Snowboarders wonder if their sport is getting too difficult to judge correctly

BEIJING – Even for an Olympic snowboarding champion like Anna Gasser of Austria, the uncertain seconds between the end of a successful jump and finding out what the judges thought of it never get easier.
“That’s why you cannot be dependent on your happiness of how your jumps score,” said Gasser, who won the gold medal in Pyeongchang four years ago.
But, of course, it’s the scores that ultimately determine who wins and loses these events. And at these Olympics, it’s been a source of frustration in a sport that is constantly producing more elaborate and complicated tricks for judges to interpret.
There was controversy in the men’s slopestyle competition when replays showed that gold medalist Max Parrot of Canada actually caught his knee on one of the jumps that was scored as a grab of the snowboard. Then during the halfpipe competition, NBC announcer Todd Richards was convinced that Ayumu Hirano’s second run would vault him into an unbeatable position until it scored just 91.75, leaving him in second place. Though Hirano’s third run ultimately got him the victory, it left snowboarding on the verge of perhaps the most high-profile disaster in the sport’s history.
“As far as I’m concerned, the judges just grenaded all their credibility,” Richards said.
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The streak of judging mishaps in these Games has created some questions around what might happen Tuesday in the finals of the big air competition, where snowboarders start atop a 200-foot high slope, launch themselves off a ramp and then get judged on their spins, snowboard grabs and landings, not to mention how high they get in the air.
Even in the qualifying round Monday, which reduced the field to 12 including Americans Red Gerard and Chris Corning, there were quite a few competitors who left either confused or unsatisfied with the way the event was scored.
Niek Van der Velden of the Netherlands made a visibly dismissive hand gesture, as if shaking it off, when the judges only rewarded him with a 63.75 after landing a triple cork 1620. Another competitor, Canadian Darcy Sharpe, even called for a full-time snowboard governing body to take over for the International Ski Federation (FIS) because the current system does not give judges the most advanced tools to properly judge tricks.
“FIS doesn’t take care of us as much as maybe they should,” said Sharpe, who secured the last spot in the finals. “They’re not caring about snowboarding as much. Until we have a league, until we have a people caring about having proper cameramen on the scene, proper feeds displayed for the judges, proper training and accountability for the judges as well, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get proper judging.
“I don’t blame them. They do this almost as a hobby. They’re not making tons of money being judges for these events. They have to go work in the summer and stuff, so it’s hard to expect such a professional level from them when we don’t treat them as such.”
Though judging controversies are not new to the Olympics whether it’s boxing, figure skating or gymnastics, snowboarding is a relatively young and rapidly developing sport. Even from one Olympics to the next, riders are adding new spins and flips and going for bigger, more technical moves that often aren’t discernible at full speed.
At the highest level of snowboarding, a lot can happen in just one jump.
“It’s evolved so fast in the past years, I think it’s hard for maybe the judges to keep up,” said Parrot, who easily made his way into the finals. “To be honest, on my first score of 78, I think I should have got at least two more points but perhaps on my second jump I should have had two points less. So the total, I’m happy, it’s kind of what I deserve. But it could have gone wrong. It’s a hard sport. It’s hard to judge. Some have different perspective on which tricks are more difficult but that’s what a judged sport is.”
In that sense, big air is easier because there’s only one jump to look at, whereas judges in slopestyle are looking at multiple tricks in a run. Though the judges in this year’s disputed slopestyle event had access to the replay, head judge Iztok Sumatic told Whitelines.com that the judges never scrutinized it because they are pushed to deliver quick scores to move the competition along and Parrot’s grab appeared clean on the angle they were given.
It was only later – after the score was delivered – that a new angle surfaced showing Parrot in fact missed the grab he was trying for. By then, it was too late.
“We need to make decisions in seconds, because it’s live,” Sumatic said. “We need to put the score out as soon as possible, so everything is coordinated with the whole show.”
But if the entire sport is based on judging these kinds of details, wouldn’t it make sense to encourage use of replay and multiple angles so that it’s easier to get it right?
“I’m a snowboarder and I watched that run at full speed and I couldn’t tell he missed his grab,” Sharpe said. “It did take a replay. And maybe that’s something to look to at in the future, you look at replays on every jump and it takes an extra 30 seconds to get our scores. It's already a long contest, but we want the judging to be correct, especially in the finals. You can give them an extra minute of time.”
Multiple judging fiascos at this Olympics is perhaps the reckoning that will motivate some changes. Sean FitzSimons, an American who did not make the final, said it’s up to the snowboarding community to determine what it wants from the judging.
“We saw that in both events where some people were confused, but it’s just such a high level it does get hard to judge, even style versus spins and all that,” he said. “Sometimes it just feels like it’s all over the place.”
And it won’t get any easier as snowboarders progress into more elaborate tricks.
“For the women it’s still OK, but I think for guys it’s getting really hard to judge,” Gasser said. “Their tricks are so high level, so high difficulty it’s just getting really hard.”