Trying to figure out the scoring of gymnastics could make you crazy

Due to a longstanding personal rule against interviewing people who you could fit between two slices of Wonder Bread, I've never become an expert on gymnastics.

And now, after three nights of watching it from the Beijing Games on NBC, I have to confess I know even less about it than I did before.

Credit for this goes to the Peacock Network's crack gymnastics broadcast team — Al "Somewhere Back in the Peleton" Trautwig, and former gymnasts Tim Daggett and Elfi Schlegel.

They are all there to help you understand what's going on, which, if the first couple nights of gymnastics were any indication, they clearly all three have sworn, on their mother's graves, never to do.

Let's say a gymnast is making that scissor-kick motion over the pommel horse. He smacks a thigh into the horse, stopping cold.

What you at home want to know:

Is it over? How big of a mistake was that? What's the ramifcation for the score? Will he ever have children?

What Daggett usually will tell you instead:

"Ooh! That was bad!" Or, if the slip on the apparatus has, say, actually punctured an athlete's lung, and he is leaving the arena strapped to a board: "That was crazy bad!" (These might not be exact quotes. Can you imagine writing that down?)

Conversely, if an athlete does something outstanding, Daggett will inform you just how outstanding, using precise gymnastic terms, such as:

"That was GINORMOUS!"

That's pretty much it. No calling out the moves as they happen so we know what they are. No instant analysis of points deductions and medal ramifications. (Not to mention: Rare acknowledgment that any other nation's athletes are even in Beijing, let alone on the floor.)

Once in a while, Schlegel, sensing a vacuum, will chime in helpfully:

Daggett: "That was crazy bad!"

Schlegel: "Indeed. Crazy. And bad."

Sometime in the middle of the women's team competition the other night, it finally dawned on me: NBC's broadcasters aren't keeping us from information just to mess with us. They actually might not know what's going on.

Reason: International gymnastics has adopted a new scoring system. It's not unlike the new scoring system for figure skating, which succeeded in devising a scheme so unbelievably convoluted that not even the most greedy sellout judge from France can figure out how to sell her score to the highest bidder.

Here's all you need to know:

• A perfect "10" (remember Nadia?) is now a perfect 16.9 — or somewhere thereabouts.

• The old "10" standard is gone, retired, locked up and hidden away, all saggy and deflated, like Bo Derek. In its place is a two-pronged scoring system which is, at least theoretically, open-ended, meaning there is no limit to what you can earn — a score that might be truly ginormous.

• A gymnast's "A" score begins at zero. You get different fractions of a point for various maneuvers, ranging from the common hair-flip/giggle (.1) to the flaming-sword-swallowing-full-frontal-fakie-double-half-caff-three-hitch dismount (.7) You get more fractions of points awarded for the maneuvers performed in various combinations.

It's believed that the most "A" score points a gymnast could possibly cram into a program, given current time limits — and current points at which a gymnast's body would actually explode, or perhaps break in two — is about 7.0. Although American gymnast Nastia Liukin has an uneven-bars routine with a possible difficulty value of 7.7.

• The "B" score is for execution. Here, you start at 10, and get a per-boo-boo deduction, ranging from .1 (mascara run) to .5 (severed carotid artery) to .8 (a fall) to .9 (causing an apparatus guy wire to snap free and put out the eye of the chairman of the International Olympic Committee).

Note that you can get a perfect 10 for execution, but it's not likely. And it doesn't matter, because the A and B scores, compiled by separate panels, are added together for a composite A-B score. That's your point total.

So what's a good score? Roughly, 14 and up. Fifteen is great, 16 is excellent. More than that, and you're likely heading toward the medal stand, and perhaps having Daggett say, "That's gymnastics, 101!" without explaining what that means.

You can go over 17 — Liukin did once with that crazy big uneven bars routine, which earned a 17.1.

Alas, that didn't happen at the Olympics, where a few Americans were putting up scores in the "12" range the other night. It briefly confused Chinese spectators who thought the scoreboard was displaying their own athletes' actual ages.

What can we say? They look crazy young.

Ron Judd: rjudd@seattletimes.com. Read his Olympics Insider blog at: www.seattletimes.com/Olympics