Driving, gymnastics, break dancing (ESPECIALLY break dancing)… Anything that can’t be timed or measured or otherwise objectively decided should be removed from competition.
How do you quantify “style”? How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion? How do you fairly compensate for what your personal opinion considers “worth” more when it comes to a trick or routine compared to another?
Swimming, running, jumping, throwing things a distance are all things that can be measured and ruled against a standard that every competitor uses. It’s fair and it’s removed from any bias.
The Olympics are supposed to be about competition between athletes and shouldn’t be affected by popularity or politics, which anything with an interpretive aspect to the result will suffer from.
So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.
It’s like you didn’t even read what I said, or didn’t understand. If it were only about vibes, the judges wouldn’t need to be experts in that sport. But whatever, you obviously just want to be correct and won’t look up shit.
I’m serious about the competitive accounting, or maybe poker championships; you clearly need something crunchy in order to have fun. Almost all sports have made rules and scoring adjustments over time to accommodate stylistic approaches to competition, Olympics or not, because they’re cool and fun and people like them.
That doesn’t mean it’s simple pageantry. Not sure if you’ve ever known an athlete who was training for the Olympics (I have a cousin who was an Olympic hopeful in figure skating), but it takes a lot of work and knowing what judges look for is 100% part of it. Style is part of the scoring and that is good.
Imagine if every gymnast had the exact same routine on purpose for objective comparison. Wow, very cool and fun. So entertaining and worth watching. Gold medal for objective conformity.