Poor Referee Decisions!

The Koreans have just been robbed of a medal by Asian arch-nemeses the chinese.

However, it's really late and I'm tired so I'll write about it tomorrow; this will remind to write about it.
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So in discussion I couldn't quite articulate what it was that made long track superior to short track, but the above event showed me what it was.  The long track is decided by the competitors in one way or another, whereas the short track is always dominated by the referee.

A certain Mr. Kramer won the 10km long track by around five seconds, but was denied the gold by the referee because he went into the wrong lane.  Now this might at first seem to undermine my position, however, the referee is simply following the rules as laid down by the sports governing body, and Mr. Kramer (the world record holder in one distance, and favourite to win three gold medals across the games (he only managed one)) spends his entire life training and participating in events such as this.  If he cannot follow the rules after countless thousands of hours of training, and they aren't ingrained in his very core being, then I have little sympathy for his cause.  It is also the case that the penalty was entirely self-inflicted, no other human being made him do what he did.

Short track in entirely different however, as skaters are always jostling for position and making contact.  It is therefore up to the judges interpretation of rules.  The skaters can control their own destinies insofar as their route around the track, but should another skater run into them and take them both out, that is beyond their control.

The team skate is a perfect example of this.  The chinese skater deliberately skated into the Korean skater in order to get the Korean disqualified.  The Korean skater didn't move to interrupt the chinese line, and didn't impede the chinese skater in any way; but the chinese skater lost out because of her own exuberance and so the referee penalised the Koreans.  This kind of ridiculous decision is what spoils short track, and it happens more often than you might expect.

Just as footballers dive headfirst at every point of contact in order to gain a penalty, short track skaters make big overblown gestures to intimate their innocence, and worse than doing it in the first place is getting away with it.  The chinese cheated and won, and my respect for short-track drops again.