In China, the goal is not to win gold medal for you, but for the country. The other girl has the higher win rate against the opponent at the final, so Ye was ordered to bunt.
A player being "better" than another one is not a transitive property.
In many games, due to different play styles you can have A>B, B>C and C>A, just like in rock-paper-scissors.
Chance is a completely separate topic, but also has a simple answer. Chance doesn't mean that everyone has the same chance. If one player has 40% odds and the other has 60% odds, you want the 60% player to compete.
"I saw how the Chinese were playing rather strangely in many matches and for many years, so the new information doesn't shock me. Already back then we were upset. But if you ignore the deeply unethical way of doing things, China was actually acting rather wisely. I could never beat Gong Zhichao, and I much preferred playing against Ye Zhaoying. There's no doubt that the Chinese knew this, and that they had a much better chance of winning gold by getting Gong Zhichao into the final."
Which is why most sports have a variety of formats or phases to address that. The most typical being a regulation season where there is a winner at the culmination. Sometimes those then feed into the more bracket-like format.
The idea that any one of these methods is the path objectively measures the one true best player/team is a fallacy. That any particular award within the same sport is deemed more prestigious than another is largely down to marketing.
I don't really care to attack the structure too, but if the structure is so important that it should be kept, then there still is a good argument that really, arguments about statistics is really not relevant (which is half of what people are arguing with me about). However, a flat structure of just games is specifically the right place to make statistical arguments and judgements because it is naturally ergodic.
Says who? This is strictly down to prestige.
Btw, association football is played at the Summer Olympics. But you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's the highest competition for football. By prestige, that's the FIFA World Cup. By skill, it's perhaps the UEFA Champions League. [0]
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_at_the_Summer_Olympic...
[0] I don't know enough about football to say for sure that the Champions League has the highest skill on display. But even the Champions League has way more prestige than the Summer Olympics for football.
Olympics are more "meh" and not something people really cared about.
Plus the professional teams are have intentionally developed rosters. In the Olympics, if it turns out that Canada has produced the two best goalies this year, then the world's second best goalie will be benched unless there's an injury.
I don’t think it is. People don’t really care about the olympics. It’s a far cry from the FIFA World Cup where basically every bars broadcast the games.
Football is the most popular sport in the world and used to be absent from the Olympic and is now present in a mostly uninteresting format. Tennis is fun but not taken that seriously now that it doesn’t carry ATP points.
It’s fairly important for swimming, track and field and the other sports people never watch otherwise.
Realistically, round robin would take way too long.
However you are right in general that player exhaustion and logistics play a part as well.
We just need to keep in mind that the 'tournament winner' is mostly there for entertainment (both of the audience and of the participants), and doesn't necessarily correlate all that well with 'absolute best player overall'.
By creating a big prize (either money or prestige) you create incentive to win and the new definition of best shows up (the one most likely to win this title).
And even in the same sport you can have conflicting goals. E.g. should one try to maximize chance of winning a single prestigious event or get equally good results through the whole season?
At the same time I like analyzing the tournaments from the perspective if the best team (according to a criterion that either players or spectators care about) has the highest chance to win.
Knockout tournaments have this property usually.
And I declare that 'liking' to be 'entertainment'. Might be a pretty broad definition of entertainment.
This seems a decent compromise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badminton_at_the_2020_Summer_O...
No. If the only bit of information you have is a single game, then yes, you'd be right to assume the victor was the better player. But in an iterated game, you can easily get into a state where regardless of the outcome of a single game you're still pretty confident that one player is better than the other. It would take many games to tip your estimate. But you don't have many games, you just have the one coming up. What you don't want to have happen is a minor fluke, causing the worse player (estimated win chance 25%) to move on to the finals where they're more likely to lose.
There could also be factors that cause the odds to not follow a simple ordering rule. It could be that player A will likely beat C, B will likely lose to C, and yet B will likely beat A, due to playstyle or something.
But the former thing is more likely what's going on. A beats C is 50% odds, B beats C is 30% odds, A beats B is 70% odds, you want A or B to win and they're playing next, followed by the winner playing against C. B winning can absolutely happen, but it sucks for you if it does.
Do you think the better player always wins? What's your explanation for the world series being best of 7?
When people play sports, there is always a similar sort of matchup, where different people matchup differently with each other.
Play style matching matters.
Separately, in video games definitely the concept of winrate stacking/smurfing. Definitely not at the olympic level, but wr% does not necessarily mean a specific win.
> But if you ignore the deeply unethical way of doing things, China was actually acting rather wisely. I could never beat Gong Zhichao, and I much preferred playing against Ye Zhaoying. There's no doubt that the Chinese knew this, and that they had a much better chance of winning gold by getting Gong Zhichao into the final.