Hey DU,
The gymnastics world is dealing with our own little President Bush right now. His name is Bruno Grandi, and he’s the president of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG). I know a lot of people don't care about gymnastics and make fun of it, but hear me out.
A little back ground: I am the founder of www.worldgymrank.com, which is considered the bible of world rankings for gymnastics. I founded the site back in 2001, since gymnastics never had any type of world rankings, and I felt it would help the general public understand the sport a little bit better if they could see how gymnasts were ranked against each other before they saw a competition on television. It’s been a huge success, and of course the FIG hates me for it, so they proceeded to develop their own ranking system. Unfortunately, they won’t properly market their rankings, and it’s buried so far into their website, nobody really knows they exist.
Since Bruno Grandi has become president of the FIG in 1997, the sport has become a joke. I won’t bore you with all the details, but if you saw what happened in Sydney 2000 Olympics (the women’s vaulting horse was set at the WRONG height) or in Athens 2004 Olympics (the Paul Hamm all-around finals fiasco; the obvious cheating of the judges during the rings, vault, and high bar event finals) you’ll understand why so many of us are just sick of his “leadership”.
Now, he’s insisting that the problem our sport has faced has been the scoring system, not corrupt judges (ha-ha). So he has proposed to abolish the perfect 10 and wants to retool the sport in such a horrendous fashion, it’s only going to alienate the casual (and hard-core) gymnastics fans further. Again, I won’t bore you with all the details, but if he gets his way, only portions of the gymnast’s routine will be scored, and a complex formula will be used to determine the final score, which will look something like “14.975”. There will also be a “world-record” category, encouraging gymnasts to try extremely difficult skills. This is highly dangerous, as gymnastics is already risky enough. Then, to top it off, he wants to raise the age-limit for gymnasts to 18. That means you can’t compete in any international gymnastics competition until you are 18. This will be devastating to gymnasts around the world, as many want to go to college, and you can’t usually do both. Plus, if you compete in NCAA gymnastics, you can’t have ever accepted any prize money before you enroll, as that makes you a professional. So many boys and girls will be forced to either skip the Olympics in favor of an education, or try and make the Olympics at the risk of forfeiting their chance to compete in college if they don’t make it, because they would have accepted prize money to help pay for their training. And when I say “prize money”, it’s not like tennis or golf purses. You win a big gymnastics competition, and you get about $5,000. We have no million-dollar tournaments. The most a gymnast can make in a year is about $30,000.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
But there is hope. Along with myself, a bunch of Olympic and World Champions, coaches, judges, journalists, and of course, fans, have united against the FIG. We’ve made great progress, and the momentum has really gathered in our favor. Rustam Sharipov, a 1992 and 1996 Olympic gold medalist from Ukraine (the Orange Revolution!), has started a petition a couple of weeks ago, and it’s already gotten 1400 signatures…all from within the gymnastics community. We’ve been bombarding the FIG with email. So much so, Grandi has had to change his email address because of the hate mail LOL. He's also been forced to call some more meetings about the huge backlash he's facing from the public. We have thousands of emails from thousands of people around the world protesting these changes. Of course, the American press is stupid and hasn’t run with any of this, but there has been some coverage in Brazil, Spain, and Japan.
So, I thought I’d branch out to DU and provide a link to the petition. I know we get a lot of petitions floating around here to sign, and it’s not for everybody. But it’s secure, and you can hide your email address and your IP is hidden.
Petition:
http://thiscause.org/p/menu.php?p=Sharipov21441DBYou may not be a big gymnastics fan, but gymnastics is the number one sport during the summer olympics, so I bet we have some "once every four years fans" here! Thanks for listening and maybe signing. I was a gymnast for half of my life, and have been heavily involved with the sport for all of it. The FIG is destroying our sport, and I think the public needs to know what is going on.
-Matt
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