My take on the Olympics

Thoughts about the Olympics

1. If you are rooting for your country, would you rather they get (say) 18 medals: 6 Gold, 6 Silver, 6 Bronze, or 17 medals: 10 Gold, 4 Silver, 3 Bronze?  More generally, when is (g,s,b) better than (g',s',b') Some schemes:
   
   
   
   1. The commentators and the websites seem to use g+s+b. They say things like
      American is leading the Medal Count without breaking it down.  Given that the margins-of-victory are often rather small, and all of the athletes who finish in the top 3 (often even in the top 20) are quite good, I think that just g+s+b is good.
      
   2. If you want to value gold medals more than a scheme like 3a+2b+c makes sense.  One problem- the weights 3,2,1 are arbitrary. What would a criteria be for good weights?
      
   3. It may be a complicated function. For example (g,s,b) is better than (g',s',b') if g ≥ g'+4 OR (g ≥ g'-3 AND g+s+b ≥ g'+s'+b').
      
   4. You may want to allow for a partial order--- that is, some triples are incomparable.
   
   
2. Swimming or running: Often the top X people are 0.5 seconds apart and all close to or better than the world or Olympic record.  I would give them all medals. This is not some wimpy self-esteem crap--- if the athletes are that close together, and close to breaking records, they really are all excellent and you really can't say whose better. A possible scheme:
   
   
   
   1. If you tie or beat a world record you get a Gold Medal. (Might even allow if you are within X of a world record for some X.)
      
   2. If nobody has beaten or tied a world record and you tie or beat an Olympic record then you get a Gold Medal.  If someone else has beaten or tied a world record then you get a Silver Medal.  (I may allow some leeway in both cases.)
      
   3. The top person behind all of those people gets the bronze Medal.
   
   
3. Or we could give more medals: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Zinc, Aluminum, maybe more.
   
4. In Women's Gymnastics these women do spectacular things but if they land badly TAKE OFF X POINTS! Somehow that doesn't seem right.
   
5. In most events Women and Men compete separately.
   
   
   
   1. Track and Swimming: Since these are timed we can say without apology that the men are better, so its best if they don't compete head-to-head. However, if a women wanted to compete in the men's event she should be allowed to (Are they now? I doubt it.) I don't think this has come up. 
   2. Gymnastics. Here its NOT that either gender is better, its just that they do different things.  The very thought of a guy on the uneven parallel bars terrifies me.  The thought of anyone doing backflips on a 4-inch wide beam also terrifies me.
      
   3. Equestrian- from what I could tell from the Yahoo Schedule Website men and women compete equally here.
      
   4. Archery and Shooting are seperated by Gender. For Archery this might make sense- some strength is required.  For Shooting this makes no sense to me. I asked a guy who knows about shooting and he told me that many non-Olympic shooting sports are not seperated by gender.  So why are the Olympic Shooting contests seperated by gender? My guess is that its the same reason COLT allows PC members to submit and CCC does not: because that's how we've always done it.
   
   
6. Game theorist needed: The rules for Badminton were set up so that it was in China's interest to throw a game (see here).  In this case I think it should be fine for a team to forfeit rather than play badly on purpose. More important- the rules need changing.  The Blog Turing's invisible Hand discussed this here.
   
7. What sport do you most want to see in the Olympics? I would say Chess Boxing or Skeet Surfing. Both make more sense then the Olympic sport of Modern Pentathlon which combines pistol shooting, fencing, freestyle swimming, show jumping, and a 3 km cross country run.