How does the olympic gymnastics tie-break work?
Gymnastics used to give out duplicate medals at the Olympics. In a bit of irony, Liukin’s father got one of his gold medals at the 1988 Olympics after tying teammate Vladimir Artemov on high bar. But the International Olympic Committee told the FIG to stop sharing medals after the Atlanta Games, and a tiebreak system was implemented in 1997. It’s a complicated formula that is based on deductions from the execution mark and involves more math than the SAT. Even Liukin wasn’t quite sure how the tie was broken — and that was after someone explained it to her. The short answer is that He Kexin had .033 less in deductions when you apply the second tiebreak formula. For the long answer, grab a pencil and some scratch paper. He and Liukin both finished with 16.725. They had identical 7.7 start values (the measure of a routine’s difficulty) and they each had a 9.025 for execution after the highest and lowest of the six judges’ marks were tossed out. The execution mark is based on the perfect
