Here Come Da Judge

Always casting around for my next career, sporadically watching the Winter Olympics has resulted in a bit of an epiphany: I am a natural judge.

How else to explain that, having watched just two guys in the Men's Halfpipe competition, I was able to figure out who deserved a 39 vs. a 45.

The fact that, prior to turning on The Games that evening, I wouldn't have known a halfpipe from a tailpipe, doesn't suggest to me in the least that I don't know what I'm judging about. No, to me it just screams, 'you were born to judge.'

Apparently, my husband has the same innate Olympic judging capacity.

While, prior to turning on The Games that night - which I'm now more or less celebrating as our own personal Feast of the Epiphany - Jim wouldn't have known a halfpipe from a peacepipe, he quickly got into the Olympic spirit, metaphorically donning a black robe of his own.

"What's the scale they use?" he asked.

"Max is 50," I answered, quite authoritatively, I might add, given that the answer just seemed to come to me, as naturally as breathing out and breathing in.

"Okay," he said, "This guy's going to get at least a 48 for this run," referring to Shaun White's post-gold-clinch 'what the hell' star turn.

Damned if White didn't score a 48.4.

As I said, my husband is as natural at this judging stuff as I am.

So what if he was off by 0.4 in that last call?

I say - especially when you take into consideration our complete and utter ignorance of snowboarding up until the split second we began watching it - he nailed it.

When it came to judging the Original Dance part of the pairs ice-dancing, I was more or less the only judge on our living room bench, as Jim had fallen asleep after the second or third pair in which the guy wore a cowboy hat and the gal dressed like Annie Oakley.

I will admit that the scoring is a bit more complex than it was for Halfpipe, but I did intuitively and immediately grasp that the Canadians, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, were the best. (I had seen them in the Compulsories a few evenings prior, and - based on Tessa's costume alone - my judging gut said "Gold.")

As I write this, the medal outcome is uncertain. We just don't know who'll be on that podium.

But if it's not Tessa and Scott, or the Americans Meryl and Charlie, then we wuz robbed, as surely as another pair of Canadians were in Salt Lake City, when the French judge claimed she was bullied by the Russians to vote for their duo over the clearly more meritorious Canadians.

This brouhaha resulted in the new, complex trig and log-based scoring system that replaced the old and discredited 6.0 scale.

As a judge, I would rather have liked just having to finesse the scoring between a 5.8 and a 5.9, but I believe the the new system will be more transparent, once I have mastered its opacity.

Meanwhile, I continue to demonstrate, if only to myself, my innate grasp of the new scoring, since, when Tessa and Scott performed, I told myself, "at least a 68."

Bing-O!

Similarly, I called Evan Lysacek's Gold, even though, I must confess, I can't yet tell the difference between an axel from a lutz. (Naturally, as a natural judge, I can tell the difference between a camel spin and sit spin.)

But, with respect to any compare and contrast of the axel and the lutz, while I may not be up to speed yet, I can guarantee that, with all he has to do running Russia behind the scenes and running with the oligarchs, Mr. Putin - who criticized Evan's win, claiming that his boy, Plushenko, did better - doesn't either.  (If I weren't something of a judge, with decorum to maintain, I would be taunting "Double L - Loser" in Plushenko's face, if not in that of Putin's, who is, admittedly, a bit scarier.)

I'm pretty much relaxing during those events that require no judgement beyond sagely observing that 'the Dutch woman sure skates fast." Then again, all judging doesn't have to be Solomon-like. Some of it is, in fact, sage observation.

But when it does come to those subjective sports, I am all there.

Judge not lest ye be judged.

Feh - that's for wimps.

Let The Games continue!