While the Olympic gymnastics competition may be remembered for Simone Biles’s courageous return to win a bronze medal on the balance beam on Tuesday, it has also placed the sport’s rules under intense scrutiny.
On Sunday, MyKayla Skinner vaulted into history, capturing a silver medal that seemed out of reach only days earlier.
Skinner was supposed to be on a flight home after failing to qualify for the women’s all-around competition or any event finals thanks to a controversial rule prohibiting more than two gymnasts per country from competing in the finals. She only gained a second chance when Biles withdrew from the vault final. Skinner’s exclusion from the team competition also generated scrutiny of the team component of Olympic gymnastics, especially the size and construction of teams.
Then, in the floor final on Monday, two women tied for third place, upending a long-hated rule that has forced tiebreakers in gymnastics.
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These rules have their roots in pressure from the International Olympic Committee to improve the fairness of judging and diversify the distribution of medals. This pressure has had ramifications for decades. It has shrunk team sizes, although the specific number of gymnasts has fluctuated over time, and also changed the scoring from the iconic perfect 10 to an open-ended system. And in fact, these rule changes didn’t originate in the sport itself, but rather reflect the politics of the Cold War over a half-century ago.
Gymnastics was one of the original sports in the modern Olympics when they debuted in 1896. Women only joined the fray in the 1920s. The competition was held outdoors, and the team event actually involved eight or more gymnasts performing a group routine together.
This changed during the 1950s.
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First, Olympic gymnastics permanently moved indoors after torrential rain flooded the outdoor venue at the 1948 Games.
Additionally for the 1952 Games, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) standardized the competition to follow the modern apparatus format (vault, bars, beam and floor for women and floor, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal bar for men). Each of these apparatuses had been used in earlier competitions, but they appeared inconsistently alongside other apparatuses like the flying rings or the rope climb, which fell out of use. By 1952, men also no longer did a group routine. Women retained one until 1960, using the handheld apparatuses that are now a part of rhythmic gymnastics. With the group routines gone, the team competition only consisted of aggregating individual scores.
Most importantly, in 1952, the Soviet Union joined the Olympics. Immediately, the Soviets won almost everything: the team competition, the individual all-around and every apparatus. This was a fraught development in the midst of the Cold War, which had transformed the Games into a contest of national and ideological ascendancy.
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The IOC was displeased both by the change in the team competition and the small number of athletes capturing a huge percentage of the medals. Accusing the team competition of being “artificial,” the governing body threatened to eliminate the event entirely. In 1956, the IOC put muscle behind its objections, introducing a new rule that said no athlete could win more than one medal for a single performance. The FIG did beat back the threat to the team competition thanks to support from the Soviet IOC members, but only after cutting the team size from 10 members to six. It also separated the individual all-around competition from the apparatus finals.
And still, in 1971, IOC President Avery Brundage accused gymnastics of being “altogether too simple” because one person could win so many medals. Then, two years later, the IOC made the FIG limit the number of athletes in the finals to two gymnasts per country. The support of Soviet members of the FIG proved critical to passing this rule. Even though it would seriously curtail the Soviet medal hauls, they supported the rule because it would increase representation from around the world (and in turn, win them allies in sports leadership).
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union didn’t just win a lot of medals — it also tied for a lot of the medals others were winning. In the 1970s alone, there were 14 ties at FIG events like the world championships and eight at the Olympics. In the 1980s, the IOC started questioning why gymnastics had so many more ties than other sports. The IOC was suspicious about collusion among Eastern bloc judges, which threatened to stain the sport and the Olympics.
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According to some commentators, officials and judges made deals with other judges to award higher scores to gymnasts from certain countries to ensure a predetermined outcome.
The FIG, however, refused to conduct tiebreakers, arguing that no other sport had them.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, its fragmentation into many smaller states and the emigration of coaches and officials to the West only made the situation worse. More top-level athletes were able to compete, and officials from more countries attempted to arrange scores with each other. “Suddenly there were 10 or 15” countries willing to fix scores, one official told me. “And if anyone wanted to collaborate,” there were now more possible countries to work with. But any advantage quickly eroded because these arrangements produced so many ties. At the 1992 Olympics alone, there were eight ties out of 42 gymnastics medals awarded.
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That was the final straw for the IOC, which demanded the FIG introduce tiebreakers in Atlanta in 1996.
Yet, though the FIG grudgingly acquiesced, such half-measures failed to assuage the IOC’s concerns about the credibility of gymnastics judging.
So in the early 1990s, after decades of alleged score-fixing, the FIG decided to overhaul the entire system. It proposed having two separate judging panels for each apparatus, so that no individual controlled the final score. The new system was also designed to put distance between gymnasts doing harder skills, while still rewarding flawless performances. But with the United States — which was quickly becoming a gymnastics powerhouse — leading the resistance to these changes, the FIG abruptly abandoned the new system.
It took a judging scandal at the 2004 Olympics before the governing body finally implemented the new system, abandoning the perfect 10, which had been the trademark of the sport since Nadia Comaneci achieved seven perfect scores at the 1976 Olympics.
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Under the new system, one panel of judges awards points by tallying the difficulty of the eight hardest elements in a routine, and any bonus points from connected skills. This usually results in something around four to six points. In the second score, a separate panel takes away tenths from 10 based on errors in the gymnast’s execution — think unpointed toes, bent legs or the much-dreaded falls. This usually results in anywhere from seven to nine points. These scores are added together, with the total usually being around 14 or 15.
These rules frustrate some gymnastics fans. But they are a result of the FIG needing to balance between the demands of the IOC and the wishes of the gymnastics community, and they have their roots in the Cold War.
Throughout the sport’s history, it has faced allegations and insinuations about the honesty and the rigor of the scoring system, spurred on by a suspicious number of medals going to a conspicuously small group of gymnasts and countries. These concerns are rooted in judges deciding who wins a gymnastics competition, which leaves the sport susceptible to human error or corruption.
Popular or not, trying to make scoring more objective and equitable is integral to preserving gymnastics’ place as one of the Olympics’ most prominent sports.
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