The Olympic Games so far

[chris]

The Olympics are always one of the highlights of my - er - Olympiad (OK, "quadrennium") and so far, despite the lack relative paucity of gold for Great Britain (not forgetting our representatives from Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and quite possibly the Channel Islands) the whole event has exceeded my expectations. I won't claim that things have been perfect, but at worst there has been a valiant effort to attempt to fix the bugs that have arisen.

History will likely judge the ticketing poorly. There were 20 million ticket applications for the first round of tickets released, and fewer than half of applicants received anything. Starting there and ending up with tens of thousands of non-football tickets unsold (on top of hundreds of thousands of football tickets unsold) seems to indicate a procedure that was somewhat made up as it went along and a public that was frustrated by this to the point where it lost enthusiasm to try towards the end. This does not start to address prominently-positioned tickets apparently sold but not actually occupied. Nevertheless, history will likely also judge this a less substantial fault than you might suppose, because this episode of the Games may well actually have struggled less badly in this regard than at least most - if not actually all - of its recent predecessors.

TV coverage has been a quantum leap forward from that of previous events. The BBC, and many of the other rights-holding broadcasters, have made almost all the action available live. In the UK, all up-to-24 streams have been available not just online but also broadcast digitally by satellite and cable. As befits the BBC and its track record of operations "because of the unique way it's funded" all the streams are available without a subscription fee, and as free as television ever was. My pedantry here relates to the fact that many nations have comparable funding (e.g. a majority of the G8: UK, France, German, Italy and Japan) and you have to pay for a Freesat receiver in much the same way as you have to pay for a TV aerial, but there are no subscription fees after that.

Yet it is probably human nature, or at least a reflection of the sense of entitlement that our modern wealth has brought us, that it's easy to focus on the imperfections rather than to enjoy the freedom. For instance, if you miss a live broadcast in the UK, the BBC are sometimes disappointingly slow (taking as long as a double-digit number of hours) to make things available on catch-up. Additionally, when so much is available, it irrationally sticks in the craw that anything might not be broadcast at all, even when the omissions are just qualifying and ranking rounds (e.g. in shooting and archery respectively).

Furthermore, much of the physical broadcasting is performed by a neutral, peripatetic organisation called Olympic Broadcasting Services rather than the host nation, and some of their work has been frustratingly far below the standard achieved by an experienced broadcaster within a particular sport - the men's cycling road race was particularly criticised here. I fear that the logical progression from here is not just to offer a single point of view on each event but a choice of points of view. In the greater scheme of things, these are not just First World Problems, these really ought to be considered "the 1% of problems".

Having so many options available can be a little overwhelming as a viewer. My conclusion is that while the BBC are doing a decent job of curating the action and picking the best available at different times to provide general-interest rolling shows on BBC One (and BBC Three), the balance between showing sport and showing people talking about sport has not quite been to my liking. (There are a small number of exceptions. I've got a lot of time for Claire Balding as a pundit; in fact, the whole of the aquatics team have been tremendous.) Fortunately we are lucky enough to have the option of flipping over to see any of the 24 streams if we want to - and BBC One, tastefully, tends to reserve the punditry for the pauses between the events and coverage of all the medal ceremonies at which there is no domestic interest.

It amuses to me to consider the likely reactions of a theoretical alien visitor who came to visit the Olympics and make a ludographic study of them. The different sports display a great variety of procedure and inconsistencies; there does not seem to be nearly the extent of sharing of best practice from one sport to another that there could be, and there seem to be few or no reasons for the differences other than preserving tradition - tradition often borne of historical accident. This is an example of the sort of social conservatism of which I am generally disfavourable.

For instance, there are almost as many different ways of holding races as there are different races. Sprints on track are generally held over four rounds, with race position in previous rounds being an important factor in advancement; however, sprints in the pool are held over three rounds, with only competitors' individual times in comparison to the entire field at large, rather than in comparison to the particular heat in which they participated, being considered. Why is one better than the other? I must say that my gut feeling tends towards the swimming way of doing things, though it could be argued that the swimming method makes the race aspect of the race less important.

Furthermore, these are not the only way of determining who is the quickest to complete a particular endeavour. There is no particular reason why competitors participate eight at a time on the track or the pool which may have nine or ten lanes constructed, or why competitors participate six at a time on the rowing lake; it could be argued that if you want to discover which of two participants is faster, then the purest way to do so is just to have a competition between the two of them. If cycling or tennis or archery or boxing or many other sports are happy to have several rounds of single-elimination competition between pairs, it's logical to consider whether it might be more fun than the current approach to have more of this pair-based competition.

We can take this further still; instead of having two competing at once, let's have only one competing at a time. In the cycling time trial, competitors participate individually and the gaps between starts are such that there is no practical chance of interference between competitors. Would this be a better way to determine who's the fastest at a particular feat? If the objection is that this risks adding a factor of differing weather conditions between those who compete early and those who compete late, why not go to the other extreme and draw a lesson from the marathon?

It's easy to imagine a one-off 100 metre race competed on a square track; 100 competitors, each has a metre-wide lane, making the whole track a square. If you object that the speed of sound means that some competitors will hear the starting-pistol a sufficient fraction of a second later than others to be unfair, let's lose the starting-pistol and draw from the inspiration of (e.g.) a BMX race and have a physical obstacle in the way of competitors that drops away to start the race. Furthermore, it would sort out the false start issue.

Of course, these not-entirely-serious suggestions would bring about their own drawbacks. For instance, in the 100-running-at-once marathon-analogue 100m race, sorting out 36th place from 37th place might require the sort of touch-to-register-race-completion sensor currently found in the pool. Arguably this is purer than the whole "let's look at an image to determine whether a torso has crossed the line" system used at present. I'm not saying that any of these suggestions are necessarily better than the current way of doing things, but I'm not immediately sure why they're actively worse, rather than just different.

And that's just the racing... or some small section of racing. Considering different methods of tournament organisation, some competitions are organised on a single elimination basis, others have repechages, others have pool systems to determine progression and elimination. Sometimes these pool systems don't quite work properly and inadvertently incentivise people to lose matches, causing controversy. I'm not suggesting that one sport has it right and all the others have it wrong, but I do think the different sports can look at what each other's systems have to offer.

There are also huge disparities in how many attempts people are given to prove their worth or otherwise. For instance, in team sports, even the weakest (association) football team that qualifies is guaranteed three matches before elimination, and the British handball and basketball teams will get five matches even if they lose each time. However, in archery, after firing 72 arrows in the ranking round to determine an initial seeding, it's straight down to single-elimination competition, where half the competitors will be eliminated in their first match. No matter how strong the initial 72 arrows were, it's possible to lose a match 30-29 30-29 30-29, so even six arrows that score 10/10 and three that score 9/10 may not be enough. This strikes me as pretty inequitable compared to the degree of failure permitted in team sports. It also surely increases the chance that the strongest athlete in the competition might be eliminated due to a short-term dip in performance.

There is an analogue to the old "degrees of skill" argument here; a game might be said to be a better test of skill if there are more identifiable levels of skill in it. For instance, noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-toe) has one level of skill; either you know how to force a draw or you don't. However, well-established ratings systems have identified 8, 10, 12 or more identifiable skill levels in many different mind sports such that a player of one higher skill level will (*waves hands a little*) almost always beat a player of a lower skill level. You can artificially increase the degree of skill in a contest by playing best-of-three, best-of-five or more and thus giving the more skilled player more chances to demonstrate their superiority. In the same way, might (say) the 100m sprint be a more accurate reflection of ability if it were competed on a "best of three" basis? If not, why do any sports use "best of three" at all? By extension, why do some team sports use "best of seven"?

Part of the reason why there is no absolute right and wrong is that different sports are wanting to try to reward different things and meet different goals. That's OK and has got to be OK. It's only when the reason for having these different goals is nothing more rational than tradition that there's room for dissatisfaction.

It's also interesting to see the way that some sports have fixed their inherent procedural bugs and others, well, haven't. The most interesting sporting bug story so far (the badminton one is just dumb) relates to a fencing semi-final; specifically, in the Women's Individual Epee contest.

With a second left in overtime, and one of the fencers requiring just to secure a tie in that final second to win the match, the timekeeper dropped a blob and started the clock too early - then may have not properly reset the clock for the final part of the action. This final "second" proved decisive and the losing team's coaches kicked off to the extent you would expect. The fencer was briefed not to leave the fencing piste, for leaving the piste signified acceptance of the controversial decision, and sat there for about 70 minutes while appeal after appeal was conducted. The BBC have a not-too-technical write-up, fencing.net has a more technical one, but for me the sweet spot of a concise, clear explanation is hit by this discussion here on Dreamwidth.

It does occur to me that fencing could stand to learn from the best practice example of basketball, which prominently has a decimal clock counting down fractions of a second as time winds down and plenty of experience at resetting the clock very exactly. Fencing could be even better-suited to this than basketball in that the exact time of a hit can be measured precisely and thus can be ruled legal or otherwise. Frankly, fencing is so fast that it could probably do with being timed to decimal parts from the first swing of a sword.

On the other hand, Gregg Easterbrook of the consistently entertaining and excellent Tuesday Morning Quarterback on ESPN has long taken a contrarian position against greater precision being announced or depended upon than can realistically be relied upon, and might take this as a case in point. It's a respectable view, but I tend to believe that video evidence is available (and, at the level of the Olympic Games, genuinely practicable) that could make sub-second timing genuinely reliable, and thus I am in favour of its use. On the other hand, events like the 100m sprint reflect the state of the art in even more precise sub-second timing, and show the limitations; while people enjoy super-slow-motion camera footage that might be used to provide millisecond (or tighter?) accuracy, that has not yet found favour with the sporting community.

One day I want to produce a meaningful ranking table that compares sports and the demands they place against each other, because there is no particularly famous or well-regarded attempt to do so. A quick search reveals ESPN's attempt at this, which is a reasonable starting-point, but it is open to criticism.

For a start, it's pretty old. While there is no date listed, you can get temporal context from discussion of Hasim Rahman and the heavyweights prominent at the time; I think this places it at late 2003 or early 2004. More importantly, there are some important sports missing; off the top of my head, decathlon, triathlon, cricket, mixed martial arts (the single category for martial arts doesn't really cut it to me), dance as sport and doubtless plenty of others. I admit that I rather like the concept of some relatively unknown sport proving the most meritorious of them all.

The whole algorithm they used is open to question. The attempt to measure participant fitness rather than holistic merit leaves elements of dexterity and skill underrated and only a certain sort of stamina considered at all - but, more importantly, there is no attempt to say that some categories are more important than others, and some sports which only particularly attempt to require some characteristics but not others criticised as a result. (All the non-contact sports suffer, for instance.) Even if you accept the premise that the categories selected are valid, and all of them should be fully weighted for every sport, some of the scores awarded look dubious... or, at least, borne of a particular common sporting heritage rather than the cosmopolitan background that would be ideal. This is essentially qualitative research dressed up as being quantitative, which will only ever be truly satisfactory for the person compiling the figures. (Which is, in part, why I want to produce my own list!)

I think there are some axioms that should prove reasonable starting-points. I contend that there is a concept of purity of sport that deserves consideration. A sport is relatively pure if it requires relatively little, and relatively readily available, equipment. (By extension, I don't think it's unreasonable for team sports to suffer in this regard.) A sport is relatively pure if the experience playing it is relatively similar at the grass-roots level to the way it is at the global level. A sport is relatively pure if its rules are relatively easily learnt and understood; every tweak and game balance that is required - no matter how good the reason - diminishes the purity of the fundamental activity. A sport is relatively impure, arguably to the point of very considerable detriment, if it is significantly subjectively judged; the greater the role of the referees, let alone any judges, the less pure the sport.

I also contend that there is a concept of relevance of sport that deserves consideration. This is not to be confounded with popularity or media attention, because the media of the world has its own twisted and self-interested set of drivers, and it would require a survey of the entire world's media - not just a single language of global media, either - to measure it properly. It would be particularly capitalist to attempt to measure this relevance in purely financial terms or only to consider professional sport, let alone only considering spectator sport, but a survey of relevance that did not consider such factors at all would be similarly incomplete.

I may be asking the impossible, but it would be a fun long-term project at the very least!

One other way to compare a certain set of target-based precision sports against each other is to consider the degree of precision and repetition required. Trap shooting and skeet shooting are blatantly binary; either you hit the target or you miss it. Repeat a hundred times, or a hundred and fifty times, then count the hits up. A typical winning score is 99%. Tie-breaking is necessary and obscure.

Yes, it's pure, but it's dull; I'd rather cut the size of the targets by - say - 20% or 40%, or some other appropriate extent so that a winning score might be somewhere between 60% and 80%. I'd rather require something extremely difficult to be performed frequently, rather than something very difficult to be performed perfectly, and am prepared to accept the very small element of increased risk that this would introduce that requires people to get lucky - as opposed to the current situation which requires people not to get unlucky. This is a preference based on human nature, borne of similar thinking to the conventional wisdom that quizzes become less satisfying if anyone scores under 50% or over 90%.

Archery comes close to being problematic here, but gets away with it. The Olympic records are such that there's a worrying degree of requirement of ceaseless, consistent perfection, but we're talking about a reasonably sociable requirement of 75% perfection or so, and there's plenty of reason for the "9" ring to exist outside the "10" ring, with "8"s not being particularly rare even at the top levels. My main problem with archery is the small sample size used in the individual elimination matches. Up until 1988, similar numbers of shots were required in archery as in other target events, but also it was required to fire them from a variety of distances. I think I'd like to see the Olympic round moved back to requiring a 90m shot, as was the case pre-'90.

The best practice here, as far as I'm concerned, comes from shooting, with some disciplines featuring the best practice as well as others featuring the worst! While the qualifying rounds of the rifle and pistol competitions are based on five dozen or so shots at an archery-like target, with typically a very dull 85%-90% or so of bullseyes required to advance to the final, the grand final uses a target that awards not only whole points but tenths of a point for being millimetre-by-millimetre closer to the very centre of the target. I don't quite like the aesthetic that a perfect score from a single shot is rewarded with the ungainly value of 10.9, but it could be argued that pistol and rifle shooting require the most precision of them all by virtue of the smallest solid angle subtended by the bullseye from the shooter's point of view. I think we're talking nanosteradians here; hitting a 10.9 with a pistol from 50 metres is akin to hitting an airport terminal (or at least an airport) when firing at the Earth.

And yet - and yet! - the great and humble sport of darts has a couple of significant advantages over them all here. I am convinced that if you had to go to a darts range in order to play the sport, rather than a pub, it would be taken as seriously as any other accuracy sport, be played around the world and could be a contender to be as respectable as archery or shooting. (Maybe it's just a reflection of the "sport as an analogue of war" persistent undercurrent; you can kill someone with a gun or an arrow, whereas you can merely blind them with a dart.) Perhaps, snootily, darts looks like a poor relation because of its accessibility, humility and lack of expense. To me, that speaks well in terms of purity; few sports are quite literally as "pick up and play" as darts.

The other target sports require people to shoot for the same part of the same target each time, whereas in darts, no matter how many triple-20s or triple-19s you start off scoring, at worst you need to go for a specific double in order to get down to zero - and, in practice, you'll probably need to vary your throws a little sooner in order to get the out-shot of your choice. Tip of the hat, here, to the "running target" events in the shooting; while the bullseye remains on the same part of the target, at least the running targets move. Minus a million points for the hunting origin, on the other hand. Darts also deserves credit for its arithmetic requirements.

Other than its tradition, darts might also suffer in reputation by virtue of being more of a game than most of the other target sports, which tend to be very po-faced and uninteractive. Specifically, the championship 501 could be viewed as being one of several different games that are played with darts and a board, though I might hazard a guess that dart game popularity might break down as something like "90% n-hundred-and-one, 4% Round The Clock, 3% Killer, 2% Cricket, 1% others".

And yet darts could - and arguably should - be even more of a game than it is. Here is my design for a darts game, roughly comparable to - say - a best-of-five-sets of best-of-five-legs match. It is designed to slightly increase interaction between players and to require them to hit a wider variety of out-shots rather than repeatedly counting down from 501.

Players start on 5001. Nine integers are drawn at random and pre-announced, one between 4500 and 5000 (exclusive), one between 4000 and 4500 (exclusive) and so on down to one between 500 and 1000. Players must exactly reach each of these scores at the end of one of their darts; the penalty for busting past one of these intermediate scores is to conclude the turn, with a return to the target score plus 111. It's not necessary to hit these intermediate scores through doubles, but a double is necessary to reach 0 and go out. (This rule improves the game because it forces slightly different arithmetic and different out-shots each time.)

Additionally, any segment that a player scores is worth zero to their opponent on the next turn - so if you score triple-20, triple-20, large-single-20, then the triple-20 and large-single-20 are worth zero to your opponent on their next turn, though small-single-20 would still score for them. However, if they do hit a blocked target, then in turn they deny that segment back to you for your next turn. (This rule improves the game because it increases interactivity between the players and permits tactics.)

The scoring for bullseyes is a bit different; the first dart in the bullseye is worth 50 as at present, a second dart in a set of three is worth 70 rather than 50 and a third dart in a set of three is worth 100, thus valuing the spectacular but highly unlikely triple bullseye at 220 and incentivising it ahead of the triples. On the other hand, the outer bullseye is only worth 15 rather than 25 to stop the bullseye from being overvalued. A bullseye can also substitute for any single value between 1 and 10 even if blocked by the previous player - so if you need (e.g.) a 1 and both small-single-1 and large-single-1 are blocked, you can always score it through the bullseye.

In conclusion, I am delighted that London was selected to host the Olympic events for the year, from torch relay to Paralympics, and so far consider that it has done the job tremendously well and is likely to carry off the rest of the job with aplomb. That said, a nagging doubt leaves me thinking that the French passion for grands projets and public engineering means that they might have done it better still. Part of me would be happy to live in a world where Paris got the Olympics and we got the 2018 World Cup instead, even considering that FIFA are actually even worse than the IOC for being over-reaching self-interested supra-governmental global detriments and general public nuisances. We all know that Malthusian bargains don't work that way, and more likely we would have been left onlooking everything, again.

Hosting an Olympic Games is inherently an unreasonable proposition. Then again, so was building a Millennium Dome. It may have been fashionable to criticise the Millennium Experience at the time (and I will say that there was a lot of "try lots of different things to see what works" playing safe to it, though the results were not without high spots) but I do think that the continued existence of the building as an indoor arena adds to London life. Fingers crossed that the Olympic infrastructure does find a good eventual use. I am far more convinced, and far less merely hopeful, than ever before that it will all prove to have been well and truly worth it.

Comments

[cork_dork.livejournal.com]

>few sports are quite literally as "pick up and play" as darts.

Uhh... a large part of the running events beg to differ. Heck, there have been Olympic-level marathoners from Africa who ran without so much as shoes before getting to international competition. Racewalking also comes to mind. So do wrestling and judo (in their purest form, you can do either anywhere, although for safety's sake doing so over a mat makes sense), and to some extent boxing (all you really need to own in order to spar are handwraps, gloves, and a mouthpiece; total investment would be something like $50. And if you practice at a gym, there may be wraps and gloves available for use. Nobody wants to share mouthpieces, though. Admittedly, purchasing practice bags can get a bit more expensive -- heavy bags run about $100, speed bags about $50, and headache bags probably another $100 each, plus whatever costs you expend on hanging them, but aside from sparring partners and a ring to spar in, that's the basic setup for a really decent home boxing gym.). The athletic throwing events (shotput, javelin, discus, and hammer) all require little beyond some open space, the thing to throw, and a long measuring device. Some team sports, too -- all one needs to play football is a ball and a goal, after all.

Of course, the ancillary equipment one needs to play at a top level in some of those sports may be greater (eg, I'd expect that a national-level hammer thrower probably spends quite a bit of time in the weight room, and a really good distance runner may also spend a bit of time in the pool to work on endurance, or using a sprinter's parachute to work on power), whereas top-level darts players probably only have to spend whatever's needed to set up a dart board at home to practice on.

For that matter, a number of other sports that seem to be equipment-intensive are often have interesting workarounds; for example, Cuban fencers often practice with bamboo "foils" at the club level for learning hand positioning, parry and riposte, disengagement, and lunges. That's enough to separate the decent fencers from the rest of the pack (who, in Cuba, are then told "you can do this recreationally, but it's not a job. Sorry."). Good steel is hard to come by in Cuba, and expensive, so actual fencing blades are generally reserved for competition -- if you're a good enough fencer to compete on the national level, you're given a blade that you own and maintain, but if you're not, you use one off the rack at the club you're competing at. Not unlike in darts, actually -- good players will own their own darts, whereas the casual once-every-couple-of-weeks player probably plays with the bar darts.

[(Anonymous)]

I think 'need of officials' has to be a factor too, though. Wrestling, judo and boxing all pretty much require judges and/or referees to determine whether points have actually been properly scored or not; and timekeepers. Darts matches can much more readily be officialed by the players, at hobby level. (I guess that's pretty much true of distance running too, but sprints need a starter.)

[chris]

Fully agreed, and to the technical detriment of the sports you suggest. Sometimes I think that individual martial arts have limited prospects and are to some extent obviated by mixed martial arts competition, but I know that there are sound reasons why mixed martial arts contests are as codified as, pretty much, contests in individual martial arts.

In a similar vein, I've been enjoying not just watching but also thinking about weightlifting. There are two well-established weightlifting, er, styles, and apparently it was only a couple of decades ago that a third, the "press", was also competed in. However, I'm not sure why either of these would be better than hypothetical freestyle weightlifting. Get your weightlifters together and, in turn, get them to lift a bar with zero or negligible height above their head as high as they can, then measure the heights they achieve. (Presumably different for each lifter as heights and arm lengths vary.) In hypothetical freestyle weightlifting, there are no stylistic disqualifications; if a lifter manages to lift a weight to the required height while keeping at least their heels on the ground, and I imagine that both of these should be measurable using buttons or other touch-sensors, then the lift is good. I'm not sure this is better, and I'm prepared to believe there's a kinesiological reason why this would be less safe, but it would certainly be more pure.

[chris]

I can't argue against anything you've said there, and am fascinated to hear about the practice in Cuba; I would, however, suggest that boxing, track events and a less codified version of association football are among the few, as opposed to "no", sports I specified as being comparable to darts in accessibility.

Darts: this story, about 15-time world champion (and undoubtedly among the top 50+-year-olds among all sport) discusses Phil Taylor and his fitness.

[bohemiancoast]

Gosh, what a lot of food for thought.

On the BBC: I am loving my HD TV, which turns out to be incredibly well-optimised for watching sport: who knew? I hadn't noticed the broadcasting consortium until yesterday, when my daughter and I watched some dreadfully filmed gymnastics. The competitors are on all the apparatus at once; so the standard way of broadcasting is to show the expected most-interesting one first, and then pick up as many of the others as possible in gaps. Instead we got endless shots of people taping their ankles, or waiting for their scores.

We saw the archery live yesterday; the one set of tickets that we got. The audience was a mix of about 10% UK archery enthusiasts (lots of club shirts in evidence), 10% Korean fans, and 80% clueless. Arriving early would have been good for that latter batch, because there was a very clear exposition of what was going on. It would have helped with the endless stream of questions from people around us of very basic things about the sport ('why all the pointy bits', 'how do they know where to aim', 'why do they all wear bucket hats'). I don't know what can be done with people who don't know how to turn the flash off, or mute, their digital cameras, or who witter on to their mates as people draw.

Overall it was a brilliant day out; our top tickets were cheaper than nearly every ticket in the Olympic Park would have been (though we have super cheap 'wander around the park' tickets for today to make up for that), and we got to see two plucky Brits be knocked out, the top ranked man get beaten, and the awesome Iraqi woman on a wildcard getting to lose to the top ranked woman. Round the back it was possible to do 'have-a-go archery', too.

In terms of the design of the match, I'd like to see more arrows and different shooting lengths. I am also unsure about the two-player, arrow-in-turn, approach. The essence of most archery contests is a long line of arrows being shot at once in a way that would be completely recognisable 500 years ago; I think that's pretty cool and I think it's a shame that Olympic archery has lost that feel.

How much do we like darts? I took up archery because I'd always wanted to do it, but also because we wanted a family sport and darts just isn't played that way. I personally think the interactivity of 501 darts is a particular strength of it; it's clearly a contest in a way that even the Olympic archery doesn't match. My husband used to be a good darts player (pub standard for a good pub team); I'm not, but I love target sports and I love playing darts. As far as 'own darts' goes, I don't think you have to be very good at all to not want to use the pub darts. But my darts cost less than a pub lunch; the main expense of this sport is the beer. A huge contrast with archery, where your first few goes are trivially cheap once you find a beginner's course, but there's then a massive leap to kit up and join a club.

[chris]

Hurrah! Thanks for sharing; it does sound tremendous and I enjoyed your write-up. Legendary long-time London blogger Diamond Geezer long trumpeted this as being likely to be one of the sleeper hits of the Games and I'm glad to see that it has lived up to its potential. (Did you go on the same day as him?)

It does seem to me that the current archery format is part of the made-for-TV twenty20-isation of many sports. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I like seeing new developments in sports formatting, but only when the new formats don't drive out the existence of the old ones altogether; keep the short-form knockout tournament, with the risk of the top seeds being eliminated early, but keep the old FITA rounds of six dozen arrows as well.

Actually, six dozen rounds are used to determine the seedings at the start, and I suspect they may well be organised in the trad. arr. of lines of archers as if it were a medieval battle. (Again, these were not televised... or even open to the public, but designated as "unticketed", a word used elsewhere at the games to mean something other than "not open to the public".) The open question is why not award medals based on those performances, as a true extended test of skill, then have the knockout at the end as a bit of extra fun?

[bohemiancoast]

I think we went the day after Diamond Geezer, who appears to have been assiduous in getting tickets!

His guide to the Olympic park was helpful, though I am not sure you could do all of this in one day unless you were very very fit.

[(Anonymous)]

Boxing is a particularly fine example of the hopeless TV coverage. Apparently, above the ring is a big score display board which shows what each boxer has scored in the preceding rounds, but that's not shown on the TV at all: you have to rely on memory (and on the commentators remembering to tell you).

On a related note, I suspect your 100-competitor 100m race would be quite a challenge for the commentator, and indeed the camera and the viewer, to spot what the heck was going on in the 10s available. At least with eight you have some chance of correctly identifying each runner in their finishing sequence.

[chris]

Ah, there's sound technical reason - though not necessarily sound sporting reason - why scores aren't displayed during the rounds in the boxing any more. The boxing scoring system is different this year to the way it has been in the past and has come in for considerable criticism. Unfortunately, all the descriptions I've seen of this year's system are annoyingly hand-wave-y when it gets to the crucial part.

Five judges count scoring punches separately and submit their scores, by pressing buttons, as the rounds progress. The three "most similar" scores out of the five are considered and the middle of those is considered. However, if there are not three "most similar" scores, apparently the top and bottom scores are discarded and the remaining three are averaged and rounded. This is annoyingly algorithmically ill-defined; the only example I've seen is that if the judges respond 2, 2, 2, 4 and 5 then the score for the round is 2. To be fair, it's not as if I have actually looked up the specifics on the AIBA site; presumably the detail is available there. I can't see why not to go with the "trimmed average" approach under all circumstances, unless you just don't trust your judges.

[cxcvi]

A darts range, you say? Like the darts cafes that they have in the Netherlands?

I have more thinky thoughts, but those will have to wait until our gas is inspected. Or the rapid fire pistol final. Whichever comes second...

[chris]

Hadn't heard about those, but they sound interesting!

[(Anonymous)]

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Sprints on track are generally held over four rounds, with race position in previous rounds being an important factor in advancement; however, sprints in the pool are held over three rounds, with only competitors' individual times in comparison to the entire field at large, rather than in comparison to the particular heat in which they participated, being considered. Why is one better than the other? I must say that my gut feeling tends towards the swimming way of doing things, though it could be argued that the swimming method makes the race aspect of the race less important.
<<

I think there are a few sport-specific reasons for the differences here.
1. Swimming is through a medium 1000 times as dense as track. I expect the amount of energy expended as well as other physiological effects on the body may necessitate fewer runnings of the race.
2. There are generally less swimmers in any one event than in track. Less countries participate in swimming than in track, and in swimming only 2 athletes from each country (compared to 3 in track) are allowed to participate. This has always struck me as a bit odd especially as the third place swimmer in the US has typically been competitive for at least the bronze medal at the olympics (this year being a bit of an exception... go rest of the world!). But ultimately, less competitors means that less winnowing rounds are needed to get down to the top eight.
3. The pool has very little in the way of varying environmental conditions because it's done indoors instead of outside. And each lane is identical. Track conditions (especially wind speed) can vary quickly and have large impacts on times. Further, track lanes (for races over 100m) are not identical because of the curves.

>>
Furthermore, these are not the only way of determining who is the quickest to complete a particular endeavour. There is no particular reason why competitors participate eight at a time on the track or the pool which may have nine or ten lanes constructed, or why competitors participate six at a time on the rowing lake;
<<
I can't speak for rowing. However, there is are reasons for limiting swimming and track to 8 lanes:

Pools are typically built to be 50m x 25m (or yds. in the US) This is because there are two different modes of swimming: long course and short course. Think indoor and outdoor track/field, or long and short track speed skating. There are subtle differences between long and short course swimming (there are more turns in short course, though the races are about 10% shorter in distance) that makes the distinction interesting (and also some financial and historical considerations: it's considerable cheaper to build a SC pool than a LC one). At any rate, because SC is competed in 25 m/yd pools, it's convenient for 50m pools to be 25 m/yds across so that they can be used for both. Because of the width of the lanes, this means you can reasonably fit 8 lanes across (with two small, unusable lanes on the outside). The pools that are used at the Olympics do not have this restriction. They are built longer across so as to have a buffer lane to reduce wake effects on the outside lanes (Heats at the US Olympic trials even used the full 10 lanes in order to speed up the meet).

I believe (though I'm less knowledgeable about track) that track has 8 lanes because of the curves (staggering races around the curves becomes less and less practical with more lanes).

>>
it could be argued that if you want to discover which of two participants is faster, then the purest way to do so is just to have a competition between the two of them. If cycling or tennis or archery or boxing or many other sports are happy to have several rounds of single-elimination competition between pairs, it's logical to consider whether it might be more fun than the current approach to have more of this pair-based competition.
<<
Well, again I think there are some sport-specific reasons for the differences. First of all, tennis and boxing do not work with more than 2 participants at a time. Really, any head-to-head sport in which you must react directly to your opponent's actions (as opposed to racing or target sports where your performance is not directly inhibited by your opponent) can't reasonably be contested more than 2 at a time since otherwise you open the competition to gamemanship.
Pursuit Cycling (I think that's the term for the sport that's contested 1-on-1 in the aerodrome) is very specifically engineered to be a 1-on-1 version of cycling. Most cycling is not contested in this manner, but then you should consider them different sports with similar athletic medium. They emphasize different aspects of the skills necessary to ride a bicycle very quickly.

Swimming and track are more concerned with times and records. It's not as meaningful to keep track of world records in 1-on-1 sports than in, I guess, purer racing sports like swimming and track. Moreover, racing multiple participants at the same time makes sense from an efficiency perspective (ever been to a swim/track meet? They take all weekend already. Multiply that by 20 to compete 1-on-1). Moreover, an elimination tournament with 100's of participants would take 6+ rounds (see my comment about getting tired above). Later rounds would necessarily be slower and therefore less exciting (this is less of an issue in 1-on-1 sports where the emphasis is not on speed and time).

I can't speak to archery's 1-on-1 format. That's a little confusing to me. Though, perhaps it has to do with environmental factors. Archers aren't shooting at the same time, so having more of them participate at once would lengthen the competition and open it up to wider changes in wind speed. And two archers competing at different times of the day will have different wind conditions and be incomparable.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, also, the badminton controversy is a huge shame. However, I think the idea of playing preliminary pool games to seed the elimination tournament has merit in that it levels the playing field from the start where as seeding the players into a single-elimination tournament based on prior rankings is inherently unfair for a myriad reasons (not all participants have equal access to the ranking competitions being the primary problem). However, as is blatantly obvious now (and should have been to badminton organizers if they had looked at table-tennis's problems from a few Olympics ago), meta-gaming is going to be too much of a temptation. However, I'd suggest that this could be fixed with a modification of the seeding algorithm: Let the top qualifiers pick who they want to play:
Ideally, the two top qualifiers ought to play in the finals of the elimination bracket. In the semis, 1 and 2 should be playing 4 and 3 respectively. After the qualifying round, give 1 the choice of who (3 or 4) he would want to play in the semis. Usually, he'll pick 4 so that he'll have the easier match, but sometimes he'll pick 3 instead (maybe to avoid playing a compatriot until the finals or because he'll match up better against 3 than 4). Now, in the quarterfinal round, seeds 1-4 should play seeds 5-8. Give 1 the first choice, then 2 can pick from the remaining 3, 3 can pick from the remaining 2, and 4 is stuck with the last). And so on for however many rounds you're going to have. With this system, you have an incentive to finish as well as you possibly can in the qualifying rounds so that you have more control over who you play in the elimination rounds.

[chris]

Another sound idea and one I've heard before. It is not unprecedented; for instance, in the rugby league play-offs, the ClubCall system gives the highest seed emerging from the quarter-finals the choice of which opponent to face in the semi-finals. However, as I recall, I have a suspicion that at least one top-seed qualifying has chosen not to participate in the choice aspect here, and to speak out against the ClubCall feature's existence, and I think they were given the lowest seed qualifying by default. I'm not sure what reasons, if any, they gave for their opposition; one might imagine that they considered it disrespectful to whichever opponent they eventually chose to name, but that's just a guess. In general, I agree with you and support the concept, and reckon that whichever team it was that objected was just being goofy.

[chris]

Hello, whoever you are, and thank you for your long and detailed comment! You make lots of good points. I note that Dreamwidth has a nice long comment length limit (for instance, considerably longer than that of LJ) for what it's worth.

It's certainly relevant that there's a long-established tradition that the more gruelling the event, the fewer the number of qualifying rounds. The sprints on the track may be competed over four rounds, but middle- and longer- distance races may have only three or two, and the marathon, triathlon and so forth are single races. One other pragmatic element that I haven't considered is that while there is relatively little work required to the track between athletics races, and swimming races can come fairly thick and fast (most of the delay between races - and there isn't much - is for the jazzmatazz of introducing the swimmers), other sports' races need considerably more preparation. It takes many minutes for rowing boats to get into position, for instance.

The identical nature, or otherwise, of swimming lanes is an interesting one. Certainly it has been suggested that this pool is particularly fast, or particularly good, because of the width of the lanes and because of the unusually heavy lane dividers being relatively likely to counteract the effect of ripples and waves spilling over from one lane to the next. I also understand that the concept of these waves bouncing off the sides of the pool, or the bottom of the pool, further slows participants down, which is why the very outside 0 and 9 lanes are not used and I'm not sure that even the 1 and 8 lanes may not be considered slower. (Double negative!) Good point about the reason for the standard pool width, which I hadn't considered.

I think there's definitely scope for a head-to-head contest in at least the 100m or 200m sprint; after all, occasional match races are not unknown. Yes, running several rounds is incrementally tiring. However, as much as sprinters are known not to run at 100% in early rounds, one might imagine that they might not run at 100% in early rounds of the head-to-head contest. I've never particularly wild about the aspect to which people don't go at 100% in early rounds, in any case, and this head-to-head format might discourage such measure. Could - say - three days of two rounds per day be that much more exhausting than the current format of two rounds per day, especially when the first day might well be effectively run at training pace?

[(Anonymous)]

>> Hello, whoever you are, and thank you for your long and detailed comment!
Oh, I guess I could have signed off... I don't have a Dreamwidth or OpenID account. My name is Dave Stigant. I was a swimmer (in the US) through college, though nowhere near to qualifying to represent my country in the Olympics.

>>
The identical nature, or otherwise, of swimming lanes is an interesting one. Certainly it has been suggested that this pool is particularly fast, or particularly good, because of the width of the lanes and because of the unusually heavy lane dividers being relatively likely to counteract the effect of ripples and waves spilling over from one lane to the next.
<<
Yes, this is standard practice in high level competition pools now (and has been for at least a decade or so). There is, practically speaking, very little difference between lanes 1-8. There is probably a slight drag off the side wall in lanes 0 and 9, but I believe 1 and 8 are insulated enough to not be a big deal. The reason you see very few people win from those lanes is because the slower swimmers tend to be seeded out there from qualifying.

>> I think there's definitely scope for a head-to-head contest in at least the 100m or 200m sprint;
<<
Perhaps, but I wonder what it would really add to the sport. It wouldn't really emphasize a different strategy or technique than the non head-to-head events do. (Well, beyond certain meta-gaming aspects). The same people who win in the current approach would be expected to win in this approach. Also, there are two other aspects of swimming that work against this:
1. The pool (heh) of swimmers is already divided already into 6 (or more) main specialties (backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, sprint freestyle, middle distance freestyle, distance freestyle, and IM) which are really not directly comparable because even the basic motions are different. In contrast, while there are differences in distances in running and biking (which also has flat vs mountain specialists), the basic motions stay the same across all sub disciplines. I don't think there would be enough depth within most specialties to make a head-to-head format interesting in general. I suppose one event just for sprint freestylers could be interesting, but freestyle is already heavily favored over the other strokes as far as number of events, and adding another event for them would probably be seen as unbalancing.
2. There's a considerable amount of crossover between strokes (ex: Phelps, Lochte, Coughlin etc all swim multiple disciplines). It's not so much that you'd "only" have to do 2 head-to-head races a day over a week. It's how those races would interact with your other races.

[chris]

Hello! Which college? My wife comes from not too far from Athens, GA, so I'm hoping that you, like double-gold-medallist-and-counting Allison Schmitt, are a Swim Dawg. There's relatively frequent passing mention of the college swimming system even on general-interest British TV, which almost never has reason to mention it otherwise.

You're convincing that a head-to-head sprint contest would probably make more sense on the track than in the pool. The "number of different events per sport" issue is another one again, and a bit of a touchy one in the UK because of the change as to which cycling events would be competed in the velodrome this year; from probably inaccurate memory, there were seven men's events and three women's events last time and this has been changed to five and five this year. I think there is often some disinformation here; a popular rumour is that the high number of swimming events arose because of extended US success in them, and US success was prioritised simply because of the US financial contribution to the IOC in terms of TV rights. However, Wikipedia does track the number of events per sport over time, and I don't think there really was the correlation that people sometimes draw.

Unrelatedly, I have Dreamwidth invitations available if one would be of interest. *searches* You're a puzzle person, aren't you?

[(Anonymous)]

>> Which college? My wife comes from...
Rice University (Houston, TX). Go Owls! The US is a bigger place than the UK, I'm afraid...

>> You're convincing that a head-to-head sprint contest would probably make more sense on the track than in the pool.

Well that's possible, though I again I still don't see the point in non head-to-head sports. My point about "nothing added" should still apply to track. Part of the excitement of the finals in swimming and track is that you have 8 people competing in one final triumphant contest, and theoretically any one of them could win or have a breakthrough performance. More people in the race increases the likely-hood of a down-to-the-wire dramatic finish. Elimination tournaments, I expect, would necessarily be less dramatic (by some, vague, undefined measure of "dramaticness").

Part of the fun of head-to-head sports is how different matches between different sets of opponents can be because of the different strengths and weakness of each. But, to borrow a mathematical term, racing sports have a higher degree of transitivity. If A beats B and B beats C then A will surely beat C is almost universally true in swimming and track, but less so in head-to-head sports. The only reason to have prelims/semis/finals in racing sports is to select the "best" 8 and then let them go at it in the final.

But at any rate, perhaps I've at least made my initial point that differences in format are usually driven by differences in sport rather than a lack of knowledge about the "best practices" (certain glaring examples aside, cough, badminton).

>>
The "number of different events per sport" issue is another one again,...US success was prioritised
<<

I've never heard those rumors about the number of swimming events, though admittedly, we Americans tend to be completely deaf to things like that. I have no knowledge of the velodrome events, though I've enjoyed watching them in the past... hoping to see some this week if they make the US broadcasts (streaming, I'm sure, is available but sans commentary, I find it a bit hard to follow unfamiliar sports)

>> Unrelatedly, I have Dreamwidth invitations available if one would be of interest.

Not really, but thanks. I don't blog much (at all), and spend more time lurking than is probably healthy. I just saw your comments and thought they were interesting enough and had enough knowledge of the topic myself to weigh in.

>> You're a puzzle person, aren't you?
Yes, though less so recently. More of a fan at this point than an active participant.

[chris]

Ignore what I said about trap shooting; Double Trap Shooting is clearly the king of all target sports. Thank you, gold-medallist 94%-scorer Peter Wilson!

[daweaver]

Hmm. I'm coming in from the point of view that OlymBid 2005 was a good contest to lose, and that the disbenefits from the current spectacle significantly outweigh the benefits. Well done Madrid, congratulations Paris.

History will likely judge the ticketing poorly. There were 20 million ticket applications for the first round of tickets released, and fewer than half of applicants received anything. Starting there and ending up with tens of thousands of non-football tickets unsold (on top of hundreds of thousands of football tickets unsold) seems to indicate a procedure that was somewhat made up as it went along and a public that was frustrated by this to the point where it lost enthusiasm to try towards the end.

Selling tickets is a classic problem in basic economics. Supply is known, and the price will vary solely according to demand. One way of solving the problem is to have prices rise and rise until demand equals supply; this would match the prevailing ethos of the spectacle, and requires no skill from the organisers beyond being able to count seats. It can be that prices will be maintained at a moderate level (including zero), and a random selection made amongst applicants; this requires some level of competence from the organisers.

In the overview, though not the main post, it is asserted,

It has broadly been a very good Games for the BBC, though - again - far from perfect.

A very contentious statement there. It's my understanding that the BBC has taken a policy decision to only speak positively about this event, with exceptions granted for contrarian bits no-one watches, like Panorama and Newsnight Review. The Beeb has not just sipped from the cup of Bacchus, but has drained it and in turn been drained.

Where, for instance, is a discussion of the direct cost of this event (officially about £9 md) against the original bid (approx. £2.5 md)? What about the indirect cost, and benefits? How come the presenters never discuss the overt nationalism and general repession of liberties? Why do they perpetuate the cult of celebrity? How was it ever thought acceptable to shut down overseas broadcasts of local radio for two months, just in case a programme might happen to contain some news about this event?

On Saturday, there was a demonstration with a thousand locals saying, "down with this kind of thing". It made the main evening bulletin on French television, and a report circulated on Russia Today. The BBC didn't cover it on telly, apparently didn't mention it on radio, and confined reporting to a very short piece on their website, ending with a sniffy quote from Sebastian Coe's representative along the lines of "oh, big events always bring out the nutters".

The television coverage of the event itself is comprehensive to a fault; I wonder whether it sets an impossible precedent for the next Crass Spectacle. From a journalistic perspective, this whole event has been a colossal and spectacular failure: the BBC directly refuses to report views that undermine its entertainment output.

Sometimes these pool systems don't quite work properly and inadvertently incentivise people to lose matches, causing controversy.

I entirely disagree. The group phase worked precisely as it was intended to do, obtain an approximate ranking suitable for further refinement. The problem is that the players knew the precise draw for the knock-out phase before completing the group phase, thus making it possible to benefit from losing - or, to be accurate, avoid the feared team until the final, thus guaranteeing a top-three finish.

This had been predicted, and the organisers had been warned by the various coaches that such shenanigans were likely to happen. The organisers chose to ignore these warnings, and resorted to their catch-all, "you've offended us in a way that we can't articulate, but that makes us look stupid. So we're going to throw you out for the crime of making us look stupid, and damn any concept of justice." (See also: Penn Province NCAA-ball team.)

This whole saga is a perfect example of the crass nature of the spectacle. It's a win-at-all-costs environment, one where nationalism and jingoism and commercial pressures combine to make defeat unpalatable.

[chris]

Oh, Iain! *blows a raspberry and pulls a funny face*

Despite my reaction which is intended to paint you as the very slightest of party-poopers - speaking as someone who has pooped more than his fair share of parties - there are parts where I agree with you. As I said, a part of me would rather (economically) have hosted the World Cup than hosted the Olympics. I'm glad that the UK gets to host one or the other, ((ETA:)) even despite my intense dislike for both the governing bodies concerned, and would welcome the bringing into existence and hosting ((end of ETA)) of third or successive events that attract as much attention in a way that (e.g.) the Winter Olympics, the World Athletics Championships and the counterpart World Cups of other team ball sports do not.

Nevertheless, as much as I tend to have little or no time for the sort of nationalistic puffery whereby people take the attitude that Britain remains one of the world's most important players, rather than a moderately-sized European nation which is only privy to many of its positions of privilege through a historical accident of scientific advantage, I tend to believe that national-team international sport generally falls on the side of good taste. As much as I'd like to see a greater degree of world government and a lesser degree of national government for certain issues that are too important for individual countries to decide, I wouldn't welcome a de-emphasis of international competition on sport.

The ticketing problems seem to me to fall into two categories: first, relatively late decisions about which tickets would be available to the public; second, a lower-than-desirable proportion of tickets being sold to the public. Something like 6.6 million tickets were on sale in the first round of sales, and I might guess that of the order of 1-2 million of those were for football. If there had been another few hundred thousand sold in the first round and another few hundred thousand fewer sold in later rounds, or more clarity about the existence of all the later rounds and the numbers of tickets that were available for each session at each price point and that would be expected to become available in later rounds, I think people would have been more understanding.

I remain convinced (though purely on balance of probabilities and do not consider a more rigorous degree of proof or disproof to be possible) that England's World Cup bid would have been rather better received had the BBC's episode of Panorama about FIFA not been broadcast three days before decision day. I'm not saying that the BBC was wrong to air that documentary, and I'm very glad that investigative journalism takes place into FIFA's doings. Nevertheless, I think that particular scheduling decision speaks volumes for the BBC's skepticism, alongside its enthusiasm.

I also tend to believe that the BBC has a relatively strong track record of self-knowledge and self-criticism, even if not as absolutely strong as would be ideal, and thus do not feel inclined to criticise it for its lack of explicit criticism of its own highest-profile output. Did, for instance, ITN report upon the activities of the Counter-Olympic Network? The fact that I had not heard about the demonstration you reference before you mentioned it there, even though the news of the treatment of the cyclists' Critical Mass demonstration spread far and wide, and despite looking for news in (admittedly British origin!) sources that might have reason to be comprehensive in both anti- as well as pro- Olympic coverage, goes to suggest that the BBC were not particularly more at fault than the rest of the UK media.

This had been predicted, and the organisers had been warned by the various coaches that such shenanigans were likely to happen.

I have since heard it suggested that something similar happened in table tennis in the past, though must admit I don't know the specifics. Certainly this would support my premise that sports could do more to learn about best practice from each other.

More generally, on the rights and wrongs of the situation, can I point you to Peter Birks' post on meta-gaming in badminton? Many sports explicitly punish those who bring that sport into disrepute, and tend to view such playing by the letter of the law (or the rules, if there is a difference between law and a rulebook) rather than the spirit of the law as disreputable.

At the very least, the Badminton World Federation have a Code of Ethics with a Players' Code of Conduct, point 4.1 of which says that one of many on-site offences is "During any match or at any time while within the precincts of the site of a BWF-sanctioned event, not conducting oneself in an honourable and sportsmanlike manner." Yes, that's broad, but that's no bad thing, as it puts the onus on people to err on the side of caution against any sort of behaviour that might contradict this direction. You could as easily argue that the behaviour displayed falls under 5.1 - "In addition, if a player has at any time behaved in a manner severely damaging to the reputation of the sport, that player may be deemed by virtue of such behaviour to have engaged in conduct contrary to the integrity of the game of badminton."

I don't think it's practical or desirable to specify in advance all the possible ways in which people might behave in an undesirable fashion, because people are inventive at coming up with unforeseen and unforeseeable ones, and am happy, in general, with the existence of such catch-all rules (not just in this sport, but in sports in general) which catch not-previously-specific disreputable behaviour. In a very similar vein, I am happy with the concept of General Anti-Avoidance Rules for tax and have not yet been convinced at all by the arguments I have heard against them.

[daweaver]

As much as I'd like to see a greater degree of world government and a lesser degree of national government for certain issues that are too important for individual countries to decide, I wouldn't welcome a de-emphasis of international competition on sport.

For team sports, there are arguments on both sides of the nation-versus-corporation debate, and I don't think there's a clear winner either way. For individual and pairs events, I find the emphasis on nationality to be wholly wrong.

For instance, today or tomorrow sees a tennis match between Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. The world number one against the world number four, a repeat of last year's Australian Open final. A repeat of the pair's unforgettable Aussie semi-final this year, which you'll doubtless have forgotten already. A chance for Novak to avenge defeat on this court four weeks ago; a chance for Murray to actually win something on this court.

If we believe the organisers, this isn't the latest skirmish between two powerhouses of men's tennis. No, it's between an archipelago off the north-west coast of Europe, and a sandwich of land in the north Balkans, batting Luxembourg back-and-forth across the Alps.

I stand by my comments relating to the tickets: the organisers needed to demonstrate the ability to organise a party in a bakery, and managed only to burn their buns.

Did, for instance, ITN report upon the activities of the Counter-Olympic Network?

Saturday's Snowmail indicates that Channel 4 News was going to give them some coverage. There's also a suggestion that London Tonight had footage on Monday. Whether this amounted to a serious discussion, I don't know, as I saw neither.

Behaving "in a manner severely damaging to the reputation of the sport" is a crime under badminton's rules? Their game, their rules. Very much looking forward to the inept tournament organisers being charged under this rule. They were warned, they ignored warnings, yet it looks like they are going to escape culpability while a completely devalued tournament concludes.

[chris]

Very much looking forward to the inept tournament organisers being charged under this rule. They were warned, they ignored warnings, yet it looks like they are going to escape culpability while a completely devalued tournament concludes.

Touché! Can't argue with that, and I haven't heard that point made before. I fear that the prohibition is only in the players' code of conduct, but your point is extremely well-made - indeed, many other actors than just players can damage a sport's reputation.

[bohemiancoast]

Despite having had a ton of fun either at the Olympics, watching Olympics on television, or doing meta-Olympic activity like the various cultural events, I tend to agree that we didn't need this. It was certainly very expensive; the most extraordinary of all public circuses.

However, given that it was here, I was determined to make the most of it. So I have had a lot of fun. Even quite trivial things like the design of the showjumping fences have delighted me. And the park is really beautiful, and I have some hopes that one day, once all the razzmatazz is over, it will hugely benefit the area I live in.

We were in the park today (on 'host borough' residents tickets), and one thing struck me, which is that the balance of visitors between Brits (the huge majority) and the rest is clearly not what the organisers expected. The most obvious evidence of this is flags; the shop sold completely out of Union flags on the first morning; a few more are delivered each night but always go within minutes of opening time. Every other world flag is readily available.

So as a huge tourist draw, perhaps not. But as a celebration of British spirit, rather good actually. And it's almost worth £20bn to see Boris Johnson caught on a zip wire. Almost.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Great entry!

So here's a silly, almost-off-topic comment for you: there's actually a slightly finer division of skill in tic-tac-toe than you claimed. The ability to force a draw is indeed the top level, but ability to force a draw provided player one has played their first move in the centre is (I claim) a distinct milestone which young players reach first.

I know this from extensive personal experience. When confronted by a player who claims to be unbeatable at noughts-and-crosses, I ask if I can start, then play in one corner. They almost invariably take the centre. I then play to the opposite corner. About half the time, the novice opponent then takes a third corner, which is a losing move!

[bohemiancoast]

Not only do they 'almost invariably take the centre', they have to take the centre, because anything else is a losing move. Which leads to my noughts-and-crosses variant, which is to explain that since everyone knows that centre first is the best strategy, neither player can play their first move in the centre...