Artistry has no place in the Olympic Games

This will not be a popular column. The Winter Olympics in South Korea end tomorrow. Future Games should be scaled down.

The Games have gotten too big. Too expensive for most cities to host. And too subjective.

The Games — Winter or Summer — need to get back to their motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for faster, higher, stronger.

That means events should be limited to competitions that can be measured. With a tape, a scale, or a stopwatch. Or by the number of rocks in a house or pucks in a goal.

Don’t leap to conclusions -I’m not arguing against adding new events. The original Olympic Games were limited to what we now call track and field events. Then they added swimming. Rowing. Cycling. Team sports.

But notice — every one of those are won by someone reaching the finish line first.

If the International Olympic Committee wants to introduce a downhill race that involves competitors balancing on their heads on a skateboard while playing a violin with their toes, let them go ahead. If it can be measured at the finish line, I call it a legitimate race. If it involves judges evaluating the quality of violin playing, it’s not.

In other words, anything that requires judging for style and presentation shouldn’t be included in the Olympics.

Yes, yes, I know that would disqualify figure skating and ice dance. To say nothing of skiers and snowboarders who perform more aerial gyrations than a drone on steroids.

Personally, I was entranced by Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in the ice dance. They were superb. Their skill, their grace, their artistry, was simply beyond comparison. But that’s my point. It was artistry. If ice dance is in the Winter Olympics, why isn’t ballet in the Summer Olympics’

In what I call the ‘objective’ events — the events where the outcome is determined by a measuring tape or a finish line — a skier does not lose points for a sloppy turn in the giant slalom. She loses milliseconds at the finish line.

Of course, if her gaffe somehow saves a millisecond or two, others will copy it and make it standard practice.

High jumping depends only on clearing a bar. Remember the uproar when Dick Fosbury went over the bar on his back, violating all conventions? Today his innovation is taken for granted. But judges, I’m sure, would have penalized him for style flaws.

Weightlifters sweat, grunt, and fart. They will never win contests for beauty, style, or grace. Who cares? All that matters is how much they can lift.

Events need referees, for sure. To ensure that one competitor doesn’t trip another, stray into someone else’s lane, or skip a downhill gate. Rules are rules, and need to apply equally to everyone. Cheating must not be rewarded — whether by using steroids or sneaking a shortcut in a marathon.

But events should not need discretionary judges.

I’m not suggesting that judging panels are crooked or biased. Or even incompetent. That controversy was settled years ago. They were, and the process was fixed — or so we’re assured.

But judging is always subjective. No matter how many technical factors are calculated into the process, judging always depends to some extent on what each judge considers to be an ideal performance.

How would you judge between Picasso and Rembrand? Between Mozart and Gershwin? Between Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Sir John Gielgud’s’ Michelangelo and Henry Moore?

Simple answer — you don’t. Picasso and Rembrandt were not competing with each other. Mozart couldn’t have imagined Gershwin.

How do you decide which you like better? Only by assessing how that portrayal, that presentation, affects you.

Figure skating, gymnastics, and acrobatic snowboarding are, I contend, dramatic portrayals and presentations.

These ‘sports’ do have some expected moves, certainly. And they certainly demand muscle, training, and skill. But we’ve come a long way from Barbara Ann Scott tracing mandatory figures on the ice to be examined with a magnifying glass. Torvill and Dean knocked the conventional rules of ice dance out of the rink in 1984 — ever since then, the emphasis has been on artistry, not required spins and jumps.

If artists want to compete with each other, good for them. Set up the rules; invite the contestants; bring on the judges. Hand out cups and statues and World Championships. Hold world competitions every two years, every four years. But don’t do it under the Olympic banner. Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca