Here’s my suggestion for next time: After all the events are over and the medals have been given out, do a series of events with the medal winner of sport A, competing against the medal winner of sport B, doing sport C. With A, B, C drawn out of a hat. So we could see a ping-pong champion vs. a wrestler in a diving event. Etc. This would be so cool!
After we got back, people would ask what we had seen at the Olympics. I would say “We saw Usain Bolt run the 200m, we saw the women’s 4x100m relay and the men’s 4×400, we saw the last events of the decathlon…lots of great stuff. But my favorite was the men’s 800m.” . . .
Tokyo Track revisited: no, I don’t think the track surface is “1-2% faster”
How fast do we slow down? . . . For each doubling of distance, the world record time is multiplied by about 2.15. . . . for sprints of 200 meters to 1,000 meters, a doubling of distance corresponds to an increase of a factor of 2.3 in world record running times; for longer distances from 1,000 meters to the marathon, a doubling of distance increases the time by a factor of 2.1. . . . similar patterns for men and women, and for swimming as well as running.
I suppose it’s too late to add Turing’s run-around-the-house-chess to the 2012 London Olympics?
The Whiter Olympics. . . . And they’re not talkin bout the snow, either. . . .
Did you know that Puerto Rico had a Winter Olympics team? One year it featured my cousin Bill, who finished last in the slalom. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t born in Puerto Rico (despite what it says on one website), but I guess he’s probably been there on vacation on occasion. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he speaks Spanish–he does live in L.A., after all. And, of course, it takes some skill to finish last in the slalom. I’d probably fall off the chairlift and never even get to the starting line.
The overseers of international figure skating scoring instituted a new system in 2004, designed to reduce the chances of vote fixing or undue bias after the scandal during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. Under the old rules eight known national judges scored a program up to six points with the highest and lowest scores dropped. Under the new rules, 12 anonymous judges score a program on a 10-point scale. A computer then randomly selects nine of the 12 judges to contribute to the final score. The highest and lowest individual scores in each of the five judging categories are then dropped and the remaining scores averaged and totaled to produce the final result. . . .
If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face”.
Meanwhile, tug-of-warriors haven’t been allowed into the five-ringed halls since 1920.
>After all the events are over and the medals have been given out, do a series of events with the medal winner of sport A, competing against the medal winner of sport B, doing sport C. With A, B, C drawn out of a hat.
There must be a market for this. There’s a got to be a sports promoter and a reality TV producer that could combine forces and make this happen. Call it The Gold Standard.
I feel like, if you applied your 2024 suggestion to the Winter Olympics, we’d just end up with a lot of boring side-sliding down a mountain, or a lot of serious injury/death. Although, alpine skiing , e.g., already has a lot of serious injury/death when done by the professionals, so maybe it wouldn’t be all that different.
Speed skating should become “ice derby.”
I was struck by the one statistics-related entry about judges and the complicated voting scheme. I wonder whether we might be able to use a computer for the judging these days? We could attach sensors to the figure skaters and create a 3D scan of their movements. Then a computer could do the judging. It would only need to be trained using fair training data. The labelled training data could be provided democratically by the member states. This has the advantage of the judges not favouring or disfavouring any participants, no confirmation bias, no fatiguing or ordering effects. It would cost a lot of money. But it would be much fairer.
One more word on the dropping of the judges procedure. While it increases the variance of the score, it leaves participants with the psychological effect that some unfair vote might not matter. This reasoning is, of course, fallacious. But it might *feel* fairer to statistically not very literate people.