Women's uneven bars competition at the 2008 Summer Olympics was held on August 18 at the Beijing National Indoor Stadium.
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.
The final scores work as per the normal scoring procedure: the D score measures the difficulty of the routine and the E score measures how well it was executed. The E score has a maximum of 10.000 and is reduced for each deduction (for every error in the performance).
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 are eliminated and the remaining four are averaged. The first tiebreaking procedure is determined by the E score, the execution score. Since Liukin and He tied with an E score of 9.025, the second tiebreaking procedure 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 were deducted, the averages became:
Thus, since Nastia Liukin's average was lower after the second round of score elimination, He Kexin was declared the winner.