I've always wondered how ballet was doing just fine for all those years without being part of the Olympics, and then just disappeared altogether when it was rejected by the Olympics. Why did it all of a sudden need the Olympics to be validated, when it didn't before?
Freestyle skiers wanted to ski on the ultimate stage--at the Olympics. They wanted to be on par with other sports such as Alpine or Cross Country. They wanted to be recognized as athletes and actually had to give up any professional status to do it. The sport became sanctioned by the FIS and had its first FIS World Championship in 1986. That meant improving safety (i.e. aerial progressions), providing consistency in courses (especially aerials), and defining the scoring parameters.
The biggest hurdles in becoming an Olympic event:
- New sports should be competitive in at least 25 countries spread over at least 3 continents. (Americas and Europe were the primary source of competitors, with limited from Australia and Asia--which, quite frankly, sums up most of the winter sports due to geography alone. )
- Large participation. Ballet has the fewest number of participants of the freestyle disciplines
Ballet had the biggest struggles since the IOC prefers to bring in timed sports over judged sports. (Initially, the IOC wanted to accept moguls only as a timed event.) They needed to sure up the scoring such that it was both reliable and valid. If a run is performed exactly the same at two different events, it should be scored the same. Ballet/Acro almost became like the short program in figure skating with strict requirements for pole flips, axles, and linking maneuvers. There were so many required elements (9 flips or axles and 10 linked maneuvers) performed on a shortened, steeper course in 1.5 minutes (down from 2.5 minutes) that it left no room for freedom. There were variations of rotations and straight vs cross-skied landings and takeoffs. The judging went through a series of changes. At one point, there were 6 identical moves that had to be performed by each competitor in order for the judges to get a chance to do a straight comparison between athletes. I'm looking at a former World Cup competitor's thesis--in Swedish--with the help of google translate. It look like the FIS really played with the format a lot and established a scoring system focused on Technical Merit and Artistic Impression combined with Deductions. Based on the competitors' opinions, the format favored difficulty over artistry.
So basically, in the age of figure skating scoring of 6.0 based on ordinals, ballet skiing / acroski was forced to make a scoring system representative of today's figure skating system. Essentially, trying to make the sport objective killed the sport.