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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

> 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

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