Prevent Cruelty to Children – Ban Figure Skating

There are some sports that I would not encourage children to participate in at a competitive level. It is no problem if they play them for fun or with their peers in the schoolyard or gymnasium, but they shouldn’t play them professionally.

I am referring to the sports that do not have an objective scoring system. Sports that can easily determine a winner by the number of goals scored, the fastest time recorded, the distance jumped or that can be measured in some clear concise fashion are fine. Sports like baseball, tennis, golf, hockey, javelin, rowing, or Tiddleywinks can be scored objectively. Play them to your hearts content.

But for your sanity and the sake of your children’s egos and self-esteem, avoid the sports scored by some subjective means. At all costs avoid figure skating, competitive diving, gymnastics and synchronized swimming. The loosey-goosey means of scoring will raise the blood pressure of parents and decrease the feeling of worth in the child. Non-objective scoring by its nature is unfair and faulty. Why would you subject your child to the whim of a prejudiced or marginally competent judge?

Don’t get me wrong. I admire the dedication and commitment of the many Olympic athletes who participate in these later sports. I remember watching a former World Champion figure skater practicing slowly skating the figure eight over and over to try to perfect this portion of the old compulsory program. He must have done it a million times before he was a champion and yet when he competed he was at the mercy of a number of judges trying to assess the perfection of his technique in a fraction of a second. I would hate to see years of hard work, sacrifice and dedication left to be judged by the physical abilities of a group of elderly mortals.

Competitive diving, gymnastics and synchronized swimming all suffer from the same problem. To try to promote some sense of fairness these sports all try to objectively determine “the degree of difficulty” of a jump, a dive or a routine. I think this only makes it harder to compare the performance of athletes who execute different routines. If one diver performs a less challenging dive well, is that better than a diver who performs a more challenging dive less well? How can you tell?

Needless to say I am not taking up diving, figure skating or gymnastics for just this reason. I don’t want to dedicate years of my life to perfecting a five-minute figure skating program and have some judge, who is suffering a hangover or who has just been refused a Canadian residency permit, evaluate my years of effort. I would rather take up bowling because I know that counting the number of pins I knock down is not subject to interpretation.

So help prevent cruelty to children. Let them play water polo not take synchronized swimming, learn lacrosse not the parallel bars, and learn how to high jump not make a triple toe loop! You will be thankful you did.