The Group GamesЛИДИЯ ВИНОГРАДНАЯhttps://www.facebook.com/notes....6386721 My blog is back for the time being.
Even though there is still a lot which I would like to write about Junior World Championships (still wonder if I get disqualified after it or not), I need to outline the very strange judging at group competitions of World Challenge Cup in Minsk.
I never touched this topic but at some point I have to unveil of what is really happening with all those scores rising by 30% in just one year.
Group exercises in rhythmic gymnastics are judged pretty much in the same way as individual gymnasts, except for the part that Mastery is replaced by Collaborations. There is no limit in collaborations, you can stick inside your routine as many as you can.
If in mastery for individual gymnasts everything is more or less clear (except for the “difficult” criteria when you never know what’s considered “difficult” and what’s not), in the collaborations the definition is easy but very difficult to catch by the human eye.
For a person to understand. Let’s see this example.
This is just 2 seconds out of 2:30 of the Bulgarian 5 balls routine. Here the judge during these 2 seconds must identify and write down :
- That 2 gymnasts throw the apparatus, pass over the other gymnast and that they catch outside of visual field and without hands (that is indeed possible)
- At the same time the judges must notice that a gymnast at the back throws 2 balls, and what’s more – she throws they standing back to her partners, meaning she threw the ball without visual field.
Having watched these 2 seconds a judge must analyze all that (I guess just reading of what I wrote took you longer than 2 seconds) and write down this in symbols, and also calculate in the head the “value” of what has happened.
What a judge needs to write down :
Total score of the collaboration : 0.90
And that’s actually not the hardest case.
The hardest cases are when the gymnasts are more distributed around the carpet and you can focus your eye on just at least one part of the corner.
In this collaboration the judge is likely to focus on a group of gymnasts on the right and will miss the double throw of the balls on the left.
So here a judge must see :
- A gymnast throwing the ball to her partner (which is also important to see where all the balls are finally going), doing rotation over the partner and catching the ball from the other gymnast outside of visual field, without hands.
- At the same time the judge needs to analyze of the initial throw of this gymnast - if that was outside of visual field or not (as her partner was standing behind her and the throw was basically “blind”)
- At the same time the judge needs to see the double throw of the gymnast on the left and that she is receiving a ball from a partner on the right
So having analyzed all that, the judge needs to write down all the symbols and the value.
And the routines are really packed with collaborations happening one after another, so the brain needs to enter some Einstein mode.
I don’t believe that’s humanly possible. Actually I KNOW that’s humanly not possible. Everybody knows. But nothing is happening to not just ADMIT it, but also change it.
Though the TC did a try during World Cups to align the collaborations by giving a strict definition to the height of the throws in collaborations which led to the fact that for some countries some collaborations were crossed out. Like this one which Ukraine had to change later in the season as the throw of the ball where the gymnast is catching it between the floor and the stomach was horizontal and not vertical. Yes, by the way, a judge must think about this too. And the coach choreographing the routine. Suddenly the definitions change throughout the year and the routines are adjusted just to make sure that everything CAN be counted. If somebody can see
:-)
At the end of the day the life is the judge is anyway EXTREMELY difficult and making it more difficult (making the judges analyze the height of the throws, rethrows, pushing them to see who receives all the throws apparatus and how they are overall engaged in collaborations) – that’s just leading us to the situations of Minsk World Challenge Cup.
Let’s be totally transparent. It is not possible to judge D3 at the moment. If you do your best, you would still miss some points which were initially choreographed. And here that’s where the “PR campaign” steps in. One country can say “Hey, you know we have 18 points in D3” and if you start calculating and you have somewhere around 11 – you think that you must be wrong somewhere. And try to add something which you did not notice initially. Just writing and adding some numbers on the sheet.
And then we get awkward scores. Like Ukraine suddenly getting scores just at the end of the ranking list or Bulgaria with a flawless routine being beaten by countries with major mistakes. Who cares as long as you can justify the ranking by some phrases like “well, I just did not see, I’ll try harder next time”?
The scores would be even less pointless at the World Championships where the licenses would be received by countries whose judges would be in D3 on that day in the panel. I can be wrong. Let’s hope.
RU