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Winter Olympics and ranking methods
Feb. 24th, 2018 06:36 pmI watched a lot of people sliding around on snow and ice last week while I was ill, and I found myself getting interested in the different ways of scoring this. NB I am not at all expert in any of this, though I have very basic skating/skiing/snowboarding experience; my perspective is that of the casual viewer.
First up, and simplest, we have things that are one-off races, with multiple people starting at the same time on the same course, like snowboard cross or speed skating, where the winner is the one who crosses the line first. Falling over is a bad idea here, but only because it slows you down. If everyone else falls over too (not wholly out of the question in either sport, though I think the most I saw was 5 out of 6 snowboarders falling over), then you could win or qualify with an objectively 'slow' time. Speed skating complicates things by penalising people a lot, making it more possible that you could fall over, cross the line a minute or so later, and still get bumped up into medal or qualifying position. I don't know if snowboard cross riders are better than speed skaters at not cheating, or if the attitude in snowboard cross is "if you get cut up, that's your tough luck"; my guess based on half an hour of watching would be the latter. (Snowboard cross is bloody great to watch, just saying.)
Biathlon seems to vary a bit in how they manage it; sometimes it's a straight race, sometimes staggered starts, but same deal, fastest wins. They too have penalties, but in this case it's to weight the importance of accuracy in the shooting bit, otherwise you could just fire off your rounds as fast as possible, miss all 5 times, and beat the person who was slightly slower but more accurate. This means we're moving away from "fastest is best" to "we think other factors are important too".
Luge and skeleton are speed races, but unlike the above sports, you get multiple goes. But every go counts; you're rated on the total time taken for all 4 of your runs, not for the fastest one. So it's not just speed that counts, it's reliability. It also allows for the fact that times on the luge/skeleton run are measured to the thousandth of a second, that differences between people are tiny, and that very small mistakes can make a significant difference. So you can allow for everyone having, say, one duff run, and still expect that the winner will both be most reliably the fastest, and have the fewest duff runs.
Moving on, you get the sports that are judged by, well, judges. Halfpipe, slopestyle, big air, that kind of thing. (And ice skating, but we'll get to that.) I only watched the snowboard versions but it works the same for skiing, it just looks less cool[0]. Three runs as standard, but unlike luge/skeleton, you just use your best run. So you can cock up the first two and then pull something spectacular out of the bag on run 3 and win. (Indeed, most people will fall on at least one run.) The advantage to this is that it encourages people to take risks, because if you screw up, you can have another go and this one won't count. But falling is marked really, really harshly; if you do 4 fantastic tricks on a halfpipe run then fall on number 5, you'll get a better mark than the person who fell on trick 2, but you're not going to be bothering the top ranks. Landing badly without falling is marked pretty harshly, too. So the marking system encourages risk-taking, but only to the point that you think you can land it, and land it smoothly, 1/3 or 2/3 times. (Halfpipe marks are also explicitly weighted towards altitude achieved above pipe, effectively to make riders go faster and limit how many tricks they can fit into a single run.)[1]
Which brings us to figure skating, in its various forms, all of which have a massively complicated two-part judging system which weights various things, but all of which also only have a single try per part (there are two parts, but as demonstrated this year by Nathan Chen, if you cock up one part badly enough, you can't save yourself in the second; it's a total score deal). Now, I do not by any stretch of the imagination fully comprehend figure skating marking, because it is pretty damn baffling, but the gist of it is that you get a technical mark, which strictly reflects what element you performed and how well, technically speaking, you performed it, and in theory at least has no subjective factor; and then you get an artistic mark as well. However. The effect of the way that the current system is weighted is that the technical mark is more important than the artistic mark. And you *don't* get marked down all that much for falling over. In particular, if you are a male figure skater and you land a quad (which is a Hard Jump and not everyone at the Olympics can do it), *but* you then fall over or put a hand down, as long as you rotate the requisite number of degrees, you get the technical mark regardless. You'll get some kind of markdown for the fall, but someone who lands a couple of quads and falls over once (eg most of the top skaters this year, although I am pretty sure than neither Hanzu who got gold, or Fernandez who got silver, did fall over) gets more marks than someone who 'just' does triples and doesn't fall at all (eg Adam Rippon, who did a lovely skate with no mistakes but hasn't got a quad, so was way down at #7)[2].
The mark schemes in all of the sports I've talked about exist to reward particular behaviour. In the case of figure skating, I think at the moment they've got it wrong. I guess the thing is that they want to reward risk-taking, but as you only get one go, unlike the snowboarders, they figure they have to reward you for taking the risk even if you can't *quite* do it. But it makes it somewhat aggravating to watch, for the casual viewer. (Please note, as mentioned above, I am absolutely the casual viewer here and that is therefore my bias, but so are most viewers, right?) If you're not a figure skating expert, a quad looks a lot (A LOT) like a triple. The appeal of skating, to most folks, is that they do impressive jumps to music while looking pretty. Falling down does not look pretty, and quads don't look any prettier than triples. By all means reward people who can both land a quad and look pretty (Hanzu's free skate was bloody gorgeous and contained quads and no falling over), but if you fall over in your routine, that should be like it is with the snowboarders: a scoring disaster.
[0] OBJECTIVE FACT.
[1] I'm very tempted to go on about the men's halfpipe final at length, because it was spectacular and worked out to Maximum Tension at the end, and was interesting in terms of risk-taking and the effect of marking systems, but this post is already long enough. Suffice it to say that even the best snowboarders don't land all their runs.
[2] I am also avoiding going on about Nathan Chen, who had a disastrous short programme (fell down many times, enough to actually lose marks), and then what everyone described as, and was marked as, a spectacular free skate, because he landed 6 quads. But when I searched this out on the stream, HE PUT A HAND DOWN TWICE. How is it right that he got a higher mark for that than Hanzu did for his impeccably landed programme just because it had a mere four quads? Oh look I am going on about it, whoops.
First up, and simplest, we have things that are one-off races, with multiple people starting at the same time on the same course, like snowboard cross or speed skating, where the winner is the one who crosses the line first. Falling over is a bad idea here, but only because it slows you down. If everyone else falls over too (not wholly out of the question in either sport, though I think the most I saw was 5 out of 6 snowboarders falling over), then you could win or qualify with an objectively 'slow' time. Speed skating complicates things by penalising people a lot, making it more possible that you could fall over, cross the line a minute or so later, and still get bumped up into medal or qualifying position. I don't know if snowboard cross riders are better than speed skaters at not cheating, or if the attitude in snowboard cross is "if you get cut up, that's your tough luck"; my guess based on half an hour of watching would be the latter. (Snowboard cross is bloody great to watch, just saying.)
Biathlon seems to vary a bit in how they manage it; sometimes it's a straight race, sometimes staggered starts, but same deal, fastest wins. They too have penalties, but in this case it's to weight the importance of accuracy in the shooting bit, otherwise you could just fire off your rounds as fast as possible, miss all 5 times, and beat the person who was slightly slower but more accurate. This means we're moving away from "fastest is best" to "we think other factors are important too".
Luge and skeleton are speed races, but unlike the above sports, you get multiple goes. But every go counts; you're rated on the total time taken for all 4 of your runs, not for the fastest one. So it's not just speed that counts, it's reliability. It also allows for the fact that times on the luge/skeleton run are measured to the thousandth of a second, that differences between people are tiny, and that very small mistakes can make a significant difference. So you can allow for everyone having, say, one duff run, and still expect that the winner will both be most reliably the fastest, and have the fewest duff runs.
Moving on, you get the sports that are judged by, well, judges. Halfpipe, slopestyle, big air, that kind of thing. (And ice skating, but we'll get to that.) I only watched the snowboard versions but it works the same for skiing, it just looks less cool[0]. Three runs as standard, but unlike luge/skeleton, you just use your best run. So you can cock up the first two and then pull something spectacular out of the bag on run 3 and win. (Indeed, most people will fall on at least one run.) The advantage to this is that it encourages people to take risks, because if you screw up, you can have another go and this one won't count. But falling is marked really, really harshly; if you do 4 fantastic tricks on a halfpipe run then fall on number 5, you'll get a better mark than the person who fell on trick 2, but you're not going to be bothering the top ranks. Landing badly without falling is marked pretty harshly, too. So the marking system encourages risk-taking, but only to the point that you think you can land it, and land it smoothly, 1/3 or 2/3 times. (Halfpipe marks are also explicitly weighted towards altitude achieved above pipe, effectively to make riders go faster and limit how many tricks they can fit into a single run.)[1]
Which brings us to figure skating, in its various forms, all of which have a massively complicated two-part judging system which weights various things, but all of which also only have a single try per part (there are two parts, but as demonstrated this year by Nathan Chen, if you cock up one part badly enough, you can't save yourself in the second; it's a total score deal). Now, I do not by any stretch of the imagination fully comprehend figure skating marking, because it is pretty damn baffling, but the gist of it is that you get a technical mark, which strictly reflects what element you performed and how well, technically speaking, you performed it, and in theory at least has no subjective factor; and then you get an artistic mark as well. However. The effect of the way that the current system is weighted is that the technical mark is more important than the artistic mark. And you *don't* get marked down all that much for falling over. In particular, if you are a male figure skater and you land a quad (which is a Hard Jump and not everyone at the Olympics can do it), *but* you then fall over or put a hand down, as long as you rotate the requisite number of degrees, you get the technical mark regardless. You'll get some kind of markdown for the fall, but someone who lands a couple of quads and falls over once (eg most of the top skaters this year, although I am pretty sure than neither Hanzu who got gold, or Fernandez who got silver, did fall over) gets more marks than someone who 'just' does triples and doesn't fall at all (eg Adam Rippon, who did a lovely skate with no mistakes but hasn't got a quad, so was way down at #7)[2].
The mark schemes in all of the sports I've talked about exist to reward particular behaviour. In the case of figure skating, I think at the moment they've got it wrong. I guess the thing is that they want to reward risk-taking, but as you only get one go, unlike the snowboarders, they figure they have to reward you for taking the risk even if you can't *quite* do it. But it makes it somewhat aggravating to watch, for the casual viewer. (Please note, as mentioned above, I am absolutely the casual viewer here and that is therefore my bias, but so are most viewers, right?) If you're not a figure skating expert, a quad looks a lot (A LOT) like a triple. The appeal of skating, to most folks, is that they do impressive jumps to music while looking pretty. Falling down does not look pretty, and quads don't look any prettier than triples. By all means reward people who can both land a quad and look pretty (Hanzu's free skate was bloody gorgeous and contained quads and no falling over), but if you fall over in your routine, that should be like it is with the snowboarders: a scoring disaster.
[0] OBJECTIVE FACT.
[1] I'm very tempted to go on about the men's halfpipe final at length, because it was spectacular and worked out to Maximum Tension at the end, and was interesting in terms of risk-taking and the effect of marking systems, but this post is already long enough. Suffice it to say that even the best snowboarders don't land all their runs.
[2] I am also avoiding going on about Nathan Chen, who had a disastrous short programme (fell down many times, enough to actually lose marks), and then what everyone described as, and was marked as, a spectacular free skate, because he landed 6 quads. But when I searched this out on the stream, HE PUT A HAND DOWN TWICE. How is it right that he got a higher mark for that than Hanzu did for his impeccably landed programme just because it had a mere four quads? Oh look I am going on about it, whoops.
