were put together. By contrast, strategic positioning in an Olympic badminton tournament was surely foreseeable based on experience.
The unintended consequences of rule making can occur far from the field of play. Women’s elite gymnastics provides an example of how rules for the sport create incentives leading to undesired outcomes, necessitating further constitutive rule making and opening the door to cheating.
When Michael Phelps, the decorated American swimmer, earned his fourth medal (of a total of seven medals) at the 2012 London Olympics, he raised his lifetime tally of Olympic medals to twenty-two and moved into first place among Olympic medal winners. The person he passed on the medals table was Larisa Latynina, a Soviet gymnast who had won eighteen medals in the years from 1956 to 1964.32
Latynina’s medal haul is not the only thing that captures our attention today. She won her first Olympic medal when she was twenty-one years old and her final one when she was twenty-nine. Remarkably, she won gold in every individual event (save one) at the 1957 European and World Championships at age twenty-two while pregnant.33 Today, most gymnasts are out of the sport by the time they reach their twenties. No Olympic all-around gold medalist has been older than Latynina since Vera Čáslavská of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Woman gymnasts have become significantly younger over the past fifty years because of scoring rules that have increasingly rewarded the skills of younger, more flexible athletes. Yet, over the same time, the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) has steadily increased the minimum age requirement — from fourteen to fifteen years old in 1981, and then to sixteen years old in 1997.34 Under today’s rules, Nadia Comăneci, who dazzled the world in the 1976 Olympic Games, would be too young to participate.
Jackie Fie, who worked for almost thirty years on the FIG Women’s Technical Committee and is a member of the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame, explained that increasing the minimum age was “prompted by many concerns, including the musculoskeletal development of young competitors, lengthening gymnastics careers, preventing burnout, and in order to redirect the image of the sport positively for the public, spectators and media.”35
Yet, coincident with the changes to the minimum age have been changes to the FIG “code of points” (which sets rules for the scoring of routines) that prioritize the kinds of physical capabilities more likely to be found among younger athletes.36 The Economist observes that “these changes have rewarded acrobatics more highly. So what was a common tumbling pass on the floor forty years ago would today be expected of a gymnast at a more junior level. At the top of the sport, gymnasts perform routines made up almost exclusively of combinations of intricate full body rotations in order to maximise their score.”37 In other words, women’s gymnastics has become more about acrobatics than about ballet.
These rule changes favor younger athletes. A 2003 study of the biomechanics of young elite gymnasts found that “the smaller gymnast, with a high strength to mass ratio, has greater potential for performing skills involving whole-body rotations.”38 A 2014 review of changes to the FIG code of points found “the tendency of using more gymnastic and choreography elements is obvious, mainly to the leading athletes who are adequately prepared to execute faultlessly both, high-risk acrobatic skills and difficult gymnastics elements.”39
Rules that emphasize younger athletes and rules regulating age create differing incentives: “Women’s gymnastics thus point in two directions at once.”40 Hindsight is always 20/20, but one unanticipated consequence of the incentive structure was that at least one nation sought to evade the minimum age rules of the FIG. The New York Times observed that at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China’s gold medal winning women’s gymnastics team “didn’t just look young. They looked childlike.” One member of the team was even missing a baby tooth.41
Two years later, following an investigation by the FIG, one Chinese gymnast was stripped of her medal from Sydney 2000 for violating the minimum-age requirement. The 2008 results were allowed to stand, despite much skepticism. Steve Penny, the president of USA Gymnastics observed: “There still is what I believe to be unanswered questions about this issue, but there is only so much you can prove when it comes to falsified documents.”42
One consequence of the controversy was the creation of new rules for how the ages of gymnasts are validated. Beginning in 2009, FIG no longer relies solely on state documents, such as birth certificates or even passports, both of which can be forged, especially if state officials are involved. Instead, FIG initiated an internal licensing system that is detailed in a 213-page rule book.i
For gymnastics, the unintended consequence of changes to rules governing minimum age and criteria for scoring within competitions was a new opportunity for cheating. That unanticipated opportunity was apparently taken, necessitating the creation of an entirely new framework of constitutive rules to oversee the regulation of age among competitors.
What else might FIG have done? Logically the possibilities are limited. FIG could have relaxed the minimum-age requirement, or it could have changed the scoring rules to reflect the skill sets of older athletes. The trade-offs between simplicity and a perceived need for more constitutive rules usually involves a tolerance for unintended consequences, as more rules almost always mean more unintended consequences. But unintended consequences can, in turn, mean more rules. Here is yet another example of a wicked problem in action.
Lesson 3: Rules Are Always Imperfect
Rules can never cover every possible contingency. Thus, how we set up rules and regulations has profound significance for the outcomes that we observe. Sometimes the consequences are to the game—such as the farcical Caribbean soccer game—and sometimes to athletes themselves—such as young girls pressed into elite competitions.
One of the distinctive features of sport is that action on the field is governed by a set of laws or rules that are expected to cover every contingency. This is certainly not the case for the governance of sport off the field, nor in broader society. In both sport governance and society, we create systems of jurisprudence to judge how rules should be applied. In society, these are typically judicial systems of courts; in sport governance, this often takes the form of arbitration. But even on the field of play, rules have to be interpreted and applied. What about when something happens in competition that is not covered by the rules?
In June 2012, a “rules hole” was revealed in the procedures of USA Track & Field (USATF), the national governing body that has responsibility for overseeing the track and field athletes who represent the United States in the Olympics. In the finals of the 100 meters, Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh tied for third place.j A photo of their finish couldn’t settle who had finished ahead of the other. With the top three finishers advancing to the Olympics, a third place tie is problematic. The USATF had no procedure for resolving a third place tie, and needed to come up with one quickly.43
The day after the race, officials closed the rules hole by implementing a new rule.44 The new rule allows the athletes to settle the race by a coin toss or by a second race a week later. Tarmoh eventually dropped out, while Felix finished in fifth place at London 2012.45 The fact that the rule had to be made after the fact, leading one runner to walk away from the event, led some observers to complain. One lamented that “the only amateurs left in Olympic sports are the officials running them.”46 As we all learned in the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, creating rules (in that case for counting Florida ballots) after a race is likely to make no one happy other than the beneficiaries of the ad hoc rule making.
There are many other examples of rules holes and subsequent decisions to fill those holes. In 1999, the NFL implemented a new rule that said that once a quarterback started throwing a pass by moving his arm forward, the pass would be ruled incomplete even if the quarterback changed his mind midthrow and tried to “tuck” the ball “back towards his body.”47 This so-called tuck rule caused more problems than it solved.
During a playoff game in 2002 between the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders, in a snowstorm, with less than two minutes left on the clock, Patriots