If you haven’t watched the olympic break dancing competition, do yourself a favor and check it out. The woman competing for Australia might be the best thing I’ve seen so far.
If you haven’t watched the olympic break dancing competition, do yourself a favor and check it out. The woman competing for Australia might be the best thing I’ve seen so far.
Running has judges. Just the other day in the women’s 1500m (I think) a woman was initially disqualified for pushing someone. She appealed and the decision was reversed. It’s all about interpretation and subjectivity.
I can’t think of any sport that doesn’t have a judge or referee that has to subjectively interpret athlete’s actions and the sport’s rules.
Yeah, of course there’s refereeing, but it’s still judging objective criteria like whether a ball crossed a line, not whether someone did a fancier move.
I just gave an example of running where it was about pushing, not if someone crossed a line. They even changed their decision after an appeal when other people looked at the same situation again.
And sports like football or hockey… Have you ever watched those sports? There are subjective calls all the time. It’s objective criteria, but a human still has to interpret things like handball, which depends on if your arm is in an “unnatural position” or not. Those are largely subjective decisions and there is controversy around them all the time.
With breakdancing they are of course also judging specific criteria:
It’s really not that different.