Hey, Nellie Kim:
You are one of my all-time favorite gymnasts, but you've got to fix this lame gymnastics medal policy! Every other sport in the Olympics I know of awards two medals for athletes who tie. Oh, but not gymnastics! It's not enough that it's one of the hardest and injury-prone sports, on top of the fact that you guys have whittled down the Olympic team size from 7 to 5 (How about 6? It was 6 when you won team gold in 1976 and 1980!), but these tie-breakers where less people get medals: are you trying to make sure there are as many disappointed people as possible? I happen to know that you shared a gold medal with Nadia Comaneci on Floor Exercise in the 1980 Moscow Olympics: should we have gypped you out of it with a nit-picky tie-breaker? And seriously: you got the first "Perfect 10" on the vault, and yet the team competition vault by McKayla Maroni was by far the most difficult and most perfectly executed vault I've ever seen, and you guys found deductions? (Really?) And Catalina Ponor's floor routine got the kinds of boos for underscoring you might remember from Olga Korbut's 1972 uneven bars routine in the event finals*: are you proud of this? Come on, Nellie: let's get this scoring stuff worked out, and please err on the side of making more people happy, rather than less: teams of 6, and sharing medals in ties. (You benefitted from these policies I suggest here, so why not let others benefit from them too? Please?)
* I am happy Alexandra Raisman won the floor exercise (I am a fan of hers), but Catalina Ponor was badly underscored.
