Beijing Olympics: 10m Platform Diving: Unfair Scoring for Wang Xin |History: The Roadmap to the Future--Asia

In the 10m diving Olympics competition, the judges, and NBC analyst were far too lenient on Chinese diver Wang Xin. This poor judgment was due to their not recognizing bad entries into the water by Wang. On at least two dives, the entry was quite bad, and a splash was made. However, the splash was not big, and went largely unnoticed by the judges. Both the judges and NBC analyst did not take into account Wang's height, weight, and build. If Wang landed flat on her stomach, the splash made would be less than more vertical splashes made by bigger, more robust, divers. Or conversely, if Wang was of roughly the same build as many of the non-Asian divers, on at least two of the dives, there would have been big splashes. The judges are judging diving skill, not who is thinner and more emaciated. They should be able to recognize how a big splash from a skinny, small diver looks, and judge accordingly, giving an equal score as an equivalent entry by a bigger diver whose splash would be larger, simply because of having a stockier build. Wang Xin did not deserve bronze.

Chen Roulin did, however, deserve gold. Chen's performance was superb, and showed that more thickly-built people can make smaller splashes than smaller people, with sufficient skill. But Wang received too high scores for diving entries which on other divers would have received fewer points.

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Watch the diving competition, and notice the splashes.

On a side note, in the men's beach volleyball competition, the Brazilian fans were extraordinarily badly behaved, booing the Americans on almost every serve by that team--and they did seem to rattle Dallhauser. The team players themselves acted typically Latin American, crying wolf over supposed faults excessively in the hopes of an advantage. Fortunately, the Italian referee was sane, and did not act on one of Latin America's most foolish cultural traits.