Designing Olympic sports for the spectator • Hacker News Board

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#21

Post by bradtemp » Fri, Feb 18, 2022, 8:57 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #6

> 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 wor…

My error. I thought I had the premium service as an Xfinity customer, and the ads were just showing up because these were sports recorded live. I definitely would have done that knowing. Well, almost definitely. Streaming DVR is just a shadow of what local disk DVR is. I can seek instantly at distances I configure. I can fast forward and see what's happening. I can do 3x fast forward that's perfectly smooth, and 2x fast forward with pitch adjusted audio -- that's so nice for a lot of sports or for boring sections of certain sports.

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.

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#22

Post by jfengel » Fri, Feb 18, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

divan wrote: post #13

thaumasiotes wrote: post #4

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 be…

The real tragedy of figure skating is that there is no figure skating anymore. It's called "figure skating" because the primary skill was "skating" and skaters were drawing "figures". It was called "compulsory figures" and it was a big part of competition. The fraction of overall score for figures has changed from 60% to 40% and then to 0% (in 1990). While "free skating" part became mostly a competition of the jumps.…

I was discussing this with a figure skater the other day, who had never even heard of the compulsory figures. We looked it up, and in her opinion there was no point to them because they were far, far, far below the level of any even moderately competitive skater.

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.)

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#23

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Feb 18, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #22

divan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real tragedy of figure skating is that there is no figure skating anymore. It's called "figure skating" because the primary skill was "skating" and skaters were drawing "figures". It was called "compulsory figures" and it was a big part of competition. The fraction of overall score for figures has changed from 60% to 40% and then to 0% (in 1990). While "free skating" part became mostly a competition of the jumps.…

I was discussing this with a figure skater the other day, who had never even heard of the compulsory figures. We looked it up, and in her opinion there was no point to them because they were far, far, far below the level of any even moderately competitive skater. 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…

> 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.

Are jumps?

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#24

Post by divan » Fri, Feb 18, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

bradtemp wrote: post #19

divan wrote: post #11

oh boy, glad to see those thoughts are on HN, but it barely scratched the surface of the problem. It's a special topic of interest for me, as I'm currently trying to reform sports in my country (figure skating in particular) and involved with number of projects (software and hardware) for sports. The main point I want to praise this article for is that sport should be designed. Most sport are not, they just emerged f…

While computer camera/laser judged pole vault/high jump would certainly be possible, and much quicker, they would be different in that the visible bar clearly creates a target in the mind of the athlete. It also has the advantage I talked about -- the spectator can immediately see, with no clock, judge or computer to aid them, if they cleared the bar. As I wrote, not all sports should be for the spectator. But if the…

Right, but that's also true for the long jump. Why not use progressive approach for the distance? (I'm not advocating, just raising question to show that there is no design involved, mostly tradition)

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...

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#25

Post by divan » Fri, Feb 18, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #22

divan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real tragedy of figure skating is that there is no figure skating anymore. It's called "figure skating" because the primary skill was "skating" and skaters were drawing "figures". It was called "compulsory figures" and it was a big part of competition. The fraction of overall score for figures has changed from 60% to 40% and then to 0% (in 1990). While "free skating" part became mostly a competition of the jumps.…

I was discussing this with a figure skater the other day, who had never even heard of the compulsory figures. We looked it up, and in her opinion there was no point to them because they were far, far, far below the level of any even moderately competitive skater. 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…

> We looked it up, and in her opinion there was no point to them because they were far, far, far below the level of any even moderately competitive skater.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE9pApU53W0

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#26

Post by bradtemp » Sat, Feb 19, 2022, 3:38 AM UTC

divan wrote: post #24

bradtemp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While computer camera/laser judged pole vault/high jump would certainly be possible, and much quicker, they would be different in that the visible bar clearly creates a target in the mind of the athlete. It also has the advantage I talked about -- the spectator can immediately see, with no clock, judge or computer to aid them, if they cleared the bar. As I wrote, not all sports should be for the spectator. But if the…

Right, but that's also true for the long jump. Why not use progressive approach for the distance? (I'm not advocating, just raising question to show that there is no design involved, mostly tradition) 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 federat…

Strategy is valued by a lot of viewers, myself included. As I pointed out the victory by the mathematician Anna Kiesenhofer in cycling was amazing to see, even though there was no dramatic race, because she used more math and strategy than the others.

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.

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#27

Post by cottager2 » Sat, Feb 19, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

I don’t mind judged sports. Do judges make mistakes sometimes? Certainly. But generally the ranking matches the demonstrated skill level. A much bigger issue with the winter Olympics is the repetition. How many times can I watch someone ski down a hill or jump off a jump? And then many events have 3 runs. You end up watching so many runs it’s feels repetitive. My favorite events are events like biathalon, where you only have to watch the event one time.

Re: Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

#28

Post by cottager2 » Sat, Feb 19, 2022, 4:50 AM UTC

seanalltogether wrote: post #2

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 al…

I agree. But there are so many ways a sporting event can be spoiled. For one, as a fan, you might just be curious. Or you might subscribe to the tennis subreddit, etc. I love tennis but basically only watch the Australian open because I can watch it live at night. Your best bet is probably to pick a sport that they play in your time zone.