Stardate 20020213.1324

(On Screen): A good, healthy judging scandal may go a long way to taking the wind out of the Olympics movement. Actually, judging in the performance events has been a problem for a long time. It's bad enough in diving, though there it's still reasonably straightforward: if the diver does what she says she's going to do, then you allocate a score in inverse proportion to the size of the splash as she enters the water. Multipliers for difficulty have been worked out a long time ago and are written down plainly before competition begins.

But for women's gymnastic floor exercise, and for all figure skating and ice dancing events, there are two problems. One is that you are no longer exclusively judging athleticism; when you start including "presentation" then you've entered the field of art. And how can there be any consensus linear scale for artistic achievement?

The other problem is also shared with the other gymnastic events: granularity. Ostensibly skating events are scored on a scale of 0-6 in 0.1 steps, which is a lot. But unless someone blows it big time, no-one ever gets a score lower than 5.8 from any judge. So the result is subject to what sampling engineers call "jitter"; the scale is insufficiently sensitive to differentiate the performers, and there is liable to be aliasing in the result. (In other words, the wrong team might win.) In gymnastics it's little better; the scale is 0-10 in steps of 0.5, but no-one ever gets below 9.85.

It means that in practice the judges are putting each performance into one of four buckets: good, great, fantastic, and godlike. The system began to break down in gymnastics when Nadia Comaneci got a perfect 10 at the 1976 games. What do you do when you've pegged the scale? Pretty soon 10's became moderately routine, and then they ran out of ceiling.

A lot of Olympic events can be objectively scored: whoever throws the javelin furthest, or crosses the finish line first, or touches his foil tip on the other guy's body first, or lifts the heaviest weight, or jumps the highest, wins. Judging mainly consists of making sure that no-one cheats and that the equipment doing the measuring works correctly. Success in pole vaulting is pretty straightforward: either the bar comes down or it doesn't.

The scandals come in the events where what one is judging is style rather than overt accomplishment. It's not merely what you do, but how well you do it. Even discounting judge partisanship, I'm not sure I believe that it is possible to judge that fairly.