Generic Gymnasts

Mr. Smith is a judge in the gymnastics at the Olympics. He goes out one evening and has a pizza, but it tastes like crap. Even without knowing it he has, by association, made a link between Italy and crap.

The next day, he is sitting on his judge bench with his judge friends, carefully watching the gymnasts fall about the floor with style. Mario, an eminent gymnast, walks into the area and executes a perfect sequence of somersaults and tumbles. As he finishes, the crowd applaud and cheer, and the other judges look suitably impressed. But Mr. Smith can only think of that disgusting pizza, and thusly gives Mario unnecessarily low marks.

I can think of 2 ways to get around this. The first is the use of a standardised costume for all the gymnasts, the only difference between each being the number which identifies each. Instead of watching the actual event, the judges would be shown a recording with the gymnast's face blurred out. They could then make an accurate analysis of the performance of the gymnast without being distracted in any way by their race.

The second way would be to record the event with the gymnast wearing a special suit with markers in key locations, as done in motion capture for CGI. In fact that is what this is; feeding the body movements of each gymnast into a computer and applying them to a standard generic gymnast to eliminate any kind of -isms on the judges part.