An Immodest Proposal

(Originally appeared on Sports-Central.org, 2004)

Dedicated to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
(Warning: Contains some adult content)

Somehow, it’s fitting that the Summer Olympics seems to be populated largely by whiny gymnasts begging for “do-overs.”

First, Russia’s Svetlana Khorkina, gymnastics’ hard-luck kid, cried “fix” after she finished second in the women’s overall to Carly Patterson of the United States. Then a judging screw-up deprived Korea’s Yang Tae-young of the gold medal in the men’s overall competition.

Again, an American – Paul Hamm – was the beneficiary.

Svet, Tae, get over it. You knew something like this could happen the first time you did a back handspring into a roundoff.

Or, as U.S. gymnast Blaine Wilson said, “If you can’t deal with gymnastics being subjective, then get out of it.”

So take your silver medals and quit whining before we send a shotputter over to give you something to whine about.

I’m not saying this because this is a case of foreigners complaining about the All-American kids winning gold medals.

I’m saying this because gymnastics – and you can throw in figure skating for good measure – are fundamentally flawed.

It seems we can’t get through an Olympics without having some sort of controversy over judging. In 2002, the Eastern European mob fixed the pairs figure skating (Have you heard the one about the Russian sports mechanic? He fixes figure skating competitions.)

Four years earlier, the results of almost every figure skating event matched exactly the pre-Olympic world rankings. In other words, the outcome was decided in advance, which made it exactly like professional wrestling, only without the WWE’s bothersome excitement.

During the 2000 gymnastics competition in the Sydney Olympics, someone set the vault at the wrong height, which literally tripped up a series of competitors, including Khorkina. After falling on the vault, she totally lost her poise and botched the uneven parallel bars.

Judges gave her a do-over for the vault, but not the bars, so she stormed off in a huff.

That whole thing has to have had Patterson looking at her gold medal and thinking, “Wow. I’ve had this thing for only a couple of days and it’s already tarnished.”

The sad part isn’t that it happened; it’s that the problem can’t be fixed because gymnastics and figure skating are art forms, not real sports.

Listen up. If you’ve got some guy with a pencil and calculator deciding who wins, it’s not a sport. With apologies to all of those little pixies out there, it takes more than athleticism to make an athlete.

What sports have that gymnastics and figure skating don’t is a fundamental sense of fairness. Not that I care who wins. I fervently avoid gymnastics and I watch figure skating only for the crashes.

In figure skating, gymnastics, most boxing matches and any other subjective pseudosport, an official, or a panel of officials decide who wins. In a real sport, the athletes decide who wins, while the officials perform the same task as a judge in a courtroom – they merely adjudicate the rules.

But in gymnastics, the judges are actually juries, deciding the worth of each performance, which creates even more problems for the competitors, starting with the competitors, particularly among women. The Federal Communications Commission really needs to enforce some sort of truth-in-broadcasting rules to keep NBC from calling the event “women’s gymnastics.”

The event really should be called “Little Girls Gymnastics.”

For the parents out there grooming little -- and I do mean little -- Heather, Danielle or Brittany for a spot on the Olympic medal stand, there is something you should know.

If your daughter has ever purchased anything in the feminine hygiene aisle at the drugstore, she’s too old, because the typical Olympic gymnastics career ends not with an exclamation point, but a period.

The irony here, in the middle of what can easily be mistaken for a sexist diatribe, is that sports is good for young women. Girls who take part in sports, as a rule, get better grades, don’t use drugs, have greater self-esteem and are less likely to be victims of domestic abuse than those who do not.

But that applies only to real sports. If you want to do what’s best for your daughter, get Heather a soccer ball, get Danielle a basketball, get Brittany a softball glove.

In gymnastics and figure skating, victory and defeat are not based on performance but on perception, so competitors seek acceptance -- from the judges and coaches -- rather than achievement.

In 1995, Joan Ryan, then a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a book called “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” which discussed the problems inherent with gymnastics and figure skating. Part of Ryan’s book chronicles the selection process for the 1992 U.S. Olympic Little Girls Gymnastics Team, which might have been the thinnest on record.

One competitor earned a place on the team in competition, such as it was. But she was left off on the rationale that she might be marked down in the Olympics by international judges because she had -- and this is a quote, according to Ryan’s book -- “boobs and a butt.”

OK, so what have we learned here, aside from the fact that Jennifer Lopez will never be an Olympic gymnast, is that just about the only people who get excited about gymnastics in non-Olympic years are gymnasts, gymnastics coaches and gymnastics parents.

And pedophiles.

Not that pseudosports like gymnastics and figure skating are likely to be banished from the Olympics anytime soon. You see, those are the sports that draw some of the highest ratings on U.S. television.

Everybody gets excited about figure skating and gymnastics, so the IOC added ballroom dancing as an Olympic sport. But why stop there? Anything can be judged. Why not Olympic Cannonball Diving or Olympic Macrame?

Or Olympic Brass Pole Dancing?

Yeah, that’s right, stripping.

It would certainly renew interest in the Olympic Games, if the popularity of beach volleyball’s Orange Bikini Dance Team at the Athens Games is any indication.

As sports go, brass pole dancing is at least as legitimate than gymnastics and figure skating. The best gymnast is whoever the judges say it is. The best stripper is the one who walks out the door at the end of the night with the most money.

Stripping is physically demanding – when’s the last time you tried to dance on a narrow stage while picking up dollar bills with your butt and fending off a drunk all at the same time?

If anything, stripping is a more valid Olympic sport than either gymnastics or figure skating because there is a reasonably objective way of keeping score. And in keeping with that objective measurement of victory, the brass pole dancing event would be judged by a panel of construction workers from Brooklyn, each of whom have $1,000 to distribute to a round of six competitors.

In each round, the judges -- who presumably have extensive experience in evaluating brass pole dancing -- would grade the competitors on the basis of technical ability, artistic merit and quality of surgical enhancements.

After the competition, the judges would sneak home and lie to their wives about where they’ve been.

The winner would be the one with the most money, as determined by an IRS accountant -- which might lead to some amusing situations involving discrepancies between the amount of money handed out by the judges and the amount tallied.

There also would be a men’s brass pole dancing competition, which would go pretty much the same as the women’s, except that the judges would be the regulars from “Queer Eye For the Straight Guy.”

It’s a great plan -- there’s only one flaw.

Members of the International Olympic Committee have admitted receiving bribes in connection with the awarding of the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee has been accused of making those bribes and looting the federal government coffers in providing amenities for the games.

This year’s Summer Games were put together by a group of people in Greece who had no respect for deadlines and left the main swimming venue unfinished. During the run-up to the games, the major buzz about the Olympics wasn’t centered on who would win the medals, but who was juicing up.

What self-respecting stripper would want to deal with that sort of crowd?