Ignorance Talks a Big Talk

I don't mind a little jab here or there at people, places, or things (nouns, really). Sometimes feigning ignorance is done for comedic purposes or for satire, but lately it seems like a lot of people have been criticizing the women's vault finals. Primarily the fact that Cheng Fei got the Bronze medal instead of Alicia Sacramone.

Here is an example, which I saw linked to on the Yahoo! home page.

Look, I don't know much about gymnastics, but I do know that landing a vault on two feet is better than landing one on two knees. Olympic gymnastics judges evidently disagree with me, as they awarded China's Cheng Fei a bronze medal yesterday even after she fell on her vault landing. American Alicia Sacramone finished fourth despite, you know, not falling.

Yes, landing on your feet is better than having some knee touch the ground. But landing is not the only thing taken into consideration during a vault. Other than the obvious start value and execution, the vault is actually graded on an average of two scores, and anyone who watched the whole event can tell you Cheng Fei easily had the best first vault of the finals. People forget that part.

Wikipedia has the details, but to summarize: Cheng Fei scored a 16.075 on her first vault, and when averaged with her poor 15.050 on her second vault, gave her a better score than Alicia's. People don't notice that Fei did get an 8.550 on her execution, it was simply that her vault was much harder (6.5 against a 5.8) than Alicia's that saved her.

So basically, Cheng did phenomenal on a hard vault, and bad on a hard vault, and together those beat out Alicia doing good on a hard vault and good on a moderate vault. I'm all about America, but I don't think this is the scoring battle to fight.