UKC

In exactly one hundred days, sport climbing will once-again grace the Olympic Games, and the search for the next Olympic sport climbing champions will begin.

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Great article

Nice little article which must have taken a decent amount of work to put together. Someone surely has to be bored enough to find out who would get through to the finals based on the scoring system.

It does seem the article could be a bit clearer about when it is comparing the new scoring system (points system + discipline split) or just comparing the point scoring system. The change in male medallists is predominantly down to the discipline split and the the article demonstrates that the new point scoring system has no change except to introduce important nuisances so that there are less tied results. Given that that summary is contained within a section calculating the new points, the way I read the article seems to suggest the point scoring is what creates the change (which it doesn't). This seems a little misleading to me but ultimately the article does contain all the necessary information and does clarify the influence of the discipline split, although this feels more like a caveat rather than key information.

For the women's results, it seems sensitive to all parameters and each individual change has significant influence on the final ranking. The way it is presented doesn't really matter because there is little consistency in the ranking anyway except that Janja always wins.

Hard to disagree with that!

Whichever system is employed, the men's result was not immediately obvious to the viewer, while the women's was.

With the greatest of respect to Gines-Lopez, in Tokyo the gold went to the 5th fastest speed climber (based on fastest time posted in the final), the 7th best boulderer and the 4th best lead climber. I.e. the result was completely distorted not just by the scoring mechanism but by the head-to-head nature of the speed round, which is what allowed Gines-Lopez to come first in that round (not to mention Ondra getting a bit of a bye due to Bassa Mawem's injury). 

"the result was completely distorted... by the head-to-head nature of the speed round, which is what allowed Gines-Lopez to come first in that round" 

Yes, regardless of discipline, a very problematic way of scoring. Imagine if they did this in the 100m!

There are two changes here: the separation of speed from lead and bouldering is I think universally welcome and the effect is well understood. The second change is to the scoring system and the impact it will have. The comparison needed to understand that is between the hypothetical Tokyo results under Tokyo scoring but discounting speed (presented briefly at the end of each section of the article), and the hypothetical Tokyo results under the new Paris scoring (the bulk of the article).

From this it is clear that the new system has a major advantage; if you finish a round just behind one or two other people (as Jessy Pilz did in boulder) you are not pushed down. It is scores not rankings that are combined to get the overall result. This should be familiar to Olympics viewers as it is for example how gymnastics all-around and team scores are calculated, or pentathlon.

that was an interesting and insightful thought experiment! thank you.

even given the bits of finagling required to match the olympic boulders to the new scoring system, it’s good to see that there was still a reasonable separation in the women’s field, given that it was effectively 6 competitors only, and nobody topped anything except janja.

it’s also interesting to see that neither of the pure top-performers in one discipline (seo and raboutou) did end up in the medals, with pilz (5th in boulder, 3rd in lead) snagging silver and noguchi (4th in both lead and boulder) getting bronze, due to the rather big gap between 4th and 5th place in lead while the separated but still closely packed 3rd–5th ranks in boulder put these athletes on practically equal footing in a sum-up of points.

this appears to indicate a sentiment i’ve heard said before: the setting for each discipline is going to have a big influence, when it’s not ranks per discipline but performance-based points that make the final result.

i think it was on a youtube vlog on the channel by akiyo noguchi, the narasaki brothers, and yudai ikeda, where they said that boulder problems are set so that even nonspecialists can reach an expected minimum performance (i think it was one top or something like that), while the lead route is expected to weed out athletes over more or less its entire length. that would mean even a pure lead specialist but comparatively bad boulderer gets 25-ish points in boulder and is expected to go near 100 in lead, whereas a top-performing boulderer weak in lead will get 100-ish points in boulder and single digits or so in lead.

when three athletes with nearly the same performance in a discipline get weighted nearly the same instead of overweighting whatever minute differences they had between them: good.

when one discipline gets weighted more than another so that a discipline looks nicer for spectators: …not so good.

Good article, but I'm sure we can all agree a scoring system that doesn't give Ondra gold is the wrong system.