Eponymous physics

[greenblot]

The Olympics were cool... but I'm glad they're over.  I spent waaay too much time watching them.  Not that I didn't spend a whole lot of time this weekend watching football, but that is a different problem.  Speaking of football, the Patriots are consistently making interesting roster moves, which is making me very curious to see what their eventual lineup will look like on the field.  But I digress, this post is about the Olympics.

If I were in charge, the first change I would make would be to define new criteria for Olympic sports.  First of all, in all events, there would need to be an objective way to measure the performance of any individual or team.  This gets rid of the following sports:

• Artistic Gymnastics
• Diving
• Rythmic gymnastics
• Synchronized swimming
• Trampoline

Olympic boxing, unlike professional boxing, has an open scoring system and so it would still be able to qualify.  Yes, all sports have some potential for human error, because there are still people involved to enforce the rules or make some judgement calls.  But there is a difference between when a person gets the call wrong because they observed it wrong, and when the have a different opinion on the quality of a performance.  The goal here would be to eliminate the latter.

I would also get rid of things that are just not sports to me:

• Race walking - Walking is not a sport.  That's why they call it walking and not running.
• Equestrian - The horse is doing all of the work here, the rider is more like a coach than an athlete.  If there were an olympics for animals, then this could be added to that event.

This would of course leave room for a few more sports to be added.  I propose the following:

• Baseball (since it's being eliminated)
• Lacrosse
• Football or Rugby
• Lumberjack events from the great outdoor games (except for the chainsaw ones)
• Tug-of-War (was actually an Olympic event at one point)
• Caber toss
• Ultimate Frisbee
• Pie Eating

The next major change I would make is to the scoring system.  Counting the number of total medals or gold medals doesn't make any sense.  Some sports, like swimming and track, have a boatload of medals while many team sports only have one.  So some medals should be worth a lot more than others.  So the first thing to do would be to group each event into a category, and give that category a total number of olympic points.  It might look something like this:

Basketball: 50
Water Polo: 20
Track - individual sprint events: 50
Decathlon: 50
Kayak: 12
etc.

And then you assign each medal a point value so that they some to the total for that category.  This way, the gold in basketball might be worth 25 points, but a bronze in the 200m might only be worth like 1 point.