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Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive
by foobarbecue 1y ago
Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive feedback system. Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... but that's common in sports and in modern society for some reason.
- Scarblac 1y agoIt's strange to reward slower contestants in sports.
- sim7c00 1y agoyeah, otherwise good ppl will do bad in qualifiers to get good position...
- koolba 1y agoReminds me of the final boss in Smash Bros. If you purposefully let him whip you at first, the adaptive play would nerf him enough to let you easily finish him.
- pfortuny 1y agoIIRC Ecclestone suggested getting rid of qualifiers and just putting the F1 cars n the inverse order of their last race. This idea was in order to get more overtakes (the best parts of F1 races). I think it would be great.
- bravesoul2 1y agoMakes sense. More interest in F1. More money for Bernie.
- philistine 1y ago1. Ecclestone has been out of the sport for nearly a decade. 2. A race weekend is a three-day affair, with tickets sold for each day. What do you do on Saturday if there are no qualifs?
- herodoturtle 1y ago> What do you do on Saturday if there are no qualifs? Can you imagine Monaco with no quali >_<
- Scarblac 1y agoThree races per weekend?
- andrepd 1y agoF1 is dead boring anyway, you're more there for the ambience and the VIP lounges and whatnot.
- retroflexzy 1y agoThere was a period in World Rally Championship history when the top drivers would manipulate the starting order for the following day's stages by intentionally slowing down before the end of the stage. It was bizarre to watch teams intentionally give up 10+ second margins when stage wins can come down to half-second gaps.
- seabass-labrax 1y agoIn the BTCC, there was a similar situation for a while: in one of the races, the best-perfoming half of the pack would start at the back of the grid, and the worst-performing half at the front of the grid - but in-order within the two groups. However, since 2006 there has been some randomness added to the grid positioning, which makes attempting to manipulate it a risky business.
- conradev 1y agoIn F1 they also introduced DRS in 2011 to get more overtakes
- bell-cot 1y agoTrack & Field races stagger the starting positions, to compensate for the outer lanes of the track being longer. American football has the teams switch goals every quarter, to even out the advantages of having the wind at your team's back. Why should swimming be different?
- kqr 1y agoYour examples are about making circumstances equivalent, thus canceling out any advantage. There's no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so we're bound to have some contestants advantaged. In cases where some contestants have to be advantaged, the conventional solution in sports is to advantage the ones who performed better according to some metric. I think it's unfair to reward those who were lucky or already advantaged somehow, but my wife who has a background in track and field thinks anything else would be unfair.
- bell-cot 1y ago> ... no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so ... Why couldn't you shorten the pool, from a swimmer's PoV, by putting (say) a very shallow plywood box against the wall of the pool at one end of each "non-center" lane? Yes, you might need to do some math & stats to figure out just how shallow a box. Or, you could use a feedback loop - boxes start very shallow, leading swimmers get to pick a lane, boxes adjusted, repeat.
- darepublic 1y agoif there is an advantage to a lane in swimming can't we add a certain small amount of time to compensate
- dclowd9901 1y agoNot that strange. Handicaps are quite common.
- bluedino 1y agoWorks for Mario Kart
- bravesoul2 1y agoJust thinking if it's done F1 style it is fair. It's fresh at each competition. If it's based on past times that creates possibly a feedback loop but depends on details. E.g. can a swimmer use a non competition record towards their qualification.
- messer979 1y ago“To him who has much, even more will be given. To him who has little, even what he has will be taken away”
- jstanley 1y ago> Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... Lol? How did you work that one out? By extension, should the olympics be comprised entirely of each country's worst athletes?
- mojomark 1y agoThe original comment is likely accurate regarding the benefit to ditectly trailing swimmers, but probably not trailing swimmers where shed vortices are stable in adjacent lanes where shed vortices interact chaotically.
- giardini 1y agoAlright, so we're agreed: the only solution is to build every swim-racing pool of individual lanes with solid walls between each!8-)) All lanes are then equivalent.
- necovek 1y agoAnd if someone in lane 7 speeds ahead, they are likely not seeing any of the turbulence from other swimmers either
- dsamarin 1y agoI want to see world records get broken
- vikingerik 1y agoIf slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.
- GolfPopper 1y agoIt seems like the objectively fair solution is that everyone swims the exact same lane in a still pool and is timed.
- onlypassingthru 1y agoSeeing the other competitors right next to you is often a factor in how hard one pushes themselves in a race, no matter the species.
- jack_pp 1y agoFewer records, fairer competition. I'd make that tradeoff
- scott_w 1y agoBut spectators won’t, and we are what fund sport, ultimately.
- hnlmorg 1y agoSpectators don’t seem to mind it in rally race car driving, downhill skiing, bobsledding, and other timed events where multiple competitors cannot share the track. Spectators also don’t seem to mind for diving, gymnastics, figure skating, equestrian and other events which are points defined and competitors are also performing sequentially.
- onlypassingthru 1y agoYour first list of sports are all single participant because of safety. Every one of those has a significant risk of injury or death that is unavoidable for the sport and nobody wants to die because the competitor next to you makes a mistake. Spectators would absolutely pay to watch it, however (see MMA, boxing, etc). The second list are not judged by racing against the clock and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
- chongli 1y agoIt’s not strange at all. People want to see records broken. Levelling the playing field works against that goal. Sports is an aspirational medium of entertainment. People want to see excellence. They want to see dynasties. Too much fairness and balance leads to loss of interest. Look at the NBA. We’re in a period of unprecedented parity and balance. It seems like every year brings a different championship team. Ratings are way down and loads of people are complaining about the CBA which was written with the goal of bringing more parity to the league, a goal it’s quite obviously achieving!
- michaelterryio 1y agoOn the other hand the NFL’s hard salary cap and consequent parity is what has made it the most popular US professional sporting league. People in the US don’t want to see big markets buy their way to championships.
- darepublic 1y agoas an adult the NFL is the most watchable professional sport for me, despite my city having no NFL team. every year I can just choose a playoff bound team to root for based on their style or storyline. And each game is meaningful whereas the other professional sports have regular seasons that just drag on and on. also love the one and done knockout playoff format.
- Xss3 1y agoYou find 100 commercials per 11 minutes of gameplay watchable? https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-commercials-and-just-11-minutes-of-play https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-comm... I always thought that Americans just had the NFL on in the background or something and used it as an excuse to be social. But I'm realising I'm likely wrong about that reading comments like this. I'm guessing you're just a vast amount more accepting of a high ad to content ratio than other cultures?
- 1y ago
- wnc3141 1y agoIt also focuses the race around the center of the pool which works from a visual standpoint. Favorites in the middle, dark horses surrounding at the edge
- wavemode 1y agoGiving advantages to the better participants is a practice common across a variety of racing sports. The idea being that, if you could earn an advantage by doing worse, then in a race where you know at a certain point that you can't medal anyway, it would be optimal to just intentionally slow down to try to come in last and secure an advantage in the next race.
- esperent 1y agoI've heard this said before, and I understand the reasoning, but I don't think it's good enough. We should be aiming for equality at the start of a race, not giving the better people a head start. If qualifying races are broken in the way, then just randomize the starting order. Literally do a random draw as people are walking/driving up to the start. It would make the events far more interesting as well.
- sebastiennight 1y agoAs a counterpoint, think about the balancing act of trying to place as well as you can in the semifinals while not over-exhausting yourself to the point where you've got no energy left for the final. I think this dynamic is way more interesting than what you'd get if semifinal rankings had no impact ; that latter scenario would basically result in a Dutch auction on effort, and likely suppress performance on the qualifying races.
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoYou could make it based on past performance at a given level. So your position in a qualifying race depends on your placement in last year's qualifying race. Your position at the final Olympic event depends on your placement at the same event in the last Olympics. If it's your first time at a given event, I guess keep whatever we do now or make it random. The reason for this system would be to make surprise wins from less-known people more likely, which I'd think would be desirable.
- mbreese 1y agoLet’s consider auto sport. For most races, there are fixed starting positions that are determined by qualifying. Qualification is generally done by racing around the track as fast as you can without any other racer on the track or blocking you. The faster you qualify, the better your starting position. The better your starting position, the more advantage you have in the main race. If you are trying to figure out who the better racer is, it’s not a bad system. Everyone is incentivized to do as well as they can at each step. But, I think there is another motivation to consider. I don’t think the point is necessarily to find the best racer (or swimmer in your case). Instead, I think the point may be to make it so that the best swimmers can swim their best race. The goal isn’t just to see who can win, but to see if the winners can beat a larger record. You want the best racers to have the best chance at performing their best. When the best swimmers are in the middle lanes, they have the best conditions for breaking other records. It’s not the most fair system. Track is probably a little better, but even then, the lane you are in has certain advantages and disadvantages.
- slwvx 1y agoIn US sports it is very common in the tournament for a single season, or in a single event to reward better performance earlier in that same season or same tournament. I like this because it incentivizes doing well early in a season. On the other hand, the NFL and NBA give better draft odds for to teams who did badly in the previous season. I also like this because it allows teams who don't have the (comparatively) massive resources of a team based in a large market to compete. This is NEGATIVE feedback, and of course fans of teams in large markets don't like it. Even so, negative feedback is the core of making a stable system. To summarize, in a single season or in a single tournament, doing well is rewarded. Across seasons, some sports have mechanisms to help poor teams become better.
- xarope 1y agoTraditionally the middle lanes have less turbulence so the faster swimmers get them so they can swim faster, whereas us slowpokes get the side lanes. And I guess it looks good on TV to have those nice chevrons
- smokel 1y ago> for some reason It is most likely because we are bad at pattern matching. By default we reward anything we perceive as positive, regardless of who we think is causing it or what the long-term consequences might be. It takes some education to recognize the long-term effects of rewarding the wrong things, and then it takes even more education to not worry about the very long-term effects at all.
- yowzadave 1y agoDoes this effect taper off as you get further away from the edges of the pool? Wondering if you could eliminate the unfairness by just leaving a few lanes empty on each edge of the pool.