[Cerek]

Originally Posted by Luvian Why aren't judges from an international panel?

There is an international panel of judges for all competitions. However, no panel member can be a judge if athletes from their country are in the event. In other words, you can't have Chinese judges when the Chinese gymnasts are competing. This applies to all countries.

Bart Conners was explaining this the other night. He mentioned that, while this idea looks good on paper, what happens is you end up with judges from countries that do NOT have a strong gymnastic program. IE, you don't have judges from China, America and other countries with "powerhouse" gymnastic programs. Since the judges are from countries that don't have good gymnastics, they often miss minor mistakes that should be deducted, or they don't deduct enough for mistakes they do notice.

While that explains the situation somewhat, I think Bart is missing the obvious flip-side to his argument. If no judges from participating countries can judge an event, then you will ALWAYS have judges from the lesser known countries, which means you are going to have the same basic group of judges for most international competitions. So it seems like, even though their countries may be weak in gymnastics, the judges themselves would have to become pretty good since they would be getting the most experience.

Of course, I think what Bart meant was that judges are usually former gymnasts themselves, or at least are intimately familiar with gymnastics. Individuals that had participated in a very strong gymnastic program will obviously know what mistakes to look for better than those that didn't recieve the same level of background training.

Either way, a lot of the mistakes were not little slips or falters that could have been missed. They were very obvious balance checks, falls and landings being completely missed. Best thing to do is just realize this is part of the game and do your best to work with the system