Was There a Problem with the Rio Pool?
swimswam.com
swimswam.com
Edit: of course, this could still be unfair but at least it would be due to human psyche rather than currents
The graphs make the effect look pretty linear, which doesn't fit with my model of sports psych. Shouldn't there also be a slight bump for lanes 7 and 8, because they're also closer to the smaller crowd on that side? Instead it's a straight slope straight across the pool. Is the inspiration boost that comes from moving from lane 2 to lane 1 equivalent to the boost from moving from 8 to 7? I'd expect some inverse square law to apply.
https://swimswam.com/myrtha-pools-says-tests-showed-zero-hin...
For instance the current could be caused by the interaction between the pool and the motion of the swimmers in the pool. It could be caused by the overflow wave from 8 people entering the pool. It could be caused by uneven gutter heights leading to the pool draining at a faster rate on one side/corner. It could be a combination of all of these things, none of which would show up in a static test like the one they demonstrated.
The fact that this has happened at some races and not others, and the ones it looks like it has happened at are Myrtha pools, is interesting in itself.
Do a test with something hanging below the float, below the protection of the lane ropes. Or drop some dye in the water.
(I'm a little surprise by the wave action visible in these tests. With so many ropes, that water should be like glass very quickly.)
There is some theatre here. Swimmers know the water moves, that it isn't a stationary tank. A perfect pool, with perfectly still water in every lane during an actual race, isn't possible. As slight winds can affect football games, swimmers just have to live with slight inconsistencies between lanes and pools.
Reasons for a current:
(1) This is an outdoor pool. Sunlight is the death of chlorine in pools. The bigger the pool, the brighter the sun, the more chlorine is burnt off. The chlorine-related chemicals used in pools also do not properly dissolve in water. They slowly rise towards the surface. So when you turn off the circulation system, they rise towards that deadly sunlight. Given that, and the fact that they were having epic chlorine-related problems, it is of no surprise that they would have run the circulation systems as much as possible when the pool was not in use. But pool water doesn't stop instantly. A gyre may have formed and be stable for hours afterwards. Laneropes are meant to stop this, but they do little under the surface.
(2) This is an outdoor pool, in direct sunlight, with the pumps off during the day ---> convection currents. And the circulation system is off. This is most interesting because as the sun rises one would expect an asymmetric current to form based on which side of the pool got the most sun. Normally this would be, in the southern hemisphere, the south west corner. I would expect an upwelling there along the wall, with a much lesser current across the pool surface from SW to NE.
Effects of the current.
Head/tailwinds aren't normally an issue. The faster one swims the lesser the effect. If this were happening we would see it in differences between length splits (fyi "length"=50m and "lap"=100m, many confuse those terms). I think up/down-welling currents are more at play. Fast swimmers rely on very specific stroke patterns. Slight perturbations in the water can throw off a swimmer's stroke. Imagine swimming past a water jet or upwelling and your hand is pushed sideways. That can slow you down far more than fighting a slight current.
If I am correct, the greatest effect would be in the SW corner of the pool. Anyone know which lane that would be? In the footage, we should also see swimmers drifting (both left and right) when approaching that SW corner.
(1) It's an indoor pool.
(2) The pumps are kept on.
See those windows. This is an outdoor pool under a temporary structure. Sunlight (UV) is coming in and air is circulating. And if the the pumps are running, they aren't at full power during races. Often at such events officials will state that pumps are run when they are in fact off. This is a common conflict between the needs of the event (stable water) and local health codes that dictate that circulation pumps remain on. In a 50m pool, if they are on they aren't 'on' enough to keep things mixed.
[0]http://www.unrealitytv.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/olym...
Wouldn't be surprising either, the Rio Olympics as a whole seem to be a mess, and I doubt most pool builders even consider it.
As a Brazilian let me ask this: because Munich 72 and Atlanta 96 where so much better ? (hint: no terrorism in Rio)
Many respected "first world" journalists have also commented on the same pattern of people from richer countries condescending to poorer countries that host the Olympics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/opinion/brazils-uplifting-...
Because "tu quoque" is a lot more obnoxious than just calling something bad.
Rio is the government and other sponsors just plain failing to follow thru on commitments.
* When Rio was announced people said the venues wouldn't be ready on time. They were.
* When zika broke out people predicted an Olympic pandemic. Then came southern hemisphere winter and you're more likely to get zika in Florida than Rio.
* When media discovered pollution in Guanabara Bay people asked for cancellation of events out of health concerns. No event was cancelled and no evidence of health hazards.
* when a chemical imbalance turned a swimming pool green people called for cancellation. It turned out to be harmless algae.
* when American swimmers claimed to be robbed a media uproar denounced a security chaos. Turns out they lied to hide a visit to a brothel.
All of this is a continuation of a pattern. Rich countries freaked out with the Olympics in Beijing and Sochi too. Rio would have to endure the same.
Do you have a reference for this? I'm aware of the inconsistencies with the stories in this situation, but I've never seen a brothel mentioned anywhere.
He's conflating two separate events. It was the basketball players not the swimmers who "accidentally" visited a brothel: http://www.tmz.com/2016/08/05/team-usa-basketball-players-br...
And right here too.
Booing is not something invented and exclusive to third world countries or Brazil for that matter.
Hypocrisy much?
In any case, that fact that booing has happened in previous events I can accept, but that seems a false equivalence. I'm pointing out that to my knowledge, this is the first time it has happened with such vigour and insistence at a world wide sporting event. What is the point of the Olympics if not to overcome partisanship in the name of good sportsmanship? A lot of the Brazilian fans' behaviour seems to come from the worst of futbol hooliganism, which no-one could seriously defend, and their booing of Argentinians in particular shows an unwillingness to rise above regional rivalries even for the Olympics.
I find it quite disturbing accusing Brazilians of "booing" at sports event when you could and can see this in events such as US Open, Wimbledon and other "clean and gentlemany" sports when the opponent is from some other country than US or UK. Let's not get into more "dirtier" sports now where booing is de facto standard.
What exactly do you want to see from me that you can't find yourself?
Unless there was violence why would you even care?
It seems like the true competitors eat that stuff up. Is it just the difference between professionals and amateurs?
There's a reason the /r/apocalympics subteddit is so popular.
You must not be a bathroom door.
The feeling of messiness is generated by the vapid NBC coverage. The coverage of sports is so poor, I imagine that other, non-core coverage is garbage as well.
http://www.fina.org/content/sw-3-seeding-heats-semi-finals-a...
Finals are seeded 4,5,3,6,2,7,1,8 fastest-to-slowest.
Semifinals are circle seeded (two heats where b is the second heat) 4-b, 4-a, 5-b, 5-a, 3-b, 3-a etc.
Heats are circle seeded for the last (fastest) three heats, and then regular-seeded for the remaining heats.
Basically if the pool had a current, you'd expect to see more 'upsets' from the lanes with less current, or from the lanes with a positive current in the case of the 50m.
http://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1326/in-swimming-i...
Of course, the prestige conferred by the established allocation system should also be considered as a factor explaining preferences as well...
Most sports aren't really 'fair' per se. Making them fair wouldn't be cost effective, and wouldn't make for good TV. E.g. everyone knows that some lanes are faster than others in rowing due to the lack of wind screens around the venues. And that's not even to mention the people who spend ten years training only to get violently ill and unable to compete due to the water quality. The reality is that even at the highest levels of competition there is still a lot of luck.
It really depends on the sport. For instance, football (soccer) is very random, and this is amplified by the tournament format. But in many other sports, there is no suspens at all. Actually, it would be interesting to somehow evaluate the random factor for each sport.
For example people in Poland are still discussing over the beer whether we would have been world champions if only it hasn't been raining so heaviliy during Poland - West Germany semi-final in 1974.
P.S English is not my language and I'm pretty sure I messed up with conditionals, hope you still get what I meant in the last sentence.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/06/the-origin-o...
http://deadspin.com/map-what-every-country-calls-the-thing-w...
Change "hasn't" to "hadn't" and your conditional is perfect.
(If you're curious, you've made what I would consider a definiteness error three times -- I would say 'the ridiculous name "soccer"', 'discussing over beer', and 'the Poland - West Germany semi-final in 1974'. Those won't affect understanding and you give the impression of being very fluent; there are no other errors.)
Merely empirically determine the appropriate exponent to input for the pythagorean win percentage[1]. Baseball uses an exponent slightly under 2, while basketball uses an exponent slightly under 14. The higher the exponent, the less likely a poor team is to defeat a good team.
In fact this can be generalized to sports without points if you have some other way of estimating a team/player's "quality" normalized to 1 being "average" which is all the points-scored/points-allowed ratio does.
[edit]
Note that the Jamesian (points-scored/points-allowed) quality metric doesn't work as well in games where draws are common (e.g. soccer/football), and different quality metrics will yield different exponents, so do not allow apples-to-apples comparisons. For what it's worth, applying James's quality metric to league football yields an exponent of about 1.3[2], which is in line with the intuition of ranking these 3 sports from most to least luck per win:
Soccer, Baseball, Basketball
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_expectation
2: http://www.soccermetrics.net/soccer-pythagorean-theory/why-t...
That said, I still think fairness or at least perception of reasonable fairness is very important in high-level sports. No one is going to watch the games (or the ads as the GP pointed out) if they think the game's rigged.
Edit: Also you are right.
Oversimplifying it a bit. Imagine a swimmer swims 5m/s and the current adds/subtracts 1m/s. The pool is 50m. No current each length should take 10s. Going with the current takes 8.3s and going against the current takes 12.5 seconds. 100m takes 20.8s instead of 20s. Why?
While the benefit/detriment ratio is 50-50 in terms of distance, it's not 50-50 in terms of time. You spend less time benefiting from the current because you are going faster.
Alternatively, if the race was a fixed 10seconds in each direction you would go 60m and 40m, making it equivalent.
Lengths, not laps. A lap in running brings the runner around the track and back to where they started. A lap in swimming is from one side to the other and back again (100m). A length, from one side of the pool to the other, is 50m or half of a lap. If there is a current one length is different from another other, but the laps are identical.
I few tenths of a second over 800 or 1500 meters should be (a few tenths of a second) / (800/50) or (a few tenths of a second) / (1500/50) when scaling it to the much smaller 50m, should it not? A few hundredths of a second, or even a few thousandths of a second, given that there's an order of magnitude difference.
However the 50m is just one way, so you get the entire effect with nothing cancelling it out at all. There's also then a much bigger difference between lane 1 and 8.
If everyone did two lengths, then lanes 1 and 8 would have been penalised a bit (faster one way, slower the other) but they'd have done the same as each other. Lanes 4&5 would have been a bit better.
Now picture just one length. Lane 1 never has to swim against the current, while lane 8 has to fight it all the way.
Try to catch a replay if you can.
Brazilians are disappointing me.
http://www.newshub.co.nz/world/us-swimmers-lied-about-muggin...
Lochte certainly lied about the details, but two wrongs don't make a right, and only one of these wrongs carries up to a 20 year sentence with a 5 year minimum, at least in the US.