Women's uneven bars competition at the 2008 Summer Olympics was held on August 18 at the Beijing National Indoor Stadium.
Contents
The eight competitors (with a maximum of two per nation) with the highest scores in qualifying proceeded to the women's uneven bars finals. There, each gymnast performed again; the scores from the final round (ignoring qualification) determined final ranking.
Final
The final scores work as per the normal scoring procedure: the A score measures the difficulty of the routine and the B score measures how well it was executed. The B score has a maximum of 10.000 and is reduced for each deduction (for every error in the performance).
Tiebreaker
During the uneven bar finals Nastia Liukin and He Kexin had a tied score of 16.725, which was followed by a tiebreaking procedure. In this procedure there are six judges who judge each competitor on a scale of 1-10. When all six scores are finalised, the highest and lowest eliminated and the remaining four are averaged. The first tiebreaking procedure is determined by the B score, the execution score. Since Liukin and He tied with a B score of 9.025, the second tiebreak was required to determine a winner. In this event, the lowest score given to each competitor is dropped. Before this, the remaining scores were:
When the next lowest scores are deducted, the following happens to the averages.
Thus, since Nastia Liukin's average was lower after the second round of score elimination, He Kexin was declared the winner. The results of this final have remained controversial, as many fans claim Yang Yilin was most deserving of the title, whereas others think of Nastia Liukin as the rightful winner or state that Great Britain's Beth Tweddle should have placed in the medals.