low chi siang (video)

A slip on the pegs, a little wobble and gentle touches, The difference can mean gold for one athlete, bronze for another. And the decision isn't made by stopwatches -- it's made by judges and the controversies that are hardly exclusive. Join me for a look at the subjective scoring system that I've encountered when I was selected as a jury for the AIG2007 in the flatland discipline.

The Olympics Council of Asia (OCA) introduced their new judging standards for all disciplines in the Extreme Sports category.

The Asian Extreme Sports Federation (AXF), which governs the extreme sports and work under the OCA has been diligently adhering to the Olympics judging standards regarding the development of judges, coaches and team mangers for the past few years.

Brief Introduction (Who's Who)
There will now be two panels of officials in the Olympics judging system.
The Technical panel and The Judging panel.

The Technical panel
The technical panel is generally made up of five persons: the technical specialist (head judge), assistant technical specialist, technical controller, data operator and video replay operator.

The assistant technical specialist and the technical controller support the primary technical specialist to ensure that any potential mistakes are corrected immediately. Any element can be reviewed by the technical controller, the technical specialist and the assistant technical specialist. The judges can call for a review of an element by notifying the technical panel. All final decisions made on elements and levels will be made from the majority opinion of the three technical positions.

The video replay operator does exactly what it seems! If a video system is being utilized at a competition, this person video tapes all the elements that are scored. The video is available to the technical panel for their review of any element to ensure that the correct assessment of the element was made. If there is video replay available to the judges, this videotape can be viewed by the judges for their analysis of the quality and/or errors made on any given element. The data operator enters all the coding for the elements onto either paper or the computer as they are performed and the levels of difficulty are assigned.

The Judging panel
The judging panel remains unchanged. There are the judges as usual. The judges focus totally on scoring the quality of each element. Their marks will be based on specific criteria for each element and will provide a comprehensive assessment of each rider's skills and performance. The computer will keep track of comparative scores, record results and calculate totals to determine rankings.

Under the Olympics rules, the judges marks are anonymous, which removes any public accountability of the judges for their marks. The panel selection procedure can change a rider's mark by several points and alter the outcome of their personal ranking depending on which subset of judges are chosen.

Then, the highest and lowest scores from the judges are eliminated so that the remaining marks are averaged to give the move its final value. These values are then tallied to give the overall technical mark. The judges themselves don't even know whose marks will count. The panel of judges then grades the value of each element, adding or subtracting bonus marks as they see fit.

During the competition, judges evaluate or give a "grade of execution" (GOE) to each run within a range of +5 to -5. These grades or GOEs are 1, 2 or 3 points, and the judges give these plus or minus grades to impact the final value. The + or - numerical values are calculated together and then are added to or deducted from the base value of the initial score. This creates the competitors final score for their run.

Another major issue that I have personally encountered is that the technical specialist has more influence on a rider's total element score than the entire panel of judges. The determination of an element's level and base value is checked only by another technical specialist and the technical controller, whereas all judges are held in check by trimmed means of their GOEs. Likewise, the sport is still ruled by the same people, and still subject to bias and pressure from invisible insiders.

At the AIG2007, nobody will get a "perfect" 100 score. Instead, final totals will be 75 or 86.2 or beyond.

From my own perspective, I would strongly argue that the new system would greatly affect the rider's performance, whereby judges would still persistently not eliminating tendencies to judge a rider based on their reputations. And under the judging system, how does one insure the judges mark in strict accordance with the rules; how does one insure accountability for the judges; and how does one decide if errors were made in the scoring and, if so, how to correct them?

"You get more points for your consistency instead of just executing a hard trick with a touch, Thats the Olympics Rule" The head judge says.

"Obviously, it's hard to get to that level of difficulty. It's hard for them to understand what we need to have unless they have been greatly involved in the sport itself before. But I feel like it's more of a counting game now, that you just have to get as many points as you can without touching the ground."

Overall, The Olympics judging standards has become more precise and less subjective. On the downside, it requires more training to judge and laid-people can be bewildered by the complexity. "Change is never easy, and most people avoid it."

Judging in flatland is inherently subjective. Although there may be general consensus that one rider "looks better" than another, it is difficult to get agreement on what it is that causes one rider to be marked as 85 and another to be 86 for a particular component or their vocabulary.

"Bad judges are still there -- they're just hiding behind a different system."