Dennis McCoy shralping in pro flatland in New York in 1986. At one of the velodrome contests that year, I thought Dennis, who had the freshest, new style in pro flatland at the time, should have beat Woody Itson, the veteran icon of the day. I wrote that in my zine. It was my honest opinion at the time. Dennis, of course, was stoked when he saw the zine, and Woody was a bit bummed. Both of them rode great at that contest, and, like always, it came down to a subjective call by the five judges. Were Woody's well known tricks, executed flawlessly, better than McCoy's new style and flair and energy? No matter what the call, someone always gets pissed off.
When I got into BMX racing in 1982, it was usually easy to see who won. It was a race, after all, first guy (or girl) across the line was the winner. But even at the local BMX track there were issues. It had become a custom to stop pedaling about 30 feet before the finish line, and coast over the last little set of doubles and the finish line just beyond. No one even tried to actually race the last 30 feet. It was kind of like a gentleman's agreement, your place coming out of the third turn at the Fort Boise track was your place in the race, forget racing the last straight. I think it was much the same at other tracks, and at the national level, as well.
Us kids from Blue Valley trailer park, brand new to BMX racing, hungry to win a trophy in anything, decided to pedal to the finish, and pass the points chasers who were coasting. Then people got mad when we said, "Hey, I beat those two guys who were coasting." So even in the black and white world of a race with a distinct finish line, there were sometimes issues. For a couple of races, we made the lazy kids pedal those last 30 feet. Other riders gave us crap, then we eventually stopped pedaling at the end, and we too, and joined the program.
But when BMX freestyle came along, and it was a brand new sport in 1984, we all soon learned the problems of subjective judging. Subjective judging is simply anytime that a group of judges judge an event, score the contestants based on their person opinion of the performance, and the winner is the person with the highest total score. There's no absolute winner by objective facts, like being the first over the finish line. With subjective judging, you have a few personal opinions that find the winner. And personal opinions can be affected in a whole bunch of ways, as we all soon learned.
This was one of the reasons that pro freestyler R.L. Osborn, and a few others, at first, didn't like the idea of even having BMX freestyle competitions. It's hard to believe now, but for maybe a year, that was actually an issue. Up until then, flatland and quarterpipe riding had been a demonstration sport. Riders performed in shows, and people clapped and cheered, or they didn't. But eventually competitions were accepted as a necessary, if kind of annoying, part of freestyle.
Since a flatland or ramp routine was a performance, like music or dance or figure skating in that respect, that meant a group of people had to judge the performance, and score each contestant against the others, and the high overall score would win. This opened up several cans of worms, and suddenly half of the riders, or more, were mad at the judges at the end of the day at every contest. Ultimately, over the course of those first 3 or 4 big years of AFA contests, we all learned the basic truth of subjective judging.
Subjective judging sucks. Sometimes it works in your favor. Sometimes it works against you. Deal with it!
One of the first issues was, who do we get to judge? Since BMX freestyle was a new sport, there were no old pros, who had ridden for years, to judge. So industry guys, usually former BMX racers, originally judged freestyle pros, and the current freestyle pros were tapped to judge the amateurs. This didn't work too well, though it seemed to make sense at the time.
It turned out that veteran racers, while great BMX riders, didn't know the nuances of the ever evolving world of freestyle tricks. Having never done most of the tricks, they just didn't know which tricks looked hard, and which tricks were hard. At the same time, when the sport was so new, there might be 40 different riders, at every contest, doing tricks that were completely new. Those were tricks that no one had seen before, outside of that rider's group of friends. So no one knew if the tricks were actually hard. Some easy tricks look great, like Dennis McCoy's fancy footwork back then. It looked amazing, but wasn't really hard at all. I'm not dissing Dennis, he did plenty of really hard moves, but the footwork that blew people's minds at first, was flashy, but technically not that difficult.
Another issue was that pro freestylers made lousy judges, by and large. Judging a freestyle contest (or any event with lots of participants), takes concentration, among other things. We soon found that the last thing pro riders wanted to do at a big competition was to watch dozens of younger, mediocre riders, and try to place their routines in the precise order of who was better than who. Pros wanted to hang out, talk to old friends, meet girls, and have fun. They didn't want to watch goofy kids from Idaho balance on their bike and juggle tennis balls. That was what I did my first contest, by the away. Nothing blows your concentration like starting your first routine at a major contest and having the announcer say, "And here's Steve Emig, from Boise, Idaho, with his balls in his hands."
In time, and especially as competitions grew, and the AFA had to deal with huge groups of 50 or more riders in a single class, we learned that parents of riders made the best judges. The parents were less distracted, they were older, more mature (usually) and they were much better at concentrating and trying to fairly judge a large group of riders, many of whom were very close in talent level. From a purely functional level, the parents that volunteered at contests made good judges.
Having parents judge the large amateur classes, of course, led to the most obvious problem with judging, bias towards, or against, certain riders. If a parent was judging their own kid in a contest, everyone expected them to judge their kid above the other riders. That did happen on occasion, and the AFA tried to get other judges to fill in for the classes when a judge's kid was riding. With a limited number of parents to judge, and lots of riders, that wasn't always possible.
There were other issues with parent's judging. As hard as it is to believe, sometimes a rider's parent would judge their own kid harder, just to make sure that everyone thought they were being fair. Then the kid actually placed lower. It didn't happen often, but it actually did happen. Another issue with parents judging contests is that they don't know all the tricks, especially the new ones, which leads to new tricks getting judged at lower scores than older, better known tricks. Another issue with parents judging was that the tricks they were most familiar with were the tricks their kids did, or were working on. So if Timmy was good at boomerangs and decades, but never did tailwhips, then boomerangs and decades got judged higher, usually without the parent doing it intentionally. Another weird aspect of parents judging their kids is that sometimes they would judge their own kid on how good they usually did the trick, not how they actually performed it in the contest. At times, and again this was largely unintentional, a parent would watch their kid ride and think, "Bill dabbed his foot on that decade, but usually he can pull it every time," so they wouldn't count it against them.
All of those things were issues we had with parents judging at those AFA local and AFA Masters contests in the mid to late 1980's. While their were issues, mostly the parents did a better job judging than anyone else would have. I know. I worked for the AFA in 1987, and I got stuck judging a few classes at the big Masters comps. Seriously, watching 50 kids, especially like 14-15 novice or intermediate flatland, just plain sucked. I tried to be fair, like all the judges, but most of the kids were boring as fuck to watch, and it was easy to get distracted for a few seconds, and miss that one good trick they did. Then, trying to get the 30 middle riders in a reasonably correct order, though they all were pretty much the same, was pretty much impossible. To make it even worse, we judged knowing at least 5 or 10 kids would be bitching at us the rest of the weekend because they got 27th in 14-15 intermediate, and they thought they were better than the kid who got 14th. We just wanted to scream sometimes, "Go practice more so you'll stand out, kid!"
Another issue was just the dynamics of actually judging. What score do you give the first kid? If he's awesome, do you give him a 98? What if three more guys are better later on? We soon took to giving the very first rider a 75, which gave us room to judge both up and down from there. If the first kid was really good, then most of the riders would score below 75. If the kid sucked, most of the other riders would score above 75. Then kids in one class would say to their friends, "Hey, I got an 82 and you got a 72 in your class, so I'm better than you. But the scores didn't transfer from class to class. Also, the riders that rode last pretty much always scored better. It just always worked out that way, even though we tried to score fairly. But it was impossible to explain that to kids. So those were some of the issues we dealt with for the masses of riders in the amateur classes. No matter what, some kids were always mad, that's just the nature of subjective judging. The top few riders always stood out, but even getting them in the correct order was still hard.
Judging the pro classes was a different story, for several reasons. First of all, there was money on the line. OK, it was the AFA in the late 80's, the first wave of BMX freestyle popularity, and there wasn't much money. But a little change in judging could mean a couple of places, and several hundred dollars more or less in prize money. Another thing was that the pros, mostly, were all pretty close in riding skills (Fred Blood excepted, of course ; ) ), and so the judging was always tighter. Then there were titles on the line, winning the contest looked a lot better to the rider's sponsors than getting third. The pros also did harder tricks, and had different styles, so the judges were often judging one rider's style against another. That was the issue at the Velodrome contest where Woody Itson beat newcomer Dennis McCoy, but I thought Dennis should have won. Was Dennis' style and showmanship really better than Woody's classic, known to be hard, tricks. Flip a coin, on any given day it could go either way. Because the class had far fewer people, we often had either pro flatlanders judge the ramp riders, and vice versa, or top amateurs judge the pros. That worked pretty well. It's much easier to pay close attention to 8 pro riders than to 50 novices.
Then we finally get to the issue most people think about with subjective judging, personal bias. Did that amateur rider from Hutch score Mike Dominguez higher than Eddie Fiola because Mike rode for Hutch? Did someone pay a certain judge to throw the contest? Did someone score a pro higher because they were a fan of that pro years earlier, when they were just getting into riding? Did a rider get scored higher because their style was just the trendy style at the time, and there were, and still are always trendy styles. Did the technical rider doing harder tricks score higher than the rider doing less hard tricks, but with more style? That was the classic issue in skateboarding at the time, with Tony Hawk's tech tricks versus Christian Hosoi's high air and style. Did a certain rider have an off day, but still score high just because of their name recognition? All of these things happened at some level. Overall, most of the judges, most of the time, tried to do the best job they could. But there were problems.
And that's my whole point with subjective judging. IT'S NEVER FAIR. Period. Sometimes you get screwed as a competitor. Sometimes things worked in your favor. Over the long run, the best riders score well on a consistent basis. But it's never fair, whether it's a local contest with five kids, or it's figure skating in the Olympics. And the more that is at stake, the harder it is to judge accurately, the more likely it is to be contested, and the more pissed off someone will be.
This is my big problem with BMX freestyle and skateboarding being in the Olympics. Those huge, once every 4 years, contests are about "crowning champions." Those champions are then used in all kinds of money making and sponsorship ventures and commercials. The drive to rig the system is incredibly high, because there can literally be millions of dollars at stake. And as freestylers, and I was a hardcore, if not great freestyler, for 20 years, we know that one placing at one contest really doesn't mean all that much. It's nice. But it doesn't make you the "best rider ever." It doesn't make you the most progressive rider, or the most influential rider. Winning one contest, ANY CONTEST, doesn't make you THE CHAMPION. That's kind of the whole point of action sports. Lots of different styles, lots of different riders, and no one's really the best ever, until you get to a long term innovator like a Mat Hoffman or Kevin Jones.
Winning at any major contest means that a certain group of judges, who may or may not have tried to do a legit job, who all had their personal biases, judged you to be the best, on that day, in that location, at that time. You won the day. Maybe you deserved it, maybe you didn't. And that's just the way it goes with subjective judging. Again, it's never completely fair. So should you make $3 million for getting on the Wheaties box and in the TV commercials, and the rider who came in second on that day be completely forgotten? Most of us who've put time into learning an action sport at some point say, "No." But that's how it goes with the Olympics, or even the X-Games.
One more thought. Subjective judging seriously stifles creativity and innovation. Ever see a figure skater do a SWITCH triple Lutz? No. Never. You haven't. Do you know why? Because there is no pre-figured out score for doing anything switch, or opposite direction, in figure skating. Yes, it would be much harder, but they don't do it, because they wouldn't get scored for it if they did.
Figure skating has been a competitive, subjectively judged sport for at least 160 years. The origins of the sport go back to at least 1772. But no one does the high level tricks in the opposite direction in the Olympics. In skateboarding and BMX freestyle, people started doing switch tricks in the late 1980's, only a few years into BMX freestyle or street skating competitions. In a few years those sports evolved more than figure skating did in 160 years. Why? Because riders and skaters progress naturally, organically, and without certain number scores being given to particular tricks. The creativity in figure skating (or gymnastics, or any older judged sport), has been dramatically reduced to turn it into a sport. The same is true of BMX vert, park, and street today. Imagine a top rider in a comp today doing a major contest routine WITHOUT a single flip, barspin, or tailwhip. Boom, they're not even in contention for a top placing, no matter what they do. Does that mean the riders who don't do those tricks are worse riders? Think of a run by Brian Foster, Chris Doyle, or Gary Young. Oh, those guys are/were as good as the top contest riders, and they can blow your mind in a contest setting, without the "standard" tricks. But they're not going to win a contest in nearly any case, because they don't do the current trendy tricks like 25 barspins, tailwhips, and flip tricks.
I'm not against contests in actions sports, they provide a good reason to push harder, to progress in some areas of riding (but not necessarily creativity except for best trick comps), and to travel different places, which gives riders and excuse to ride with new people. But it would be really cool to simply acknowledge BMX freestyle (or flatland, park, street, vert, whatever) contests, with subjective judging, for what they do. They tell you that on this day, in this place, this group of judges thought this person was the best. That doesn't make that person the best ever, it makes them a really good rider who won that day.
I know that's a lot to ask. But a few of us got into a big Facebook discussion on this the other day, starting with the question of whether BMX freestyle (park, street, and maybe vert) should be in the Olympics. I say they should not be in the Olympics. Anyhow, that online discussion gave me the idea to write down some of my ideas about subjective judging, and it's role in action sports, and other sports, in today's world. If you have comments, let them fly in the Facebook groups, or wherever. I'll read them, and reply when needed.
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