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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Patch notes for new metas.

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