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A good example would be Elizabeth Swaney[0] who somehow found her way into the 2018 Winter Olympics simply by showing up at qualifying.

In order to qualify for the Olympics, athletes needed to place in the top 30 at either a FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup event or FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, and score a minimum of 50.00 FIS points.[9] Swaney achieved this by attending competitions with fewer than thirty participants,[6] with one event in China having fifteen (in which she placed thirteenth). Thirteen of her top 30 finishes were a result of her showing up, not falling, and recording a score

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Swaney

This has been my analysis of high level competition as a whole. It isn't about who is the best, as in peak performance. It is about consistently making the least amount of mistakes.

You can break records, or you can out de-mistake the competition.

I disagree categorically with this.

In baseball, the team that commits the most unforced errors tends to lose the game, but the team that scores the most runs always wins.

Usain Bolt doesn't have 8 gold medals and 3 world records because he has perfect form (I just learned that he has scoliosis, leading to "imperfect" form, whether that made him faster or slower than he would otherwise be is apparently a subject of some debate), but because he's fast. It is frequently the case that the best at something defines "perfect" form. And anyway, Bolt doesn't run marathons, because he cannot sustain that kind of performance for 2 hours.

I hear what you're saying, I can't count the number of times I've seen truly bonkers tricks in freestyle skiing and snowboard competitions, from people who screwed up their 2nd or 3rd run, or couldn't stitch together a coherent run around that one trick, and so came in near the middle of the rankings. But the winners were not significantly less impressive, just blunder-free. A lot of time, the winners were the peak performers moment-to-moment but sustained that performance for much longer.

In other words... being Iceman is better than being Maverick.

There's a more unfortunate interpretation, which is that whoever can afford the travel and time to not be at work is more likely to qualify. I know a fencer who was in his mid 20s consistently placing top 3 in every tournament he went to and was Olympics material (based on who he was competing with and which of them did go to the Olympics). However, he didn't make the cut because the points system rewarded presence at more tournaments higher than placement and he had a job to keep showing up at.

"These are surely not true when you're at a high level"

I don't know what you mean by high level, but I suspect that avoiding mistakes continues to be very important regardless of level in most things.

I play Marvel Snap in the top 1000 and at that level most of the games comes down to whoever makes a mistake first loses.

>This observation applies only to amateur tennis. In professional tennis it’s just the opposite: 80% of the rallies are won rather than lost, as unforced errors are infrequent. This is true in chess as well, as high-level players don’t blunder, and thus it really is that litany of other skills that results in high standings.

I think this means at a high level, you're already not blundering. So you need to actually do something MORE in order to win. You need to force your oponent to lose, and not just play "OK" and wait for them to make a mistake.

Although pros do still make clear errors and even misses that may not be classed as an error (but are at the professional level) might outweigh the brilliant shots when it comes to the win. I suspect this is why some games are 'best of'. The real aficionados sense a low error rate and then it's more purely about the big, brilliant plays - and that's not a common event.

French Open tennis. Seems like the winners, (eg Rafa Nadal who has one of the greatest sporting records in any sport, anywhere there), consistently hit ground strokes from the baseline, back over the net and deep enough in play. From that point the opponent self-destructs.

Ok differs from wimbeldon where guys play Hamlet while playing in the final (Kyrios, Becker, McEnroe, etc. etc.) and can win doing it with outrageous aggression and magic winners, but the French Open is certainly "High Level" Rafa at the French? How many matches was his longest winning streak? 36 matches, 5 titles in 6 years? Unfathomable sustained excellence.

I don't follow tennis closely enough to understand the difference. What makes the eventual winners at Wimbledon play more aggressively than at the French Open? Is it due to the environment (clay or grass perhaps) or some sort of cultural thing?

Grass is faster, meaning for any given shot over the net you have less time to respond. This encourages attacking behaviour.

Clay is slower, meaning even off fast, angled, difficult-to-reach shots the ball bounces higher and slower, meaning you have time to get to it, thus prolonging rallies and points.

But beyond that, it's not just that players choose to play more aggressive on grass - a given shot is more aggressive on grass.

This is why the serve is more powerful on grass - you open the point with a powerful shot, and on grass that's harder to return.

See rally length differences here: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1246341537753006082

Fascinating! Thanks for the explanation.

Note Rafa has also won wimbeldon on grass, against Federer at his unbelievable peak (in the midst of winning it 8 times), in 5 sets, in the final, finishing in the dark. And won again 2 years later to put those trophies with his 14 French Open titles.

I'd go even farther than that and suspect that in many areas avoiding blunders gets more important climbing to higher levels.

Just the other day I explained this to my daughter:

In our school system a 1 is the best grade a 6 the worst.

Maintaining a 2.0 average is kind of easy. When you blunder and get a 3, all you have to so is getting a 1 eventually to compensate.

Maintaining a 1.0 average is much, much harder, because you have to write 1s consistently without any exception and no way to fix a blunder(*).

In many systems there is a hard ceiling of what you can achieve. When your performance is measured as an average, this makes the system more unforgiving for blunders the closer you are to the ceiling.

(*) Technically, in our school system this is not entirely correct, because I think you could theoretically get 0.7s. The overall point still stands, because there is a hard and positive limit.

Watch any top tennis game and unforced errors and %age first serves often tells the story of the match

> Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does.

I think this is absolutely true at the lower levels, but once you hit a baseline of consistency, the faster drivers do win races by simply being faster. It can be maddening them trying to recreate their line but still being an entire second per lap slower. But when racing closer to the beginner level, simply being able to complete every lap at a consistent pace does indeed put you at a massive advantage over others.

In the context of startups, everyone's at beginner level.

For auto racing (whether sim or real), the #1 rule has always been "To finish first, first you must finish", which, as I see it, is a direct "make no blunders before worrying about a podium finish".

> In the context of startups, everyone's at beginner level.

Why would this be true? There are plenty of startup veterans that have been doing it for years.

You're quite correct, it was an oversight on my part. It's too late to edit my post now, but at least this thread will be a record of me disagreeing with my original point :-)

Yeah but getting consistent is the bar you need to get to first before you can even be considered decent.

Being 1s faster than everyone best lap but having ~2s lap-to-lap inconsistency will make you lose every time.

A similar dynamic bears out in a lot of games. For example, in most RTS games, you win at lower levels by simply out-macroing your opponent. Only when you are on equal footing later do tactics and strategy become important, despite those ostensibly being the core focus of the genre.

> These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus.

It is trivially true at all levels - anything that leads you to lose a game can be construed as a mistake, so if you make no mistakes and you lose then the game has been solved (which Chess has not been) or was unwinnable. The mistakes just get smaller and fewer and fewer people can recognise them.

In golf, reducing bogies helps more than increasing birdies, so same idea there