American TV Neglected the Saddest Story in the Olympics

But there are questions to ask, and lessons to be learned for startups, and for entrepreneurs in general. Here are some of the questions raised for me. Perhaps you can think of more:

What processes do you do by hand that could be automated? The timing was done by hand - a notoriously error-prone process. relentless automation can systematically weed out systematic errors, provided they are properly monitored and tested. Then you can forget them, and let them do their job.

Do you have the right people doing the right jobs? The report is that the time-keeper was an inappropriately chosen volunteer. It's notoriously easy to leave a job in the hands of someone who may not get it right when it's important. And just when isn't it important? (actually, sometimes)

Do you have the right error reporting processes in place? The team lodged an appeal, and clearly that didn't go anywhere. Why not? The entire bout could surely have been replayed and the timing checked. The result, in truth, should never have been in doubt, and could easily have been overturned.

Do you have the right corrective measures in place? After reviewing the bout, surely it should be straight-forward to correct the result. When you have a mistake reported, can you roll-back and make it right?

And finally (for me - perhaps you have more points to make), always, always consider the individual. This poor woman was left distraught on the piste, unable to leave, in full view of the audience, in tears, her lifetime's work hanging in the balance, out of her control.

So let me ask - how well do you look after your users?

A normal bout goes for nine minutes or until someone scores 15 touches. In this case, time expired with a score of 5-5.

In the event of a tie, one fencer is randomly selected to have "priority" and the bout resumes in sudden death for one minute. Whoever scores in that minute wins. However, if time expires again, then the fencer with priority is declared the winner by default.

The reason for priority is to force one competitor to be the attacker. Epee fencing in particular favors defense, which is why the score is routinely so low. The priority rule is a way of preventing passivity in overtime.

For this bout, the Korean fencer was given priority. The clock ran down to one second and the two fencers "doubled", meaning they hit simultaneously. In overtime, a double touch is annulled; nobody scores. The clock had one second remaining, so the bout resumed. The fencers doubled again.

But oddly enough the clock still had one second listed! So the fencers had to try it again. They immediately doubled. At this point, it looked like the clock had run to zero, and it really isn't clear what was actually happening with the time keeper. Eventually, the referee reset the clock back to one second!

Finally, the German fencer scored a single touch and was declared the victor. The appeal from the Korean team is that the clock should never have been reset to one second; the numerous double touches beforehand had been more than a second long.

The committee that overseas the referee (the Directoire Technique) refused to overrule. From personal experience, the DT never overrules.

At any rate, the entire fencing community is really upset about this. Many of us were routing for Korea today in the team women's epee event because of this.

> the timekeeper for the event was a 15 year old British volunteer

Wow, this is just absurd. Does anyone know on what basis the decision not to award the Korean fencer the victory was made? This isn't even a situation in which a do-over would have been necessary - the correct result was obvious.

And I can't help but feel that if this had happened to an American fencer, the decision would have been very different.

I predict this will happen again. Perhaps the referee will get a little box that, when a button is pressed, simultaneously shouts "Allez" in an authentic French accent and starts the clock. If the clock doesn't start, the referee will stop the bout, debug the technology, and reset the clock. (Welcome to fencing, where one's kit of electronics parts is almost as important as one's weapon. ;)

Now for anecdotes:

I fenced saber (terribly) back when saber wasn't electrified at the NCAA level - which is to say: there was no electric circuit to detect contact between Fencer A's saber and Fencer B's target area.

(Saber got electric scoring last, I suspect, because the head and arms are part of the target area and you need conductive gloves and masks, which cost money, particularly because it's harder to share gloves and masks between fencers than it is to share a simple mesh vest.)

Moreover, at a regular-season NCAA fencing match, there's no budget for five impartial judges per bout, and no spare unaffilated fencers sitting around. So the rule was that we had to make touch/no touch calls in matches involving our own teammates. This was, to say the least, a no-win situation for a beginner. I quickly learned to pretend I was half-blind and clueless – which, alas, did not require much acting talent – and round off all non-obvious calls in favor of my teammate. To do otherwise was to earn the undying enmity of one's own team.

The stress drove me crazy. In retrospect, I should have demanded to be switched to foil or epee – epee, in particular, with its electronic scoring and lack of right-of-way rules, was a gloriously straightforward sport; though I would still have been a lousy fencer at least I would have lost for clear reasons – but instead I fled after one season.

If there's a moral to this story, it's this: There is no way that this incident is the most unfair thing that has happened in the history of Olympic fencing. ;) They must have been really, really good sports back in the old days.

I agree this was a really bad referee call, though.

That's also not strictly speaking true. The match was even at this point. Lam had previously been selected by /lottery/ to win in the case of an even standing at the end of the one-minute-long extension to the match. So, she would have won had that second passed, but she was not leading.

Clearly this item has been heavily flagged. There are currently 20 items above it on the front page, and of them, 10 are older and have fewer points. The ranking algorithm says those items should rank lower. The fact that they don't indicates that this item has been flagged.

It would seem there are those on HN who consider this inappropriate. Enough that they don't simply ignore it, but that they take the effort to flag it (although one click is hardly much of an effort)

But the lessons to learn from this are there to be seen by those who would take the time. That's why I wrote my extensive commentary, and that's why a few people also commented in support.

Perhaps I should have written this up as a blog post so that I could have:

* controlled the title (since the moderators are now so aggressive on this)

* made the commentary the first thing to read, rather than the story.

Perhaps a lesson to take away from the story of the submission (rather than the story of the fencer) is that there is a vocal minority on HN who will flag things regardless of whether there are lessons to be learned.

I'm disappointed by that, although not really surprised.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ktlincoln/an-olympic-fencer-refuses-...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/live-video/p00w2wzb (segment #3)

If you don't have access to it, the salient points of the match are:

48:25, the "sudden death" round is started due to non-combativity or timeouts on the previous rounds. Shin is given "priority" based on the toss of a coin, which means at the end of a minute if no single hits have been scored, she'll win. Shin has been playing much more defensively or tactically all match, so this maintains the tempo up to this point.

49:02, a double-touch happens with 24s left on the clock. Double-touches (ones that occur within 1/25th of a second of each other) are not scoring, so play resumes.

49:27, another double-touch with 15s on the clock. Shin plays very defensively and scores the majority of her points by evasion and counter-attack, but uses up a lot of the piste (the area the fencers are permitted in), so the referees check that she didn't overstep it.

50:09, another double-touch with 9s left on the clock.

50:24, another double-touch with 5s left on the clock. Heidemann isn't scoring a single-touch with her attack, but she's driving Shin toward the back line where she'll lose if she oversteps.

50:48, another double-touch, 4s left on the clock.

51:03, another double-touch happens with 1s on the clock.

51:18, Heidemann immediately attacks the moment the beep occurs for another double-touch with 1s left on the clock. The commentators are bemused that this takes less than a second but to my eye it's pretty reasonable.

51:20, Heidemann and Shin go en guard, with Heidemann repeatedly being warned by the referee not to take a position too close to Shin (the call of "distance" from the ref).

51:39, another double-touch, again with 1s left on the clock. The commentators are wondering about a technical malfunction at this point, but as Heinemann takes her position the clock actually clicks down to 0s. The referee notifies Shin and Heidemann that the clock will be set to a full one second. The Korean coach comes out to argue but is overruled.

52:56, Heidemann scores the single-touch she needs to advance.

Resetting the clock to 1s is actually unusual, if I remember right, and probably shouldn't have happened - I suspect that this was the mistake by the timekeeper (which shouldn't be held against them, Olympic timekeeping is not a "best-effort" thing). It's hard to say who "should have won" the match - Heidemann certainly played a more aggressive and interesting game but Shin's conversion so many of these into double-touches or even points for her are exemplary. As another poster points out, I suppose the real answer is to voice recognition software start the clock on "allez".

Lastly, I just wanted to salute Shin's courage and dignity in coming on to play the bronze match, even though she must have known she had no chance to win the medal. Even having rewatched the match in slow-motion half a dozen times, I have a hard time feeling convinced that the right decision was made - from her perspective she must have felt absolutely robbed.

For the OP story: if that young woman's worst possible result if the error had not occurred was a bronze, it would have been good if the international Olympic committee could have firmly pulled their heads out of their asses and given her a bronze medal. It would hurt no one if two bronze medals were awarded.

In the men's team semi final, Peter Joppich fought the final match against Yūki Ōta. In the extended time, Joppich scored a single hit which was apparently not counted because Joppich obscured his vest with his mask. Another double hit which to me and the commentator seemed like an attack by Joppich then (after a few minutes of discussion between the referees) was counted for Ōta, leading to sudden victory for Japan.

So, cheers to karma!

This seems the crucial point, and without having it specified it is hard to tell if this is a very serious oversight or very minor aspect. If Heidemann had 1.01 seconds instead of 1.0 to land a hit, this would be very minor. Whereas if Heidemann had a full minute of extra time, this would be major.

I'm not doing any extra research since this isn't too important to me -- but some crucial context is very clearly missing here.

This is the best I could find: http://shinalamandtheinfinitesadness.blogspot.com/2012/08/sh...