Today starts a series of occasional posts about the Olympics. I will vent about what I hate, praise what I like and just point out random stuff.
So NBC showed a lot of ski jumping coverage this weekend. I really liked it. They showed both the “normal” hill competition as well as the jumping portion of the Nordic combined. They did a pretty nice job of explaining the concepts behind the sport, but kept doing one thing that really bugged me.
I watched the ultra slow-motion videos of guys taking off from the hill time and time again, and I still have no idea what I’m looking for to distinguish a good jump from a bad one. It’s really cool technology, but I really can’t see what is different from one jump to the next.
It doesn’t help that the announcer keeps apologizing for “splitting hairs” as he critiques the jumpers. Dude, it’s the Olympics. You’re supposed to split hairs.
So after I can’t figure out why one guy jumped better than the other, they flash up the scores and I have to try and figure out why one guy scored higher than the other. Style points matter in ski jumping even if I can’t figure out what the style is supposed to be.
I don’t understand why this is the case. We have all kinds of lasers and technology. Measure who jumped the furthest and give him the medal. That’s how they do it in every other jumping sport. Luge is decided by thousandths of a second. Ski jump should be decided by fractions of inches, not if the Latvian judge thinks one guy’s form was better than the other.
Yeah, I thought the idea of style points in ski jumping was always a little weird. It seemed as if they were trying to capture the “drama” of waiting for the judges scores a la figure skating. It stands to reason that good form = longer distance, ergo the longest jumper has the best form.