[Chief Inspector Clouseau]

Fine, there are some unwritten rules about retreads, but your exaggeration was too great to let it pass...the Canadians and Russians would've needed a crash worthy of NASCAR to fall below the 3rd or 4th place teams (actually, the 4th place team should've finished out of the top 10...they were atrocious, but then again they were Russian, so they got the bonus points for "artistry"...)

[discostu]

That could very well be the case, but some would argue that that's what the artistic merit score is for, to insert those crashes. Say "I saw this routine from them 2 years ago" and given them diddly squat. I think the real source of that "rule" is to keep from getting the same routines performed over and over ad infinitum, that would really kill the sport when the announcers introduce the "defending champions who will perform the same routine they won with 4 years ago". But apparently nobody figured out a good way to put it in the rule book so it's just one of those understood concepts. Most of the judged sports where the contestants get some real time to work with (ie, not diving, but definitely the floor routine in gymnastics) have it. While I'm not a close follower of the judged sports I can honestly say that in 25 years of being a sports junky who'll watch anything if there's nothing else doing this is the first time I've heard of a retreaded award winner getting a medal. Because I am basically a nice person I credited that to the skill of the Canadians (ie they did it well enough that it deserved to medal inspite of it being a retread) rather than the weakness of the competition.