The year 1984 was a real watershed time in the West when it came to subjective, artistic sports. In the 1970's, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci and skater Dorothy Hamill primed America's pump to accept sports measured by perfect 10's instead of points on scoreboards. But with the Sarajevo Winter Games came an entire batch of beloved figures -- American unitard-clad Scott Hamilton and his flying leaps, England's Torvill and Dean bringing back the days of Fred and Ginger, and Iron Curtain-melting East German sweetheart Katarina Witt. America fell in love.

Olympic gymnastics had been ruled by Eastern Europeans and the Japanese, but the Los Angeles boycotts allowed for smiling Americans (Bart Conner, Mitch Gaylord, and Mary Lou Retton) to storm the medal stand. Judged sports had gone mainstream. But synchronized swimming, which made its debut in 1984 with a solo and duet competition, fell through the cracks -- this despite combining the frisky music of figure skating, the dramatic arm movements of a gymnastics floor exercise, and arbitrary decisions based on artistic presentation found in both.

Synchronized swimming is no less silly than gymnastics, for reasons we all witnessed again last night in the women's uneven bars competition. Struggling with finding a scoring scheme that makes sense, FIG's current system has traded in perfect 10's for 14's and 15's -- as well as a bizarre tiebreaking system that doesn't make sense to anybody involved. Fine print decided a gold medal last night in favor of Chinese gymnast He Kexin over all-around champion Nastia Liukin, after both finished with identical scores and start values.

There are a number of sports on the Olympic program that are not measured by the "Swifter, Higher, Stronger" criteria. There is no "Better" in the official motto, but disciplines such as synchronized swimming, diving, gymnastics (rhythmic and artistic), boxing, figure skating and halfpipe snowboarding always require human intervention to decide winners. Whether these sports belong or not isn't the issue -- the Olympics are in competition for attention with other major globally televised world sports events, which wasn't the case back before 1984, and the IOC is looking for anything that'll sell.

Or perhaps these are the perfect Olympic sports for the modern age. Since Los Angeles, most armchair Olympic commentary in the West has consisted of speculation about sports that should be included (American football? NASCAR? Staring contests?), and writers make a lot of money recycling that clever logic every four years. The majority of the moments from the Olympics over the past 20 years, the ones that live on in the collective American consciousness, have had to do with controversial decisions. Everybody has an opinion on everything, from the athletes' performances to the televised presentation, to the point that it seems like these athletes train for four years just to entertain us. With an audience made up of millions of judges, sports measured by goals, clocks and tape measures can't possibly be as important.

Which is why this blog is constantly confused as to why synchronized swimming isn't more popular.

TABLE TENNIS: Yesterday was the messy qualification process to get onto the bracket of the women's singles tournament, with many African and Middle Eastern countries sustaining four-set losses in 20 minutes or less. Today it was the men's turn.

On the four tables at Peking University Gymnasium, a small crowd of diehards watched as hopefuls vied for spots in the Round of 64 from Egypt, Paraguay and other nations with table tennis histories shorter than this sentence. And to their credit, some put up strong showings in losing causes. Monday Merotohun of Nigeria, sponsored by an Italian club, won two games of his best-of-seven series with a Turkish opponent. Ibrahim Al-Hasan of Kuwait was up 2-1 on North Korea's Kyok-Bong Kim before running out of gas. Two of the three members of the Egyptian team advanced to the big bracket.

But on Table 3, an Olympic hero was being reborn. Dexter St. Louis of Trinidad & Tobago first competed at the Games 12 years ago, when he was quickly flushed out of a much smaller field in the men's singles event, finishing tied for 49th. And after a 12-year absence, the 40-year-old paddler made it back.

The left-handed T&T ping-pong hero with graying dreadlocks took the floor, wielding a chipped and well-worn paddle that looked like it might have been the same one he used at Atlanta 1996. But soon, sweating and wheezing, he was being overmatched and overpowered against sprightly young Canadian Peng Zhang. He pushed Zhang to a 12-10 win in Game 3, but only accumulated 17 points in the other three games and lasted 28 minutes. His final point, a smash into his own side of the net, left him inconsolable on the sidelines with his coach.

Not to discredit the rigorous training and the qualification process he went through, but St. Louis looked like he belonged there as much as this blog would have (indeed, this blog can remember playing table tennis against a gentleman who looked like him in the student union basement back in college). But that's an important part of all this. For all the Phelpses and the Bolts and the Isinbayevas that the 2008 Olympics have offered, there remains the need for Dexter St. Louises. Athletes like him serve to remind that the Olympics are still the domain of real human beings, not just freaks of nature.

In the larger picture, a larger pool of nations in the table tennis events (56 in total, up from 35 in 2004) is a wonderful development. For now, the sport is completely and totally dominated by Asian countries. But as has been discussed here before, we are in the midst of the third era in the sport's history -- the game's control passed from England in the 19th Century, to Eastern Europe in the 1920's, to Asia after World War II. Within the hour, Nigeria's Segun Tortola eliminated accomplished Chinese-born U.S. paddler David Zhuang. Perhaps another change is on its way.