Driving, gymnastics, break dancing (ESPECIALLY break dancing)… Anything that can’t be timed or measured or otherwise objectively decided should be removed from competition.
How do you quantify “style”? How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion? How do you fairly compensate for what your personal opinion considers “worth” more when it comes to a trick or routine compared to another?
Swimming, running, jumping, throwing things a distance are all things that can be measured and ruled against a standard that every competitor uses. It’s fair and it’s removed from any bias.
The Olympics are supposed to be about competition between athletes and shouldn’t be affected by popularity or politics, which anything with an interpretive aspect to the result will suffer from.
So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.
One thing I didn’t learn until this year was that gymnastics is scored two ways. Execution starts at 10.0 and has points deducted for each error. Difficulty starts at zero and increases based on the composition of the required elements, and how they are connected.
Besides, gymnastics is one of the original Olympic sports
Yep. Olympic Gymnastics is actually a pretty poor example. The skills all have specific point values and the judges don’t have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to interpretation. There are specific penalty ranges for things like not having your toes pointed, not having straight legs, legs apart, one foot out of bounds, two feet out of bounds, etc.
That said, I think artistic gymnastics (the kind you usually associate with the Olympics) has an artistry score outside the Olympics, but that might just be acrobatic gymnastics.