The undoing of the perfect 10

Alas, the perfect 10 is no more.

Nadia Comanice, Mary Lou Retton, Bo Derek: They are now mere footnotes in the history of perfection.

Their status of having achieved the perfect 10 has been undone by a new scoring method that muddies the water of perfection because, in essence, there is no perfect score. The pinnacle, the apex, the acme of flawless is gone. Ultimately, you're just better than those who scored fewer points than you.

I came to this conclusion after watching the first nights of men's and women's gymnatics coverage at the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China. Scores were coming in at 14.1 or 14.8 or 15.4, which I couldn't figure as being good, bad or indifferent.

No longer can you look at something or someone and express, "That's definitely a 10." You're not going to look at someone and say, "Hmmm, definitely a 14.8." The observations have no contextual relevance for perfection.

Perfection in gymnastics, where the idea of the perfect 10 came to be, is now a moving target.

Comanice and Retton had their own scores of perfection, Comanice notably during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Retton's perfect routine on the vault came at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

But the gymnastics ruling body -- the International Gymnastics Federation -- moved the scoring away from the perfect 10 as a result of controversies at the 2004 Olympics. Now an athlete's score has two parts -- difficulty of the routine and execution. If a gymnast plans a routine with a high degree of difficulty, he/she automatically starts out with a difficulty score that's higher than someone who's doing a routine with an average amount of difficulty. Then the judges score on the execution of the routine -- whether there are any stumbles, or missed elements, or falls, etc. The addition of the two results in the gymnast's score.

To give some perspective, U.S. gymnast Nastia Liukin won the individual gold yesterday in Beijing. Her winning score for her floor exercise was 15.25. Impressive? Absolutely. Perfect? We'll never know.

Sometimes you need a standard to measure yourself against. In school if you were perfect you received a grade of 100. The best you could do on your grade point average was a 4.0. But even that's changed. The high school kids who take advance placement classes and do real well can actually have a GPA that's greater than a 4.0. Does that mean they are that much better than perfect? It's confusing -- isn't perfect perfect?

It's apparent we do not live in a black and white world of flawed and perfect. We live in a world with multiple shades of gray, where there are no absolutes: there is no black, there is no white, there are a multitude of variations in between.

At least one perfect gymnast understands. Retton told the New York Times: "It's simple. People get it, and you don't have to explain it. Everybody could relate to it. I miss it, and I think other people will, too."

As for Bo Derek, it's a good thing her movie "10" came out when it did -- in 1979. God knows what we'd call the movie today -- "15.2", "17.1"? That's not doing it for me.