? When Holly Holm figured out how to defend against her arm-bar and beat her with striking! Maybe someone will start drilling heretofore "impossible" moves and rise to the occasion.
I think it's way less likely someone will upset Biles in the same way. Gymnastics is indirect competition, so there's no rock-paper-scissors aspect like MMA.
It's interesting than in super capitalist US the most popular sports (NHL, NBA, NFL) are "socialistic", where the worst teams stay in the league and get the first pick in players so leagues remain competitive and any team can win one season, while in "socialist" Europe well, if you do poorly you get relegated and often the club disappears in bankrupcy.
I think this is the problem with many "judgement sports", literally too much politics into it (see 2008 olympics wrestling scandal, suspending of all Rio Olympics boxing judges or the Pelletier/Sale olympic figure skating scandal).
Honestly most of these sports are losing popularity and money over unfair judging whilst athletics celebrates superstars like Usain Bolt that then draws crowds and new talents to these sports.
There was one particularly bendy Russian strongman who was able to game the move by leaning backwards so far that he was almost doing a standing bench-press.
For fear of breaking their backs, no-one else dared to try this and the guy just dominated this event.
How hard would it be to replace a given sport's referees/judges/officials/umpires/whatever with with a system of sensors?
That question alone will tell you how objective the scoring will be. The winner of the 100m dash is almost completely unambiguous and objective, but sports like figure skating will always be doomed to some subjectivity in the scoring.
Just hit me that it'd be quite interesting given the advances in ML to see how well a computervision based system could be able to evaluate jumps,etc from these sports. Once skeleton-detection is in, then a ML system given historical scores matching relative bone positions(with some adjustments for era proficiency, athlete physiology,etc) should be able to be fairly accurate in giving unbiased scores and be able to flag abberations in human judging.
This would have been the equivalent of asking Bolt to wear a 25lbs weight vest just to try to keep the races closer. It’s also why most people assume the Olympics are corrupt. If it’s a scored event you just assume there will be someone not being fair.
They way the gymnastics federation has treated Simone Biles makes me wonder how many other extraordinary athletes they’ve erased from history and record books.
Simone Biles hasn't been erased from history. She is the most successful gymnast of all time and largely considered as so by pretty much everyone in the field.
She already has 4 skills named after her including the one worth the most point in the field. The Yurchenko Double Pike is just particularly dangerous. It's perfectly understandable that it's not the direction the federation wants to take gymnastics towards.
I'm sorry - every move in gymnastics is dangerous. And yes, I used to tumble, so I know. Furthermore, please explain why the Biles dismount off of the balance beam isn't rated the same as other moves of lesser difficulty. [0]
There is some precedent for this kind of nonsense. The NCAA banned the slam dunk in 1967 because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was so unstoppable that they wanted to slow him down. The NBA allowing the zone in 2001 was done so teams could double and triple-team Shaquille O'Neal before he got the ball because he was so impossible to guard.
I'm definitely not saying they should do this, of course, especially in the Olympics. Crippling dominant teams and players to promote competitive balance in team sports tends to be a more practical measure to keep fans of the crappier teams interested and paying.
Its hard to look at those examples, along with Biles, and not think that the precedent has racial undertones. Would the reaction be the same if these were white athletes, or would they become marketing powerhouses responded to with amazement at how they are operating at entirely new levels.
I actually hadn't considered this, and now I'm curious if some of the new F1 regulations (there are lots of new regulations fairly regularly, so I don't mean to say this is like changing the rules of basketball which happens every decade or so) have anything to do with Lewis Hamilton's total dominance, who happens to be the first black formula 1 driver.
An institution use idiotic logic to downplay the achievements of someone who happens to be black? Famously something we know has never happened before, particularly in sports.
No this doesn’t prove anything, it’s just a data point that happens to fall on a trend line. In this case, HN sees something that looks like a nail and would rather fling the hammer out the window then consider using it.
If you pull out dozens of nails and the other person tells you they're all not a nail, just "a nail-shaped piece of metal", perhaps you should find another opinion.
without looking it up, iirc, they changed rules around being able to setup behind the goal (which was a classic move for him to wraparound) and also rules around the goal crease
This was done to keep the game fun to watch, because this is where the money is.
The same way online games keep rebalancing player classes to nerf excessively powerful classes and boost excessively weak classes, so that the fight stays based on skill and luck, not on grabbing a super-weapon.
I disagree. Nerfing classes/weapons in games still gives everyone the same toolset to work with, and more skilled players can still excel with the different toolset.
To use another games analogy, this is more like "rubber-banding" in racing games, where the pack is artificially caught up to the leader.
It reminds me of The Incredibles where the boy wasn't allowed to compete because he's so much faster than everyone and has to hide his ability. At the end when he is allowed to compete, he is told to only barely win; to downplay his capabilities.
I can't imagine why he'd want to compete at all. He's got magic running ability. Of course he's going to win, with no effort at all. The conclusion is foregone.
The "barely win" thing is solely about preserving the family secret. It doesn't make the race any more interesting. I can only imagine that they're hoping he'll get bored after winning a few plastic trophies and go off in search of something more challenging.
That's not really the case here. She's not categorically different from the other female athletes. She's slightly stronger, slightly more talented, and slightly bolder. In sports, such slight advantages mean consistent wins, but only if you work as hard as everybody else. They're not magic.
She's not being held back to protect a secret. She's being held back because of a murky set of biases, resentments, and politics.
I have mixed feelings. I'd hate to see a bunch of ambitious, overconfident young women injure themselves trying to keep up with the best woman gymnast of our time. But really she should get credit for it.
On the other hand, major men's sports tweak rules all the time: change the resilience of the baseball; outlaw spitballs; lower the pitcher's mound; talk about moving the pitcher's mound back; add overtime to pro football games; literally move the goalposts (to the back of end zone) and otherwise make field goal attempts less attractive; modify rules to protect the quarterback; dramatically reduce the amount of contact a defensive back is allowed to bring on a receiver; expand the three-second area dramatically (there's a reason it got the name "key"); etc.
The safety aspect of the deterrence part is critical, though.
> If she's got no one who can rival her, that's amazing and awesome.
The goal that is notionally targeted is to have the allowed moves challenging enough to provide the opportunity for real differentiation at the elite level but not so dangerous as to have people at the elite level sufeerinf large numbers of serious injuries trying to avoid being mathematically eliminated by degree of difficulty (you could allow more moves but give less return to degree of difficulty at the highest level to achieve a similar effect, but I don’t think allowing the moves but underscoring them has any broader appeal than straight-up bans.
If an athlete is, like Biles, good enough to do a move banned for this reason, they are also good enough to reliably dominate without it.
Yeah, around here we worship Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Elon Musk and Richard Stallman for being insufferable, arrogant pricks but Heaven forbid Simone Biles be even a little bit proud of herself.
Again, they are moving the world in some direction (a good or bad - I won't comment on that). How is she moving it by a jot?! How is this an achievement on the grand scheme of things? Have you seen what animals can do with their bodies? Have you seen an Alpine ibex, for example? An squirrel? A cat? Will this impress an alien civilization?
You have a reductionist view of both people and society that I find uninteresting.
Your fixation on "great man" view of history, in which only those who affect society on a grand scale matter, belongs in the last century, as does your reductionist view that societies "progress" along some linear axis of "good" or "bad." Everyone affects society, everyone matters, and society moves in countless directions at once.
Nevertheless.
However unimportant you may consider Simone Biles, the fact still remains that she's accomplished far more than you likely ever have or will. So apply your own rubric and find a bit of humility. She has achieved master status in her art. She has doubtless inspired generations of gymnasts with a lifetime of practice, effort and skill, and made an indelible mark on her field. She's the best in the world at what she does. What have you done, Nikolay?
...that's a rhetorical question, I don't actually care.
Well, maybe I won't be more accomplished in your eyes as obviously your value system differs from mine. But I've tried hard in many way to change things for better - not for me, but for others and for the future generations to come. And I have some successes. What is she going to accomplish? Make money and make others follow her lead? And that would be great, right? Well, not for the planet - that's for sure!
> What is she going to accomplish? Make money and make others follow her lead? And that would be great, right?
She inspired me and other in her boldness
> Maybe she is. I see no grace in her performance though. Maybe I'm too used watching Soviet Bloc gymnastics. Isn't this artistic gymnastics? I see no artisticism in her performance, just routine - it's like a robot doing it, but failing to land properly
Your lack of interest in pushing the boundaries or rejecting pre established rules (Who said gymnastics should only be about art? Why do you think soviet block country must forever be the model?) strikes me as dull and classicist.
You would be very happy in China mainland, where you have one model to obey and follow, coming from the top down, with no room for inspiration or breaking the mold.
I don't follow you as gymnastics in China is way more popular than gymnastics in the US. America has always been based on following role models and all was good until the Kardashians and gangster rap singers become those. Given she competes in the artistic gymnastics field, being artistic is a key component of the sport - it's sport, but it is an art, too. Rhythmic gymnastics is way more artistic, I agree, but it also is much more complicated than simple athletic routines and it's dominated by Eastern Europeans mostly due to the focus of beauty, grace, and clockwork coordination. Again, not sure what boundaries she's pushing in this breakneck act - there's no human, who can push the boundaries beyond those set by animals.
> However unimportant you may consider Simone Biles, the fact still remains that she's accomplished far more than you likely ever have or will. So apply your own rubric and find a bit of humility
I love your take. It makes me happy to find the rare soul on HN who gets it.
Accomplishment is more than accomplishing something. Go to PubMed and you will find a lot more role models to follow and heroes to admire than all the circus clowns cheered in the MSM. A scientist may not get all the fame and cheering a clown gets, but they do accomplish a lot more in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe she is. I see no grace in her performance though. Maybe I'm too used watching Soviet Bloc gymnastics. Isn't this artistic gymnastics? I see no artisticism in her performance, just routine - it's like a robot doing it, but failing to land properly.
I don’t follow gymnastics so I am only gathering context here, but this move seems very complex. She starts with a cartwheel, ends up facing backwards, jumps in a backwards arc onto the raised platform into an upside down position, then carries her momentum through into a rotation and a half to end up upright again.
It’s hard not to see the heavy hand of racism and misogyny in the committee’s reactions to this kind of unparalleled excellence. Any time they’re presented with exceptional performance that doesn’t fit their mental model, they find a way to neutralise it.
Please explain the obvious sexism here. She's being penalized more than her male competitors (who aren't allowed to compete against her)? (Though, maybe gymnastics rules don't actually prohibit men from competing in women's divisions.)
Also, it looks most like penalizing exceptionalism, similar to how the penalty rules of hockey were changed to limit Wayne Gretzky's dominance when both teams were down a player (and changed back shortly after Gretzky's retirement, IIRC).
I think the claims of sexism come from the fact that this move has only ever been performed by men before, combined with the low scoring as a way of dissuading other female gymnasts from trying it.
I remember in freestyle aerial skiing they banned quad backflips because after a lot of analysis they determined it was too dangerous, that it was likely the skiers would exceed the length of the outrun.
It made sense but this does not at all. Aspiring gymnasts can use foam pits, crash mats and spotters to learn new moves. It's called progression.
Both essentially. You need more height to do more flips, which means you need more speed coming into the jump, which means you will fly farther horizontally. Some of this can be modulated by your takeoff, but only a small amount. Projectile motion/physics dominates.
Earlier than this Steve Corbett's flip has disappeared from the internet but it did happen in 1975 at Whistler BC:
Corbett's quad backflip was the first one ever done. He was 80 feet (24 metres) in the air flipping four times.
You can see him here at the 16 second mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afv8Ts-zTPQ
I think though Jean-Marc Rozon was the only one to do it in competition. He was the leader of the famed Quebec Air Force that dominated Freestyle Aerial Skiing in the 80's. You can see his quad in the second clip above at six seconds.
In 2012, Matt Chojnacki 'landed' a quad twisting quad backflip. I'm not sure if this was in competition, it would have been dsq'd if it was. My guess is training:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=druWqXZnoeU
Simone Biles is an athletic miracle. Just like Serena Williams (won a tennis tournament while pregnant), Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Eliud Kipchoge, etc.
Let us carefully chose our idols. How does this move us ahead as a civilization? Will these "miracles" remove the homeless people' tents in Los Angeles? Sports are a distraction and a huge industry. They don't move this world even a jot in the right direction. Competitiveness develops further the cutthroat mentality this civilization suffers the most from!
You're right about competitiveness etc. But nothing you said takes away the jaw dropping abilities of Simone and the other athletes your parent comment mentioned. It takes insane amount of practice, insane work ethic/dedication, genetic lottery, geographic lottery etc to get to that level.
We can admire and respect insane talent and aspire to solve problems like homelessness at the same time!
I know it's a lot of practice, but I am not impressed - I was more impressed by Atlas' salto and parkour as it really means a lot for our civilization unlike sports achievements, which are nothing but waste and distraction.
Really, I know families who spend days of the week commuting to soccer tournaments, snowboarding, etc. Not to mention the commute to go have practice, shop for equipment - all this is productive time, which can be used for something fruitful. Same with the spectators who burn hundreds of billions of hours as coach potatoes watching sports, paying tens of dollars per month for sports channels, eating junk food, drinking beer, etc. This totals up to a trillion hours of year and hundreds of billion of dollars of direct costs, not to mention the indirect ones and the toll to the environment of all this. How about instead of burning these calories playing sports to actually "burn" them in farming or community service?
"just a game " that should be fair. If she's dominating the competition the score should reflect that. It's not on her to be tame for her less competitive peers.
Are they incapable of practicing safely? A lot of "pedestrian" gymnastic moves can break a neck when executed poorly - but I don't see them banning the summersault. An important component of athleticism is exercising good judgement.
I am sorry, maybe I don't get it, but Biles landing was terrible! Looking at the historic footage of Yurchenko - she's been so graceful in her landings!
149 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadScore her fairly, and let her run away with it. That's the whole point of this level of competition - it's not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun and working some energy out. If she's got no one who can rival her, that's amazing and awesome.
> it's not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun
You don't get it. It's about being so above the others that you can have fun again and getting away with it.
Quoting her:
> "they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me,”
She's above the competition now. She is not there to win anymore.
It's hard to explain. When I read HN, I see the modern equivalent of corporate paper pushers who want to play nice and dream to excel at society game playing by society rules.
This is not the hacker spirit of the old days, which was about doing daring things. Modern ""hackers"" want to learn the framework of the day to put it on their resume linking to github that show they are teamplayer. This way they get a coveted FANG job then get 2.5 kids and a dog, a 401k, rince and repeat as happy cogs of society until the day they die. Lame.
No wonder why they don't get it!
It's a disease of the modern life ""hackers"": they don't want to bite the hand that feed them. To be fair, I don't expect much from people who need a day job to survive. They just want a ""fair"" competition of people playing by the rules, just like they do now, instead of admiring excellence, like they did before.
Simone is not afraid to stand above. That's a spirit I respect and admire.
Doesn't seem like she sees the under-scoring as fun.
Her actions speak louder than her words: she just doesn't care what they think, so she will keep doing it, scores be damned.
I applaud her continuous determination.
That I can agree with.
Like what, she should just quit the thing she's been dedicating basically her whole life to it and became the best of the best in her field? Why do you think it's just a question of "choose to quit if you don't like it"?
Of course she cares about what they think but it's completely out of her control, it's more of a sign of her being aware of her own power limitations and pushing through in other ways where she can have control rather than accepting whatever the committee decided.
It's very American! I like that!!
I wish more people in China mainland could learn from such examples
Um maybe re-read the comment you are replying to. It seems you both agree that Simone should be scored according to her talent. I think you're being downvoted because you mis-read the comment you are replying to.
There is no such intrinsic quality. There's only winning and performance.
She’s better. Let’s just recognise her greatness fairly. If other athletes feel bad about it, so what? If the audience wants it to be competitive, even when it isn’t, so what? She’s better and we should just recognise (and appreciate) reality.
Love her attitude though. Just does the moves anyway “because I can”. She’s great. Maybe a bit of an ego, but who cares? She backs it up, so who can say anything? Love that.
Disgusting. Do all the competitors also get to have a trophy in the end, like in modern day schools?
If you want everyone to have a chance, next move is to give them handicap. Make them wear lead belts. That'll be fun for you maybe?
Me, I want to see the top competitor crush the others after utterly dominating by doing daring moves
Simone Biles has a unique combination of size, strength, and skill that truly makes her the greatest gymnast ever and probably going forward in time as well.
Biles appears to be the latter.
I love Michael Jordan. He is my favorite basketball player ever. I’ve watched him play basketball live. But he is no Simone Biles.
The question isn’t whether Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history. The question is whether any gymnast in the future can ever do what she can do right now. Unless children become genetically engineered to be gymnasts, there may never be another gymnast as great as Biles.
NBA centers are all 7 feet tall which precludes most people from being NBA centers, but there's a whole world and somehow they manage to fill the jobs.
It seems most GOATs are eventually supplanted because things that are unfathomable become table stakes, think like triple axels in figure skating. Forever is a really long time.
> She can physically do things that no other gymnast, male or female, can do because of how short she is, how strong she is, and how skilled she is.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/lebron-...
and drafts are done in order of underperforming teams.
No, this is a competition. The best should win.
https://www.thesportster.com/entertainment/top-12-athletes-s...
Contrast this with wrestling. That is a show. There are always tweaks to the rules in these sports to make them interesting but not to the blatant disadvantage of one competitor.
Imagine if they made Tiger Woods play an extra hole all those years. That's what this feels like.
Team sports often have “try-outs”. They also often have complex rules for selecting participants which have nothing to do with skill.
And the idea of 'fixing' competitions to tinker with the odds of winning trying to optimize the event like it's a slot machine to perfectly trigger the crowds fun levels is super creepy. Like if social media were put in charge of the olympics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_World_Co...
I would argue F1 is as much about engineering as the driver. Hamilton on a different team likely excells, but probably doesn't win nearly as much.
Then why is all the prize money distributed based on the Constructors' championship, which is effectively which team does the best engineering? Indycar is the racing competition; F1 is car design competition that is judged by the racing ability of the cars, drivers and teams combined.
Is that true? I don't think so. And, I think there's lots of obvious evidence it isn't. Did people stop watching swimming when Phelps was dominating? No. Did people stop watching cycling when Lance Armstrong was dominating? No. Those sports had a huge increase in viewership, at least in the US where I was at the time. It's not even limited to the home country. I certainly hear more about sprinting after Usain Bolt than before.
If we extend to team sports there are even more cases. Remember when everyone around the world stopped watching NBA basketball because of Michael Jordan and the Championship-Era Chicago Bulls? I sure don't.
So maybe gymnastics is totally different, but that seems odd. I can pull examples from local sports, worldwide sports, team sports, individual sports, big money sports, small money sports, fighting sports and even auto racing. There's nothing about gymnastics that seems different from all other sports.
Maybe this is an unsatisfying conclusion, but I don't know why people keep thinking this, that you need evenly matched competitors for the audience. There are people who keep commenting it, and the judges act like it's true. And maybe an upsetting conclusion to some, but after writing out this whole comment I can't come up with a better answer than "she's a Black woman". So maybe that's it.
If someone can name a case where a dominating competitor decreased the popularity of a sport, I'm genuinely very interested to hear about it.
That his dominance was later discovered to be ill-gotten doesn't change that.
Sports categorically do BETTER when they've got a massive superstar. Both because some people tune in to see what amazing, unbeatable performance they put out, and because some are dying to see them choke and lose. This is literally no different, Biles could try one of these moves and break her leg and be out of the competition, she's absolutely beatable even doing moves the others can't. It's all about execution.
Honestly most of these sports are losing popularity and money over unfair judging whilst athletics celebrates superstars like Usain Bolt that then draws crowds and new talents to these sports.
For fear of breaking their backs, no-one else dared to try this and the guy just dominated this event.
That question alone will tell you how objective the scoring will be. The winner of the 100m dash is almost completely unambiguous and objective, but sports like figure skating will always be doomed to some subjectivity in the scoring.
She already has 4 skills named after her including the one worth the most point in the field. The Yurchenko Double Pike is just particularly dangerous. It's perfectly understandable that it's not the direction the federation wants to take gymnastics towards.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinseale/2019/10/08/if-you-ca...
I'm definitely not saying they should do this, of course, especially in the Olympics. Crippling dominant teams and players to promote competitive balance in team sports tends to be a more practical measure to keep fans of the crappier teams interested and paying.
No this doesn’t prove anything, it’s just a data point that happens to fall on a trend line. In this case, HN sees something that looks like a nail and would rather fling the hammer out the window then consider using it.
The same way online games keep rebalancing player classes to nerf excessively powerful classes and boost excessively weak classes, so that the fight stays based on skill and luck, not on grabbing a super-weapon.
To use another games analogy, this is more like "rubber-banding" in racing games, where the pack is artificially caught up to the leader.
Not so sure about the Olympics.
The "barely win" thing is solely about preserving the family secret. It doesn't make the race any more interesting. I can only imagine that they're hoping he'll get bored after winning a few plastic trophies and go off in search of something more challenging.
That's not really the case here. She's not categorically different from the other female athletes. She's slightly stronger, slightly more talented, and slightly bolder. In sports, such slight advantages mean consistent wins, but only if you work as hard as everybody else. They're not magic.
She's not being held back to protect a secret. She's being held back because of a murky set of biases, resentments, and politics.
On the other hand, major men's sports tweak rules all the time: change the resilience of the baseball; outlaw spitballs; lower the pitcher's mound; talk about moving the pitcher's mound back; add overtime to pro football games; literally move the goalposts (to the back of end zone) and otherwise make field goal attempts less attractive; modify rules to protect the quarterback; dramatically reduce the amount of contact a defensive back is allowed to bring on a receiver; expand the three-second area dramatically (there's a reason it got the name "key"); etc.
The safety aspect of the deterrence part is critical, though.
> If she's got no one who can rival her, that's amazing and awesome.
The goal that is notionally targeted is to have the allowed moves challenging enough to provide the opportunity for real differentiation at the elite level but not so dangerous as to have people at the elite level sufeerinf large numbers of serious injuries trying to avoid being mathematically eliminated by degree of difficulty (you could allow more moves but give less return to degree of difficulty at the highest level to achieve a similar effect, but I don’t think allowing the moves but underscoring them has any broader appeal than straight-up bans.
If an athlete is, like Biles, good enough to do a move banned for this reason, they are also good enough to reliably dominate without it.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/may/22/simone-biles-y...
I love that spirit :)
Your fixation on "great man" view of history, in which only those who affect society on a grand scale matter, belongs in the last century, as does your reductionist view that societies "progress" along some linear axis of "good" or "bad." Everyone affects society, everyone matters, and society moves in countless directions at once.
Nevertheless.
However unimportant you may consider Simone Biles, the fact still remains that she's accomplished far more than you likely ever have or will. So apply your own rubric and find a bit of humility. She has achieved master status in her art. She has doubtless inspired generations of gymnasts with a lifetime of practice, effort and skill, and made an indelible mark on her field. She's the best in the world at what she does. What have you done, Nikolay?
...that's a rhetorical question, I don't actually care.
She inspired me and other in her boldness
> Maybe she is. I see no grace in her performance though. Maybe I'm too used watching Soviet Bloc gymnastics. Isn't this artistic gymnastics? I see no artisticism in her performance, just routine - it's like a robot doing it, but failing to land properly
Your lack of interest in pushing the boundaries or rejecting pre established rules (Who said gymnastics should only be about art? Why do you think soviet block country must forever be the model?) strikes me as dull and classicist.
You would be very happy in China mainland, where you have one model to obey and follow, coming from the top down, with no room for inspiration or breaking the mold.
I love your take. It makes me happy to find the rare soul on HN who gets it.
Just ask Caster Semenya.
Also, it looks most like penalizing exceptionalism, similar to how the penalty rules of hockey were changed to limit Wayne Gretzky's dominance when both teams were down a player (and changed back shortly after Gretzky's retirement, IIRC).
It made sense but this does not at all. Aspiring gymnasts can use foam pits, crash mats and spotters to learn new moves. It's called progression.
Earlier than this Steve Corbett's flip has disappeared from the internet but it did happen in 1975 at Whistler BC: Corbett's quad backflip was the first one ever done. He was 80 feet (24 metres) in the air flipping four times. You can see him here at the 16 second mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afv8Ts-zTPQ
I think though Jean-Marc Rozon was the only one to do it in competition. He was the leader of the famed Quebec Air Force that dominated Freestyle Aerial Skiing in the 80's. You can see his quad in the second clip above at six seconds.
In 2012, Matt Chojnacki 'landed' a quad twisting quad backflip. I'm not sure if this was in competition, it would have been dsq'd if it was. My guess is training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=druWqXZnoeU
Spoiler: It's a lot.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/menstrual-blood-magic
The Yurchenko was named after Soviet gymnast Natalia Yurchenko in 1982 during a competition in Moscow.
We can admire and respect insane talent and aspire to solve problems like homelessness at the same time!
If even attempting this move is likely to seriously injure other gymnasts, then banning it would make sense. Sports are just a game.
If its actually unlikely olympic gymnasts would be injured trying it, then just let her do it, who cares, its just a game.