Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

I can't comment on how Peacock presents their sports in a way that causes spoilers since I don't have it. But I do watch the 4 Grand Slam tennis tournaments every year, and I hate the way those are presented when offered on a streaming service like Amazon or Eurosport. If I start up a match that shows it's only 90-110 minutes long, then I know immediately that whoever wins the first set will win the match. You can also guess which matches only go to 4 sets as well when looking at the time. Whats worse is Amazon was doing this thing where they would split the the match into part 1 and part 2 if it was over 2 hours long, so again you know immediately whether a match ends early or not.

These are from the same section of the post:

> 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.

> Every single sport can be watched on Peacock, which is free to me and only $5/month for people without Comcast. Something like this exists in most countries. However, what you watch has forced commercial breaks -- and if you fast forward over a large section past a commercial break you must watch it -- and you can't really fast forward, only seek around.

Dude, pay the $10 for one month for ad-free Peacock. It's worth it, and much better than the author's alternative.

I know that this is completely a personal preference, but for me, there's no point to watching most sports events delayed. Sure I'd watch a clip if something remarkable happened, but the point for me is to be there (remotely) as it happens. I wouldn't have re-watched the whole women's CAN-USA gold medal game the next day if I hadn't stayed up till 1:30 watching it, I would have at most just watched the highlights. The one personal exception to that is Formula 1, where I'll go to great lengths to avoid spoilers for a race that I couldn't watch live.

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.