Let's be precise. Let's be as perfect as a pointed toe. Let us, in other words, do better than the people who judge this silly sport. After Bhardwaj competed in the floor exercise, her coach Chris Waller approached the start value judges and said wait a minute.

A start value is a degree of difficulty. A guy walking a high wire between tall buildings would have a higher start value than a guy walking in a field of clover. Waller argued that Bhardwaj's value was 9.9, not the 9.7 the judges assessed.

Still with me?

This was because Waller claimed Bhardwaj did complete a move that made the 9.9 value obvious. She didn't do the move well, but she did do it. The judges claimed she did not. Without the move, her start value decreased.

Mohini Bhardwaj looks up at her score. (AP photo)

Bhardwaj's take was this: "It was a leap connection after my second pass. If you don't get it all the way around, you don't get a bonus for it. I guess the judges didn't catch it."

At Waller's request, the start value judges viewed a replay. They said no dice. Bottom line: Had Bhardwaj been given the 9.9 value, she might have won the bronze medal (Spain's Patricia Moreno was third with 9.487). Instead, she finished sixth at 9.312.

As befits her sport and her age (25), Bhardwaj was remarkably poised about the whole thing. Some of us would be doing flying quadruple Yurchenkos off the ceiling.

"If you've seen any of the event finals, you'll kind of understand this is the way the sport is," she said. "It's a shame."

That's a nice way to put it. After what occurred here Monday, it's over-the-top nice. When Bhardwaj stops doing advanced tumbling and flipping, she should consider a career in politics.

A gymnastics meet isn't supposed to sound like a bad call on 4th-and-1 in December. This one did. Earlier in the day, a Romanian male gym-guy was awarded an impossible-to-get score on the first of two vaults. It was enough to give him a bronze medal. The judge charged with making sure the scoring was accurate was Romanian.

Imagine that.

At night, the crowd had seen enough. After the Russian Alexei Nemov scored what the fans felt was a criminally low number on the horizontal bar, they erupted. The crowd booed for 10 solid minutes, until Nemov himself urged them with his arms to cease and desist.

And we will say it here and now: Greek gymnastics fans are beautiful people.

So loud and persistent were they, the judges actually increased Nemov's score. Imagine the refs at an NFL game giving the home team a free TD after the fans went nuts on a pass interference call.

"I would like to thank all those people for doing what they did tonight," Nemov said. "You cannot fool the fans."

You can fool the judges, however. Bhardwaj did a move they said she didn't, and lost a chance at a bronze medal. "The sport is based on what you see at a given time. Humans are judging it, so there is human error. Not everybody sees the same thing. So it's not always the same. So that's the way it is," she said.

Bhardwaj said she'll take from the Olympics a simple lesson: "Hard work at pursuing specific goals pays off at the end."

Spoken like a person who won't let judges spoil a good time.

The problem with gymnastics, one of them anyway, is that humans seeking perfection are judged by other humans whose eyesight and biases make perfection eternally impossible.

Such a beautiful sport to be so screwed up.

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E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com