When the gymnasts had completed the women's all-around competition, American Aly Raisman and Russian Aliya Mustafina were tied for third place. Rather than give both gymnasts a bronze medal, something done in many other Olympic sports, a tie-breaker was used to give the bronze to Mustafina.
To break the tie, each gymnast's lowest score from the four routines was dropped. It would be like breaking a tie in swimming by eliminating each racer's slowest leg and then recalculating the time. As we can see in the chart below, the lowest score for each gymnast came on the beam. But since Raisman's beam score was higher, she had more points deducted from her final score.
That's right, Raisman lost the tie-breaker because she did better on the beam than Mustafina. And Mustafine won Bronze because she had the lowest score of all eight routines combined. In fact, Raisman actually out-performed Mustafina in three of the four events.
On the one hand, it's silly that some Olympic events have ties and some have tie-breakers. But if gymnastics is going to use a tie-breaker, at least use one that is not dumb...
Please follow Sports Page on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
