Who wants to go back to the original Gymnastic scoring?

Question

Say I...

Answer 1

I! The scoring is confusing and too easy too "fix" IMO. I also think they should go back to the old scoring system infigure skating. It's the judges that are a problem, not the scoring.  

Answer 2

I agree, it can be very confusing if you don't understand it.  But it's actually quite simple, and once you know how it works - and why it was changed - it makes a lot more sense.  

With the old system, of course, routines were judged from a 10.00.  If you made a mistake, you got points taken off.  Back in the sport's infancy, when gymnasts all performed pretty much the same skills, this system worked fine - whoever made the fewest mistakes got the highest score.  But as the sport progressed, and gymasts began doing harder and harder skills, it became a problem.  

As a really simple example:  let's say one gymnast does a perfect back flip.  She made no mistakes, so she gets a 10.00.  Then another gymnast does a triple back flip, also perfoming flawlessly.  She's obviously the better gymnast, because she's done a much more difficult skill - but she can't get higher than a 10.00.  There's no way to reward her for doing the more difficult skill, so she ties with the less skilled gymnast.  

At one point, 10.00s were being doled out left and right.  At the 1984 Olympics, there were 44 10.00s awarded!  To fix the problem, they changed the rules, increasing difficulty requirements and lowering the value of certain skills.  But the rules had to be changed constantly, to keep up with the sport.  

The new system solves some of these problems.  Here's how it works:

There are two panels of judges.  One panel does nothing but record every skill the gymnast performs.  Each skill has a certain point value, based on difficulty.  The value of the 10 hardest skills in the routine are added up, and the total is called the A-Score, or difficulty score.  Most Olympic level routines have an A-Score around 5.50-6.50 points.  An A-Score in the 7.00s is really high - only a few gymnasts have that much difficulty.

A second panel of judges watches the routine and takes deductions for any technical errors (falls, form breaks, etc).  They start from a 10.00 and subtract, just like in the old days.  This score is called the B-Score, or execution score.  At the end of the routine, the two scores are added together for the final score.  Thus, if a gymnast has an A-Score of 6.50, and makes no mistakes, her score would be 16.50.

This new system means that a gymnast could fall off beam, but still score higher than a gymnast who made no mistakes at all - because she had a more difficult routine.  There are pros and cons to the new system, but it's the best solution they've come up with so far!

Answer 3

I!  I'm not really a gymnastic buff, so the scores are pretty confusing to me.  Like, in the vault a 16.5 is good, but on the pommel horse a 15.5 is good.  So I never know what the gymnasts need to aim for to do well in different events.  Obviously, when scoring 1-10 you know what's a good score and what's not.