From The Seattle Times online (full article here): Bela Karolyi remembers when his star pupil, Nadia Comaneci, scored gymnastics' first perfect 10 in 1976. The Romanian teenager's performance was understandable even to those who couldn't distinguish a pike position from a pirouette.
But the perfect 10, like the sport's old vaulting horses, has been mothballed. At this week's U.S. Olympic team trials, and in August for a first time in an Olympics, gymnastics' complex scoring system — its revised Code of Points — will be in effect.
Years ago, before I knew anything at all about gymnastics, I knew what a 'perfect 10' was. If gymnastics had 'brand awareness' in the public's eye, it was because of Nadia and her exploits of Olympic excellence. What a pitiful shame 'the powers that be' currently running gymnastics don't understand that. Don't even get me started on the 'Law of Unintended Consequences' and how the health of so many gymnasts has been sacrificed on the altar of 'harder, not necessarily better, gymnastics'. And, for the casual fan who believes that 'the powers that be' in gymnastics still means 'Bela Karolyi', here's what he had to say about the new scoring system:
"Why take the simple perfect 10 out?...It was so understandable. It was our trademark. ... It gave us such visibility and recognition.
"Now they pull it out and push in some complicated [stuff] that nobody understands. ... It's terrible. Terrible."
The current "complicated [stuff]" (I can guess the word Karolyi actually used!) combines two scores; the 'A-Score', which is 'open-ended' and based (putting it slightly simplistically) on the difficulty of the routine; and the 'B-Score', which is scored out of a 10.0 and concerns the execution, composition and artistry of a routine. If this scoring nightmare is ever visited on college gymnastics, perhaps the mind-numbingly simple solution of converting the A-Score to a 10.0-based value and then averaging the A and B scores will occur to the NCAA gymnastics rules-makers.
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