Athletic, yes, but not a sport

I've always felt that one of the definitions of a sport is something where you can tell who won. Gymnastics and figure skating, which rely on judges to tell you who won, are more like athletic pageants than sports. Diving fits into that as well.

We saw another example again tonight. Nastia Liukin of the US appeared to have done a little better than He Kexin of China, but the judges ruled them tied, and He won on a tiebreaker. Another Chinese gymnast finished third, but she might have been better than the other two. Who can tell? Certainly not me, and even the announcers (who have a huge US bias to be sure) struggled with it.

He, who was below the minimum age required to compete in the Olympics before she miraculously produced a passport that said otherwise, had a worse low score that counted than Liukin did. That was the tiebreaker.

Another US-China matchup was pretty spirited as well. Today's 9-1 win for the US baseball team over China got a little intense. Five, or perhaps six (news reports conflicted), US batters were hit by pitches. Two US runners collided with Chinese catchers. One of those catchers, Wang Wei, got knocked out of the game in the 5th. Backup Yang Yang got steamrolled in the sixth, which made China's manager, Jim Lefebvre (the former Cubs manager) pretty irate. He argued the US runner's play was unnecessary and that he should have been kicked out of the game. Lefebvre was launched instead. The first batter for the US in the next inning, Matt LaPorta, was beaned and knocked out of the game. Maybe the next one too. That got the Chinese pitcher tossed along with backup manager Steve Ontiveros (the former MLB pitcher, not the former Cubs 3B).

The final act of sportsmanship came when Yang yanged one over the left field fence in the 9th for the only Chinese run. He ran the bases with his arm in the air in celebration like he hit a 10-run homer.

In the bigs, the next guy goes down and pretty much everyone in uniform gets ejected. Here, the teams just shook hands after the game.

Gotta love the Olympic spirit!