Judging in sports

The recent post about the SATs reminded me of a parallel I've long noticed in sports: the less prominent the role of the referee, judges, and coaches, the fairer the sport.

One of the things that always appealed to me most about swimming and track was that the ultimate arbitrator in both sports was the stopwatch, an instrument immune from human bias.

In too many sports, coach favoritism plays a role. If you play Little League baseball, will the coach allow you to pitch, or might he find some lame justification to put his best friend's son in that position instead? Will you be allowed to gain valuable experience at first base, or will the coach play favorites there as well? The same sort of dynamic can come into play in virtually every team sport. With a sport like swimming, where one kid's best 100 yard freestyle is a 49.7 and the other kid's is a 50.6, it's harder for the coach to justify not putting the faster kid on the 400 freestyle relay. 

Likewise, in a sport whose outcome is a matter of judging, like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving, there's a lot of room for bias. I cannot recall a single Summer or Winter Olympics during the Cold War when there wasn't some sort of complaint lobbied against one or both sides for their judges' blatantly lopsided scores. And in every large social situation you can name -- and any large sporting event qualifies as such -- there are always all sorts of mini-Cold Wars going on. In swimming and track, neither love for communism nor capitalism ever influenced the electronic timing systems one bit.

Any contact sport which which requires a referee who may or may not see a foul committed, is ripe for abuse. He who plays dirtiest wins. Somehow that never made any sport more appealing to me.

Of course, with the advent of performance-enhancing drugs, even swimming and track are no longer as pure as they once were. I frequently see athletes in both sports who are obviously doping and not getting caught. I've even seen it in the masters versions of both sports, which is really pathetic.

It stinks, but I'd still rather participate in and follow a sport in which biased coaches, judges, and referees play less of a role.