King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Olympics: Fast-forward. No, faster! The gymnastics exhibition is on! Plus: Don't mess with the insane judging, please.

Aug. 25, 2004 | Tonight the TiVo let me down ...

Fast forward mode wasn't capable of moving fast enough for my taste Tuesday night as I tried to get past those gymnastics exhibitions.

Let me get this straight: There are so many events going on it's impossible to keep track of them all. It takes 70 hours a day of TV time to cover them all. And right in the middle of the Olympics, when races are being run, objects are being thrown, bars are being flown over, matches are being played, great chunks of prime time are given over to bad entertainment we wouldn't stop to look at if it were going on in that open space at the mall?

Gymnasts doing Vegas versions of their routines with the lights off and bad Eurodisco playing? There must be some rowing going on. Those drummer guys are available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Perhaps more than a few seconds of the women's pole vaulting could have been shown, or the Iraqi soccer team having its improbable run ended by Paraguay. The American horse jumpers won a silver medal Tuesday. Wouldn't you rather watch some horses jumping than three-time gold medalist Catalina Ponor looking like a late-replacement act for Siegfried and Roy?

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Let's fix gymnastics [PERMALINK]

After the fiasco at the men's individual gymnastics competition Monday night, I think we're in for a big push for reform in the way the sport is judged. We saw the same thing after the figure skating fiasco in 2002. It's a terrible idea.

Like figure skating, the best thing gymnastics has going for it is the capriciousness of the judging. The athletes are stupendous, of course, the men and women, and while many people join me in my discomfort with the little-girls-under-the-yoke vibe of women's gymnastics, many more people find the whole enterprise beautiful and entertaining.

But nothing keeps a sport on people's minds like a good fiasco. Figure skating was big before Tonya Harding, huge after.

What gymnastics officials should do now is make a big show. "We're going to be looking into the judging to see how we should fix it," the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) should read from a statement at a packed press conference. "We're forming a special committee to look into the problem. The committee will draw up a list of suggested modifications to the rules, which will then be submitted no later than 1 June 2005 to the executive board of the Competition Committee, who will then consult with ..."

At this point, the International Gymnastics Federation should look up with one eye to see if anyone's still awake and, on seeing that no one is, bolt out the door.

Next page: We'll forget all this, and enjoy the insanity again in '08. Plus: Women's hoops. And: More