The Olympic Games have the unique quality of making certain sports relevant to the casual sports fan. Only once every four years do we really care, as a nation, about snowboard cross, the giant slalom or figure skating.

For example, if you had heard of Evan Lysacek before last week, I would consider that quite an impressive feat. Though Lysacek won the 2009 World Championship in men’s figure skating, his accomplishments were irrelevant until he stepped into the Olympic spotlight and won gold for the United States. After his incredible win over favorite Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, every American knew his name – something that would not have occurred if he had won every World Championship for the next 20 years without winning Olympic glory.

Yet the story of Evan Lysacek’s gold medal reveals something darker about the Olympics – the significant presence of sports that are scored or judged by humans. In virtually all sports that fall within the general American consciousness, success is fairly concrete – in team sports, the team that scores the most points or goals wins the game, period. Beyond the enforcement of rules, which is fairly objective, there is no human involvement outside of the participants themselves – they are only competing against each other, and when someone wins there is no controversy.

There are also many Olympic individual sports in which the standard for victory is objective, unbiased and indisputable. To take examples from the Winter Games, downhill skiers race against the clock, competing for the fastest times. Of course, no sport is free of controversy – witness the Julia Mancuso-Lindsey Vonn incident last week – but there is never any controversy over who won.

The Summer Games also has prominent examples of objective sports. Track is probably the purest athletic competition there is. It is the simplest of sports – whoever goes the fastest and covers the distance in the shortest time emerges as the winner. Swimming is also fairly similar; as long as the swimmers follow the rules (while human judges ensure that they do so, it is still a fairly objective exercise), whoever goes the fastest wins the race, plain and simple.

In contrast to these sports stand those events dependent on scores from subjective, possibly biased human judges. The most prominent among these are figure skating in the Winter Games and diving and gymnastics in the Summer Olympics. While the summer sports have generated their own controversies, I’ll stick to talking about the winter ones.

Let’s start with figure skating, and return to Lysacek’s gold medal. Despite Plushenko’s superior showmanship and daring routine, Lysacek won the competition because he was more “technically sound.” In a sport reliant on Plushenko-style crowd-pleasing for its audience, it seems somewhat counterintuitive to award more points based on something that only experts on the sport (i.e. the judges) can understand or even see. For me, the casual fan, it appeared that Plushenko’s routine (which included a quad jump) was superior to Lysacek’s strong but safe showing.

Regardless of which side you take in the debate, the fact that the sport allows for such debates to exist demonstrates its invalidity as an Olympic sport. The champion of the Olympic contest should be clear to all, not open to criticism. I find it very hard to accept any figure skating Olympic champions because I cannot objectively verify that they are the best in their sport.

Of course, I don’t dispute the athleticism or skill of figure skaters – I can barely stand up on skates, let alone jump and spin in the air in them. All I believe is that you cannot call someone an Olympic champion based on the subjective decisions of an anonymous panel of so-called “experts.”

I also hold the same opinion for all the other judged sports in the Games. To take another example, let’s look at men’s snowboard halfpipe. In the event, American Shaun White won by a large margin of 3.4 points over his nearest competitor. While such a margin makes it fairly clear that White was the superior athlete, I still find it impossible to blindly accept that he is an Olympic champion based on what some panel of experts has told me. If I were educated about the sport, I might concur with their decision, but without some quantifiable measure that I can currently comprehend, I refuse to simply have faith in an appointed board.

Thus, it is fairly obvious that judged sports have no place in the Olympics, the pinnacle of sport. If the casual, objective fan cannot definitively say who won, then it must be impossible to call that person an Olympic gold medalist, as there will always be a grain of doubt to take the luster off the gold.

Kabir Sawhney is apparently the least patriotic sportswriter in history. Find out the next American he wants to strip of a medal at ksawhney “at” stanford.edu.