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.
Trying to remove subjectivity from any human endeavor is a fool’s errand.
Racing is pretty objective. Clocks don’t give opinions.
Deciding upon a distance, starting method, surface, and season for the race all introduces subjectivity
There is still subjectivity in racing. When fouls are committed it’s still a human who has to check the infraction and interpret the rules.
Genuinely convinced this is an uninformed opinion, not an unpopular one. Go look up the criteria, watch some videos and commentary from people who are experts, and learn about each of the sports you’re lazily criticizing.
Also, as another commenter said, the Olympics are absolutely also about art and style - the ancient Greeks were a civilization captivated by aesthetics. If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to watch.
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
The founder of the modern Olympics vision was that it be a celebration of art as well.
The society that separates its scholors from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
The idea of some kind of “purity” in physical competition is robbing ourselves of the completeness of the human experience IMO.
