Here is an objective statement: Simone Biles debuted a Yurchenko double pike at the U.S. Classic in May. As always with gymnastics, the subjective par

Women’s Gymnastics Is Blasting Into The Future, But Its Scoring Code Is Stuck In The Past

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2021-07-14 20:00:09

Here is an objective statement: Simone Biles debuted a Yurchenko double pike at the U.S. Classic in May. As always with gymnastics, the subjective part is where it gets complicated. Tom Forster, the USA Gymnastics women’s high performance director, announced that the provisional value assigned to the vault by the women’s technical committee (WTC) was a 6.6. Forster voiced his displeasure with the valuation, saying that he expected it to be 6.8. Biles, too, said that she felt it was too low. Everyone agreed that the move was phenomenal. The question, which was both obscure and vital, was what it was worth.

This debate led to a flurry of op-eds that declared, with absolute certainty, that this vault value was unjust, without bothering to offer up a rationale as to why it was inappropriate. One reporter even claimed that one didn’t even need to know the difference between two different vault entry styles to understand that Biles’ vault was being undervalued; the issue, as one astute person on the gymternet pointed out, is that understanding the rules is precisely what you need to know if you wish to challenge a score’s fairness and credibility. The combination of an all-time great and opaquely derived numbers with decimal points in them tends to elicit this kind of reaction.

I, as someone who spends a good deal of time thinking and writing about things like this, also honestly didn’t know what to think about that valuation at first. That is to say that I didn’t know how the women’s technical committee had arrived at a 6.6, and I also didn’t know why Forster and Biles felt that a 6.8 was more appropriate. I can’t claim to be an expert in the Code of Points—it’s too much math for my taste—but I started reaching out to people who knew the Code much better than I did, and read as widely as I could. 

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