This release move is awesome by He Hexin, but the gold should have gone to Nastia Liukin. Nastia stuck her landing, and had fewer deductions - her execution "B" score should have been higher, and it shouldn't have gone to a tie. As Tim Daggett notes on the NBC coverage, the judges on the final panel can't be from the country of the competitiors, so for example in this final, no Russian judge, no American judge, no Chinese judge, etc. and you are sometimes left with judges who have less experience judging and are less familiar with the code/judging. Same thing goes for Alicia Sacramone losing on the bronze which gets awarded to Cheng Fei - Cheng Fei is the reigning world champion on vault, so she has "the name", but like Romania's Marian Dragulescu lost out on the medals when he fell on his knees and arms on his 2nd vault after doing the awesome Dragulescu vault named after him, so should have been with Cheng Fei - Cheng's B score was too high (more here:
http://www.gymchat.com/messageboards/showthread.php?t=75852)
Nastia Liukin is awesome. Classy and nice.
[QUOTE]"Dad, I think we have the same score," she said, nudging her father, Valeri Liukin, who answered: "Oh. Yeah."[/QUOTE]
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"I still don't know how they broke the tie," Liukin said after the medal ceremony. "I guess one judge liked her better.
"But, like my dad said, at the end of the day, I have the most important medal," she said of the all-around gold. "That's the most important thing."
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Another tie for men's vault final:
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The only non-Chinese to win a gold was Leszek Blanik, who won the vault and the first gold medal in gymnastics for Poland.
As it turned out, Blanik also won in a tiebreaker over Thomas Bouhail of France. He, too, was as confused about the process as Liukin was. "I don't know exactly how I won," he said. "But I'm still very, very happy."
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Bruno Grandi does not agree - says same score, give both gold, but it's not up to FIG (International Gymnastics Federation), but IOC (International Olympic Committee):
[QUOTE]
Bruno Grandi, president of the international gymnastics federation, or FIG, said that the tiebreakers were "very disastrous" and that he would rather see two gold medalists when gymnasts score the same.
"For me, it's not correct," he said. "When two people arrive at the same level, why not make them both champions? I believe it is correct to have the two girls as champions and two gold medals. But the competition does not belong to us. It belongs to the IOC."
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