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One of my kids is doing summer swim. As a parent you have to volunteer at the swim meets if your kid is swimming in them. I found out before hand that certain positions count double when you volunteer. So I'd only need to volunteer every other swim meet that my kid is in. The position I got is "stroke and turn" judge. Basically I have to monitor the swimmers and make sure they are doing all legal strokes, turns, and finishes. I shadowed someone at the saturday meet, and then at the monday meet I was on my own.
Ya'll I DQed so many kids. At least 20 if I had to guess. Almost entirely on breastroke and butterfly events.
Afterwards I was thinking that @ToaKraka might appreciate the pedantic nature of the rules(pdf).
One of the interesting aspects of the judging is that you are supposed to give an equal amount of attention to all swimmers. Usually there are 4 lanes to watch for each judge. Which means each swimmer is getting 25% of your attention. Where it gets interesting is that sometimes events are not full. So you might only have 1 swimmer to watch in your 4 lanes. You are not supposed to just watch that single swimmer. They are still supposed to get 25% of your attention. I was standing there plenty of times just watching 3 empty lanes for 75% of the race.
The swimmer I felt the worst for was a girl doing butterfly, but she must have forgotten that for a half second and came up off the dive doing freestyle (or crawl as its sometimes called), it basically violated all the stroke rules for butterfly.
I had the largest number of simultaneous DQs when three of the four lanes I was watching for breastroke were doing a fully extended arm pull (instead of bring the arms back forward before they passed the hip line.) Then two of them also failed to touch the wall with both hands. It was a frantic minute of filling out forms after that race.
That is another thing, the whole meet basically moves at the pace we do. They won't start the next race until we are done filling out our disqualification slips and are ready to watch the pool again.
I guess this becomes a more philosophical question about the purpose of sports, but I've always felt that anything that requires this kind of hawkish officiating over nuanced but artificially imposed restrictions on what types of movements are allowed should just not be a sport. If race-walking, breaststroke, and butterfly are clearly biomechanically inferior modes and their competitions end up being largely about how subtly you can cheat, then what is the point? One of the many things that got me disinterested in basketball was the endless quibbling over replays about whether some slight wriggle made for a foul or a carry or verticality, etc.
I think there is a spiritual argument in favor of precise execution of a specific movement over speed or efficiency. Developing extreme skill in a very limited domain is the point. This also serves to train your discipline and focus. You need to stay present and on task until the competition is over, otherwise you will do the wrong movements.
Besides, sports imply competition and competition implies a ruleset, right? You need to draw the line for what is and isn't appropriate somewhere. Why not do it like this?
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I disagree, but I think I see your perspective. Curious what you think about figure skating and gymnastics. Eliminate figure skating and only keep speed skating? Replace gymnastics with some kind of parkour race? In both of those the bio-mechanically more difficult action is the whole point.
My interest in something as a sport correlates strongly negatively to the influence of officiating on the outcome, so I'm not very familiar with either figure skating or gymnastics. I've been told that judgement in both are actually quite rigorous and technical, and not entirely subjective as I assumed at first glance, but was not swayed enough to verify for myself.
I think most of the value in sport is a mixture of being entertained and being impressed. Even with questionable officiating, I get both out of figure skating and gymnastics. Running and swimming sports are generally impressive but rarely entertaining in and of themselves. For things like race-walking where winning seems built upon deceiving officials, I am neither entertained nor impressed.
Additionally, the role of officials there seems to be less about 'is this athlete actually cheating by means of a superior but arbitrarily disallowed technique' and more 'was the execution closer to perfection' in a way that is at least a bit more legible to a casual viewer. We all have some intuitive sense of what it looks like to stick a landing.
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I wouldn't say that. There are distinct local optima that are not just bumping up against the arbitrary constraint blocking the way to the global optimum. In fact, this is arguably the definition of a good constraint: one that induces a non-trivial local optimum.
I'd agree in general, but only in cases where the bounds are clearer and the resultant local optimum is far from them. That seems to be the case for something like backstroke. I could be wrong, but I recall from Olympics time every four years discussions surrounding race-walking and breaststroke in particular, where the optimum really does seem to lie right at wherever the bounds were placed.
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