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Life Is Not Fair!

I was watching some of the Olympics last night and saw again, very clearly, that life is not fair!  Gymnastics used to give out duplicate medals in the Olympics, but not any more.

For decades, duplicate Olympic medals were awarded when gymnasts’ scores were tied after the final stage of competition. But after the 1996 Atlanta Games, the International Federation of Gymnastics introduced a tie break policy that has six computations to settle ties.

I watched last night and saw USA’s Nastia Liukin and China’s He Kexin get the exact same scores in the uneven bars final.  But the tie-breaking policy concluded that Kexin was to be awarded gold and Liukin was to be awarded silver.

Is that really fair?

It’s not what happened to Nastia’s father when he was in the Olympics.  Valeri Liukin, got one of his gold medals at the 1988 Olympics after tying on high bar. But the International Olympic Committee told the FIG to stop sharing medals after the Atlanta Games, and a tie-break system was implemented in 1997.

“I’m a little disappointed I tied,” Nastia said. “It wasn’t like I got second by three-tenths or five-tenths. I had the same score. That’s what makes it a little harder to take.”

But she went on to say, “Scoring is scoring, that’s our sport.  “In other sports, like track and field, it’s all timed and it doesn’t have anything to do with judging. You do your routine and you turn it over to the judges. That’s what we’ve been going through our entire lives and we’ve come to accept it.”

Does it seem fair to you?  It doesn’t to me.  But in that sport at that level, those are the rules and everyone knows that those are the rules.

There are some who even feel that Nastia did a better routine than He.  Some are even saying that one of the judges was a lot harder on Nastia.  If all that’s true, then it’s not fair!  But that’s how it is!

Life is not fair.  And it is what we decide to do with our lives regardless of what’s fair and what’s not fair. That’s why it is never a question of how unfair something was, but rather, what we do with our mind and heart when we are dealt something that is unfair.  How do we respond?  We cannot live in the past; we must move forward!

Nastia went on to say, “I have the most important medal and it’s the all-around gold. I have four medals now and I’m tied with my dad. One gold, two silvers and a bronze, and I have one more chance to get gold that I feel like I missed out on today.”

Choose to enjoy life today, regardless!

Choose to have a great day!

Mike