Carly Patterson pranced. Paul Hamm soared. And then these two stars of the gymnastics world left the Olympic stage.

By design, Tuesday’s Olympic gymnastics gala offered us a night of enjoyment, free from judges, contested marks and controversy. It was gymnastics at its best.

This celebration contrasted starkly with a week’s worth of high drama and scandal on the mat. This was simply a chance to admire skilled athletes who live to dazzle us once every four years, only to slip back into the shadows of their obscure sport.

Slide show   Visions of gold: Aug. 29 Demark throws for handball gold, Argentina takes it to the net and Britain's Mark Lewis-Francis jumps for joy.

And here’s to these gymnasts staying in the shadows, far away from the Games. Not just Carly. Not just Paul. All of them.

Athens proved that for all its grace, gymnastics is a fraud. It is a competition without rules. It is a sport that has no place in the Olympics.

To be sure, gymnasts are highly skilled athletes, and they created some great stories in Athens. The American men won a team medal for the first time since 1984. The U.S. women captured the team silver. Patterson became the first American woman to win the all-around in 20 years. Hamm’s ignominious fall onto the judges’ table saw his medal hopes all but sink into the Aegean Sea before he completed a remarkable comeback to win gold in the men’s all-around.

But only in a competition as contrived as gymnastics could a triumph like Hamm’s be sullied so quickly. No sooner had an olive wreath been placed on his head than we learned Hamm didn’t so much win as benefit from a scoring error that cost South Korea’s Yang Tae-young the Olympic crown because judges couldn’t count to 10.

This was not Hamm’s fault. It was the inevitable consequence of a sport grounded in arbitrary rules and completely removed from the Olympic ideal. Instead of the best athletes winning, gymnastics sees the luckiest ones win, the ones who can charm the judges the most or reap the biggest benefit from a scoring mistake or competitor’s mishap.

On top of the Hamm fiasco we saw Bulgaria charge hometown bias in scoring of the men’s rings, Svetlana Khorkina claim judges cheated her in the all-around, and Russia — along with most of the Athens crowd — complain that Alexei Nemov was robbed on the high bar. 

For 10 minutes Monday, spectators booed and hissed in reaction to a high bar score given to fan-favorite Nemov. In a demonstration of just how silly this sport is, the judges huddled together and emerged with a new, higher score, in the process showing about as much backbone as an amoeba. Apparently gymnastics’ scoring standards aren’t so rigid after all, and all it takes to get a bit of a bonus is an unruly crowd on your side.

Another Games. More judging controversy. More whining. More tainted gold in a sport decided not by skill but by the whims of mathematically and ethically challenged judges.

Enough already. This farce that is gymnastics must be banished from the Games.

This is not sport. It’s a circus act.

Sports have rules that govern play. Competitors know the rules. Officials know the rules. In the case that a judgment call is required, legitimate sports offer ways to challenge, review and resolve a decision.

But more than that, the contests of raw athletic skill that comprised the first Olympics offer objective criteria for determining a winner. Victory in these sports is decided by who runs the fastest, jumps the highest, hoists the most weight. Whatever the measuring stick, in genuine Olympic sport there is a winner and a loser and little room for argument.

The gymnastics we saw in these Games, like the infamous ice skating debacle of Salt Lake City, offered almost none of this clarity. Athletes, coaches, and sometimes, entire nations, complained about judges’ decisions. In turn, judges conferred, debated and sometimes acceded to impassioned pleas. The result was chaos in the very place where Olympic competition was born.

Controversy enveloped Hamm and other gymnasts despite – or perhaps because – this sport relies on a scoring scheme that is complex enough to rival the U.S. tax code yet subjective enough to yield results that defy explanation.

Take high-flying Romanian Marian Dragulescu. His vault – the most difficult attempted in the men’s individual competition – carried a starting score of 10.0. In his pursuit of perfection, Dragulescu flipped, turned and landed with a satisfying thud – no hop on this routine. The crowd roared its approval. Dragulescu thought he’d nailed it. The crowd thought he’d nailed it. Commentators on TV thought he nailed it.

A “10” – give the guy a “10” for crying out loud!

And yet there it was: “9.90.” A good score, in fact it was the best score judges would give for any vault. But that mystery tenth of a point? We’ll never know where it went. Maybe a judge pocketed it as a souvenir.

And that’s why gymnastics has no place in the Olympics. We have no idea how this sport is being judged, where the points are going, what criteria is being used to determine a champion. Is it the landing? The bow? The smile? What does it take to win?

We can be given all the assurances in the world that the stone-faced gymnastics judges who hold in their hands Olympic destiny really are professionals on the up-and-up. But no one believes it.  Fans see right through it. The results in Athens prove it: this is a sport where rules are made on the fly.

How many more times must people who truly appreciate athletic skill and the spirit of competition be subjected to the folly that gymnastics has become?

Gymnasts will flip, turn, spin and bounce through routines they’ve practiced thousands of times. Some will bobble, some will fall, and some will nail it. Or think they did. No one – not the gymnasts, their coaches or fans — will know who won until a score, as if by magic, is displayed after a few anxious moments. But judging by the shameful display in Athens, judges are simply pulling numbers from a hat.

So enough already. End this charade. Pack up the tights, glitter and chalk and send the gymnasts home. This is one circus act that has no place in the Olympic Games.

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