Gymnastics seeks to limit ‘trial by judges’

“I just thought: ‘It’s wrong,it’s wrong,'” said the triple world champion.

The superior jury concurred,after an appeal was made by the Japanese team,and Uchimura’s score was increased by 0.700 — elevating Japan to second,dropping Great Britain to third,and denying Ukraine a place on the podium.

For the first gymnastics final of the London Games,the sport could have done without such drama,even if things were ultimately resolved without controversy.

That was not the case at the 2004 Athens Olympics,when South Korean individual silver-medallist Kim Dae-Eun took his dissatisfaction with the result as far as the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS),but in vain.

The scandal,caused by an inadvertent judging error,pushed gymnastics into a period of deep introspection.

In 2006,the rating out of 10,Nadia Comaneci’s iconic score from the 1976 Games in Montreal,was abandoned.

In its place arrived a new system,which saw gymnasts awarded two combined scores: one judging the difficulty of the routine,and one assessing the execution of the display.

“From my point of view,things have become much more honest and correct concerning the criteria for evaluating the gymnasts,” says Adrian Stoica,who heads the male technical committee at the International Gymnastics Federation.

Stoica believes that the potential for what he terms “trial by judges” has been “drastically reduced” by different means.

Primarily,for the jury charged with awarding the execution score,the highest and lowest marks are automatically discarded.

In the case of too wide a disparity,the scores from two referral judges come into play,and those judges must be from different countries to the gymnasts competing.

Judges are also systematically assessed throughout each competition,which yields empirical proof if they are being too generous or too severe compared to their colleagues.

“At major competitions,you no longer find the kind of dishonest judges like the ones you might encounter when I started out,” says Jean-Francois Blanquino,a French judge officiating in London.

“Before,some of them awarded very lenient scores for their countries,with deductions of only 0.600 points when it should have been two.

“That would be ridiculous today,because their scores wouldn’t count and they’d run the risk of drawing attention to themselves.”

According to Blanquino,the judges take their role very seriously,as they know that the credibility of the sport depends on it.

“The gymnasts are under pressure but so are we. We can’t afford to be wrong when you see the importance of an Olympic title,” he says.

“At each competition,knowing the importance of what we do makes me scared. Sometimes I can’t even hold the pen because I’m sweating so much!”