> 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.
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.
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.)
Nice to see this show up on HN. I wrote an addendum, not in that post...
Olympic rant #2: Fake "team" events. We now see a lot of events promoted as team events where the team members need never have practiced together and don't even meet each other at the venue necessarily. These are team events where just add the scores of various competitors, or "relays" where there is no baton, nobody touches. Sadly to me, this has become a common form for mixed events. I have been wanting to see more mixed events, but I wanted to see mixed events where the men and women actually work together, like pairs skating or mixed doubles tennis or curling.
It's very easy to make a mixed team event in a real team sport. You can make a rule like "3 men and 3 women on the ice."
I understand that in some sports, like swimming, you can't have a baton, but it would be nice if they had to touch or something. In the downhill sports they can't easily physically meet. Mixed team snowboard cross had the man set a time, and that controlled when the woman was let out of the gate (later.) But all this is better than the sports where you just add scores and they aren't really a team at all. These events are just an excuse for nationalism. They will always be won by big countries which have the size and budget to send a group of high level athletes good enough to get the best average score.
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.
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.
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.
> The big problem is spoilers. If you are not very careful, if you go to the Peacock site you will get spoilers. For example, if the medal games are in your list, they change the title of the entry to be the names of the people playing -- spoiling the semi-finals for you.
I love sports but hate watching them delayed online because of design like this. I don’t know who created these designs but it’s terrible. The author is right, a local “dumb” DVR is the way to go for watching sports.
The UX for online sports is terrible. One example is soccer matches on ESPN, they will display highlight bars on the timeline when something exciting happens, like a goal or a penalty. It’s destroys the suspense for me because I see the markers and know something is going to happens.
They also show a progress bar with the length, which makes it easy to know if the game went into extra time. Eg. One team goes up 2 goals early but the recording time is longer then you know the other team comes back to force extra time.
> 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.
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.
Yes, but it's pretty lame that they substitute a static screen that lasts as long as the ads in the place of the ads. It would be much nicer if they excised them.
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.
In the early 2000's, when I was quite involved in UK Skydiving - there was quite a strong bid to try and get it recognised as an Olympic sport. However, the bid was denied and my understanding to the reasoning being that it wasn't a good spectator sport.
However, I believe indoor skydiving is making good progress with their latest bid.
I have to say, watching the 2022 Winter Olympics using the Peacock app has been awesome. Being able to watch the events I want to watch, as opposed to being forced to watch the events broadcast producers decided to air has been great. Not being forced to watch background pieces has also been great. Being able to choose whether to watch the live event, or watching it later when I have time, has also been great.
It's basically what I always wanted when spectating the Olympics. I can choose to watch the practice runs for the alpine downhill. Somebody else, in the same house even, can watch figure skating for days. It's like we're living in the future!
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> 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.
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.
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.)
Olympic rant #2: Fake "team" events. We now see a lot of events promoted as team events where the team members need never have practiced together and don't even meet each other at the venue necessarily. These are team events where just add the scores of various competitors, or "relays" where there is no baton, nobody touches. Sadly to me, this has become a common form for mixed events. I have been wanting to see more mixed events, but I wanted to see mixed events where the men and women actually work together, like pairs skating or mixed doubles tennis or curling.
It's very easy to make a mixed team event in a real team sport. You can make a rule like "3 men and 3 women on the ice."
I understand that in some sports, like swimming, you can't have a baton, but it would be nice if they had to touch or something. In the downhill sports they can't easily physically meet. Mixed team snowboard cross had the man set a time, and that controlled when the woman was let out of the gate (later.) But all this is better than the sports where you just add scores and they aren't really a team at all. These events are just an excuse for nationalism. They will always be won by big countries which have the size and budget to send a group of high level athletes good enough to get the best average score.
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.
Deleted Comment
The UX for online sports is terrible. One example is soccer matches on ESPN, they will display highlight bars on the timeline when something exciting happens, like a goal or a penalty. It’s destroys the suspense for me because I see the markers and know something is going to happens.
They also show a progress bar with the length, which makes it easy to know if the game went into extra time. Eg. One team goes up 2 goals early but the recording time is longer then you know the other team comes back to force extra time.
Dude, pay the $10 for one month for ad-free Peacock. It's worth it, and much better than the author's alternative.
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.
Deleted Comment
However, I believe indoor skydiving is making good progress with their latest bid.
IOC: “too boring, viewers won’t want to watch that.”
“What about skydiving without a parachute?”
IOC: “Now that’s worth watching!”
It's basically what I always wanted when spectating the Olympics. I can choose to watch the practice runs for the alpine downhill. Somebody else, in the same house even, can watch figure skating for days. It's like we're living in the future!