Designing Olympic sports for the spectator
ideas.4brad.com
ideas.4brad.com
> As noted above, I am not a fan of judged sports. While they are not going away, I think there could be merit in moving towards computer judging -- ie. like the clock -- for many of them.
> One of the tragedies of sports like figure skating is that because people are pushed to the limit of what they can do, the winner ends up being the one who didn't fall. In a contest between one man who can jump a quad axel 80% of the time, but then tries it and fails, he loses to the man who can't do it at all and never tries.
That does appear to be a real problem in modern Olympic figure skating. But my first guess would be that it's caused by the move away from purely subjective judging, which penalized falls harshly, to objective technical scoring, which doesn't. Failing a triple axel is almost as good as executing a flawless double axel. So falls are incredibly common now.
This actually reminds me of complaints I saw about having the THC content of marijuana varieties listed. Suddenly (according to the complaints) that's all customers cared about, so they'd buy varieties that were worse and end up less happy.
The problem with jumps is that it discrimnates heavily by body type, while "figure skating" does not. I mean in compulsory figures the one who practiced longer and better wins. In jumps – the one who has smaller body wins. Kamila Valieva at age 20 will be 5 years more experienced and stronger than Kamila Valieva at age 15, and as much as talented, but she will not have a slightest chance to win herself at 15. How does it even make sense to people?
To rotate 4*360 degrees in 0.6 seconds you really benefit from smaller sum of radiuses of mass distribution. This is how female figure skating became competition of 15 pre-puberty girls.
With this overfocus on number of rotations, international figure skating losing fans and members like crazy. Arenas are half empty even on major competitions and international federation is wondering why revenues are plummeting.
But the tragedy is even deeper. Most older coaches in many countries are still from the generation who did "compulsory figures". They remember it, they remember how to teach the basics, although rarely do because everyone wants jumps as instructed by ISU rules. But new generation of coaches don't even know about figures, let alone how to tech them. And the older coaches already, you know, are dying. And we losing this knowledge. We're loosing roots of figure skating as a community.
But figures are instrumental part of figure skating, and really important to perform jumps efficiently.
Sports progress. As a marathoner myself, I find it interesting that the world records at the time that they ditched compulsory figures wouldn't even get you into the Olympic trials today. The compulsory figures just wouldn't be of any interest any more.
Perhaps the compulsories could be re-invented for today's more skilled competitors. But they still wouldn't be very interesting to watch: they show precision but aren't dynamic or creative.
You're right that the focus on strength-to-weight ratio does skew the sport weirdly. Gymnastics suffered the same problem, and had to put in age limits which substantially altered the way the sport is practiced. (And if I remember correctly there was still a controversy recently about the exact age of a top-placed competitor.)
Are jumps?
It wasn't hard for skaters in 1930s to do all figures too. The hard part was to skate the same figure 3 times so perfectly that judges would see only one trace instead of 3 and no snow at the turn points.
Mastering art of skating to that level required tons of dedication and concentration and skill. That skill later could be used for other "free" elements like jumps or spin entrances or spirals. But figures were the building blocks.
What I'm saying that modern skaters almost skip this part, dismissing it as "too easy" right off the bat. As a result if you look at top skaters in 80s and top skater in 2022 – they're skating skills hard to compare. Also, people were trying some crazy jumps back then. Here is a practice video of Tiffany Chin doing triple axel in around 1982. [1]
But I do agree that format of compulsory figures competition is not set in stone. I'm actually working on the IMU sensor embedded into the skate and exploring different on ice visualization tech. Idea is to make figures skating sexy, find new ways to visualize/augment it and experiment with a new ways to compete in figures that is watchable and exciting.
By the way, the progress in skaters' levels was largely due to new scoring system (IJS) in 2006, and not from abolishing figures. Also this "progress" led to rapid increase of jump attempts needed for success (especially in quads), which led to dramatic increase of repetitive stress injuries in skaters. I'm not sure how to design incentive system for scoring in a way to incentivie skaters to explore limits, while keeping them in a sane zone so they don't break their bodies all the time.
Olympic rant #2: Fake "team" events. We now see a lot of events promoted as team events where the team members need never have practiced together and don't even meet each other at the venue necessarily. These are team events where just add the scores of various competitors, or "relays" where there is no baton, nobody touches. Sadly to me, this has become a common form for mixed events. I have been wanting to see more mixed events, but I wanted to see mixed events where the men and women actually work together, like pairs skating or mixed doubles tennis or curling.
It's very easy to make a mixed team event in a real team sport. You can make a rule like "3 men and 3 women on the ice."
I understand that in some sports, like swimming, you can't have a baton, but it would be nice if they had to touch or something. In the downhill sports they can't easily physically meet. Mixed team snowboard cross had the man set a time, and that controlled when the woman was let out of the gate (later.) But all this is better than the sports where you just add scores and they aren't really a team at all. These events are just an excuse for nationalism. They will always be won by big countries which have the size and budget to send a group of high level athletes good enough to get the best average score.
I don't know much about the background of the author, but I feel that they understate the challenges in doing AI-based scoring for figure skating. They mention being close to the "ideal form", and say that it might be easier than expected to judge the artistic elements, but don't really support this. Figure skating is an art, and judging it in any way where the artistry isn't at a similar importance to the technical aspects defeats the purpose.
I do acknowledge the point on needing to be skilled to tell apart tricks. The figure skating pundits would immediately recognize each figure skating trick, while I was left, at best, counting the number of rotations. I just don't know enough to see which edge of the skate the use, or how much toe there is.
Overall, I can't agree with a lot of the author's points. Without tripling each event (to gain a larger sample size), and radically changing the sports in play, there isn't much you can change. Sure you could drop all bracket games and do a full double-round-robins, but I feel that that would hurt the games far more than it would help.
> The big problem is spoilers. If you are not very careful, if you go to the Peacock site you will get spoilers. For example, if the medal games are in your list, they change the title of the entry to be the names of the people playing -- spoiling the semi-finals for you.
The UX for online sports is terrible. One example is soccer matches on ESPN, they will display highlight bars on the timeline when something exciting happens, like a goal or a penalty. It’s destroys the suspense for me because I see the markers and know something is going to happens.
They also show a progress bar with the length, which makes it easy to know if the game went into extra time. Eg. One team goes up 2 goals early but the recording time is longer then you know the other team comes back to force extra time.
Dude, pay the $10 for one month for ad-free Peacock. It's worth it, and much better than the author's alternative.
So commercial free Peacock would only get so far, and downloading the stream and playing it locally is still better. If you do it right, you can even do standard DVR -- watch the stream while it is downloading, so you are only a short distance behind live, and avoid spoilers.
However, I believe indoor skydiving is making good progress with their latest bid.
IOC: “too boring, viewers won’t want to watch that.”
“What about skydiving without a parachute?”
IOC: “Now that’s worth watching!”
It's basically what I always wanted when spectating the Olympics. I can choose to watch the practice runs for the alpine downhill. Somebody else, in the same house even, can watch figure skating for days. It's like we're living in the future!
and maybe other broadcasters are doing a better job of surfacing things than CBC is, but as a canadian i'm restricted to only CBC's format, if a friend in another country shares a clip with me i can't watch it.
But the English commentators are generally really good at motivating the sense of action and drama. It's especially helpful when they point out specific aspects of an athlete's technique or strategy that a casual viewer might otherwise not be aware of, or that might not be easy to perceive on video. For me at least, this makes it easier to appreciate the action more and keeps the interest level high.
The main point I want to praise this article for is that sport should be designed. Most sport are not, they just emerged from free play activities and for the last 70+ years are mostly being changed reactively as a response to professionalization, tragic events and TV requirements (as TV rights are the major source of revenue for many international federations).
There is no book or theory on how to design the sport. How to choose tradeoffs to satisfy different stakeholders. The closest thing I could find is actually body of knowledge from computer game designers – how to keep users engaged, how to ensure the incentive structure is aligned, how to fit into requirements of the game/tournaments etc. Because of this I suspect eSports will outperform many traditional sports soon in terms of member base by a lot.
In traditional sport if you want to know how a smallest change in rules will alter the whole game – you out of luck. The only way is just to push hard for the change and watch. Here is a great read about cascading changes in hockey provoked by tiny changes of the equipment regulations. [1] Or how suboptimal incentive structure in Badminton tournament resulted in weird incentives to loose [2]
But sports officials and decision makers are often ex-athletes themselves. They carry too much burden of attachement to particular styles or traditions, and very few are trained in system design or math or economics. Sports industry is very conservative.
Take athletics pole vault mentioned in the article. How does it differ from long jump? Long and high jump/pole vault are jumps and the goal is find "the best jumper". But historically it was easy to measure distance and hard to measure height. So high jump/pole vault uses this progressive system, and long jump does not. Why? Tradition, even though progressive system is suboptimal, because athlete becomes more and more tired towards increasing the height (and doesn't show their true best). Also the winner is always the one who failed last, which is a bit disappointing but might be more engaging for the audience.
I'm not even starting with figure skating judging. In a 100 years it moved from literally voting for style to measuring individual elements. The problem is that for measuring it uses biological sensors called "humans". As with many imperfect sensors they use sensor fusion approaches (7-9 judges in a row + trimmed mean), but the nature of the error and bias still makes a lot of room for subjective judging and building coalitions (especially from judges in ex-Soviet bloc). Japanese IceScope system is one step forward to start augmenting judges with objective numbers but it's really primitive (2 4K cameras measuring skaters' jump as a pixel movement and only can assess length and speed of a jump). Olympics used FreeD system, which is impressive but way out of price range for most federations in the world.
Anyway, this topic is huge. Would be grateful for any links or papers that you think might be relevant to sports design.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/hockey-g... [2] https://agtb.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/olympic-badminton-is-n...
As I wrote, not all sports should be for the spectator. But if the purpose of the competition is to be watched, as is the case in the Olympics, that is what to design for.
Television emerged much later than most of Olympic sports, but affect many sports a lot, especially the one where international federation rips the TV rights fees (some sports delegate it to the local organizing federations and care less). For example, compulsory figures disappeared from figure skating largely because they didn't "sell" on TV and wasn't exciting to watch. Or table tennis ball got bigger to slow down the game and make it more appealing for TV.
And yet I'd love to see some research on theory of sports where spectators engagement was part of the model. For example in track cycling there is a weird discipline of individual sprint, where, as name suggests, the one who gets faster to the finish line wins. But here is the catch – they don't care about time, only about who crosses the line first. Given that airpressure behind fast-moving rider is low and saves around 30% of energy, it creates an incentive to be the second most of the time. Which leads to the weird interplay between cyclists where the literally stand still sometimes instead of rushing to the finish line. The even weirdest part is that this moment of suspension and speeding up like crazy after standing still – most exciting moment for spectators.
If we could have a framework to plug in all the requirements and constraints of the specific sport, and choose the trade-offs we want (including interest for viewers as you mentioned) based on model and not just intuition or loudest voice in the federation...
But it was still better because it was a race, and you could see how far behind the others were. But a nerd is going to love that race.
It's just not the same when they race with the clock, and of course it takes a long longer. It is the most fair, which is what you want from the standard of making an academic measurement of athletics, and that is valuable. But in terms of spectator excitement per unit time, it's just too far down the list.