Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Patch notes for new metas.

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.

Frankly, it is absolutely racist, and I'll happily burn karma to say so.

It's very easy to also not see this as having racial undertones. If all you have is a hammer then everything is a nail, expand your toolbox.

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.

Right? Nobody makes Tom Brady play with an overinflated ball to even the playing field.

Nobody institutes limits on the number of joints you can have in swimming competitions either.

In fact they might underinflate it a bit to help him out ; )

Shoot, it appears that you can't even make Tom Brady play with a ball inflated to the regulation pressure.

They passed such rules for Wayne Gretzky as well.

Wasn't aware of that. Very good counterexample, appreciate the balance

wait what rules did they change for him?

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.

But the basketball rules, however changed, gave everyone the same toolset.

Not so sure about the Olympics.

As well as this in sports like F1 the entire history of the sport has been a litany of "Let's cripple the front-runner" type of rule-making.

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.

They had to stop doing the military press in the olympics because the scoring got too difficult and political between the US and USSR in particular

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]

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinseale/2019/10/08/if-you-ca...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surya_Bonaly apparently lacked "grace" according to the judges and came in second several times while executing a more difficult routine.

> Score her fairly, and let her run away with it.

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.

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.

None of the rule changes you mention specifically target one player in the entire world, though.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Right, and they probably should've only counted each basket Michael Jordan made as one point to even things out?

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.

I am sure you realize that Jordan was just an example of someone generally considered one of the greatest in their respective sport.

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.

Biles appears to be the latter.

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.

No one is saying she's best than the best men. Male gymnasts are just often ignored.

I mean, big sports have all sorts of ways of evening out the playing field. See Lebron James is underpaid

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/lebron-...

and drafts are done in order of underperforming teams.

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).

The NBA has done the opposite and gives stars special treatment.

I think you've mistaken a show or exhibition. Cirque de Soleil for instance.

No, this is a competition. The best should win.

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.

https://www.thesportster.com/entertainment/top-12-athletes-s...

Professional sports is a show.

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.

> In a show there is casting. In a sport there is not. All members in good standing have to qualify.

Team sports often have “try-outs”. They also often have complex rules for selecting participants which have nothing to do with skill.

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.

With auto racing, sailing too, you can argue that money and tech should be evened out for a fair race. That's acceptable but this isn't.

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 keeps things balanced in terms of hardware not drivers. It’s supposed to be a racing competition not an engineering one.

Constructor championships in F1 are a big deal and keep the midfield interesting.

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.

That's just not true, F1 is one of the few examples of a competition that is almost equally about engineering and racing.

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.

Lance Armstrong, the huge cheater?

His cheating doesn't really matter to the point; that one person dominating a sport seems to be a ratings boost, not a hit.

That his dominance was later discovered to be ill-gotten doesn't change that.

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.

How are they going to train themselves to be shorter than 4'9"?

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.

yeah the whole competing against the platonic ideal of the movement thing does sort of hamper a 1:1 comparison.

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.

Because... Capitalism. The league, as a whole will make more money if there is parity between the teams.

No, it's not about tactics or competition.

> 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.

Yet she keeps doing it.

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.

Both "it's shitty to intentionally under-score her performances" and "it's great that she's doing it anyways" can be simultaneously true.

> Both "it's shitty to intentionally under-score her performances" and "it's great that she's doing it anyways" can be simultaneously true.

That I can agree with.

> Yet she keeps doing it.

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.

Exactly. She does not bow down and obey. She keeps doing her thing, in spite of the obvious consequences.

It's very American! I like that!!

I wish more people in China mainland could learn from such examples

> You don't get it

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.

> She's above the competition now. She is not there to win anymore.

There is no such intrinsic quality. There's only winning and performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com