Designing Olympic sports for the spectator

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 from free play activities and for the last 70+ years are mostly being changed reactively as a response to professionalization, tragic events and TV requirements (as TV rights are the major source of revenue for many international federations).

There is no book or theory on how to design the sport. How to choose tradeoffs to satisfy different stakeholders. The closest thing I could find is actually body of knowledge from computer game designers – how to keep users engaged, how to ensure the incentive structure is aligned, how to fit into requirements of the game/tournaments etc. Because of this I suspect eSports will outperform many traditional sports soon in terms of member base by a lot.

In traditional sport if you want to know how a smallest change in rules will alter the whole game – you out of luck. The only way is just to push hard for the change and watch. Here is a great read about cascading changes in hockey provoked by tiny changes of the equipment regulations. [1] Or how suboptimal incentive structure in Badminton tournament resulted in weird incentives to loose [2]

But sports officials and decision makers are often ex-athletes themselves. They carry too much burden of attachement to particular styles or traditions, and very few are trained in system design or math or economics. Sports industry is very conservative.

Take athletics pole vault mentioned in the article. How does it differ from long jump? Long and high jump/pole vault are jumps and the goal is find "the best jumper". But historically it was easy to measure distance and hard to measure height. So high jump/pole vault uses this progressive system, and long jump does not. Why? Tradition, even though progressive system is suboptimal, because athlete becomes more and more tired towards increasing the height (and doesn't show their true best). Also the winner is always the one who failed last, which is a bit disappointing but might be more engaging for the audience.

I'm not even starting with figure skating judging. In a 100 years it moved from literally voting for style to measuring individual elements. The problem is that for measuring it uses biological sensors called "humans". As with many imperfect sensors they use sensor fusion approaches (7-9 judges in a row + trimmed mean), but the nature of the error and bias still makes a lot of room for subjective judging and building coalitions (especially from judges in ex-Soviet bloc). Japanese IceScope system is one step forward to start augmenting judges with objective numbers but it's really primitive (2 4K cameras measuring skaters' jump as a pixel movement and only can assess length and speed of a jump). Olympics used FreeD system, which is impressive but way out of price range for most federations in the world.

Anyway, this topic is huge. Would be grateful for any links or papers that you think might be relevant to sports design.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/hockey-g... [2] https://agtb.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/olympic-badminton-is-n...

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.

The problem with jumps is that it discrimnates heavily by body type, while "figure skating" does not. I mean in compulsory figures the one who practiced longer and better wins. In jumps – the one who has smaller body wins. Kamila Valieva at age 20 will be 5 years more experienced and stronger than Kamila Valieva at age 15, and as much as talented, but she will not have a slightest chance to win herself at 15. How does it even make sense to people?

To rotate 4*360 degrees in 0.6 seconds you really benefit from smaller sum of radiuses of mass distribution. This is how female figure skating became competition of 15 pre-puberty girls.

With this overfocus on number of rotations, international figure skating losing fans and members like crazy. Arenas are half empty even on major competitions and international federation is wondering why revenues are plummeting.

But the tragedy is even deeper. Most older coaches in many countries are still from the generation who did "compulsory figures". They remember it, they remember how to teach the basics, although rarely do because everyone wants jumps as instructed by ISU rules. But new generation of coaches don't even know about figures, let alone how to tech them. And the older coaches already, you know, are dying. And we losing this knowledge. We're loosing roots of figure skating as a community.

But figures are instrumental part of figure skating, and really important to perform jumps efficiently.

Ooof and the ones that do this coupled with some usually-obnoxious but always-repeating song deserve a special place in hell. I was so pleasantly surprised when I got YouTube TV when some ad-less spots were just substituted by a tranquil nature scene (a movie clip, so you were still sure that it wasn't frozen) and no music at all.

“What do you in think about skydiving?”

IOC: “too boring, viewers won’t want to watch that.”

“What about skydiving without a parachute?”

IOC: “Now that’s worth watching!”

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 purpose of the competition is to be watched, as is the case in the Olympics, that is what to design for.