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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
So that means it's not 100 commercials per 11 minutes of content since much of the content happens while the clock is stopped.
It's far from proven that the short-lived "parity" that has emerged in the aftermath of the KD Warriors dynasty is the cause of down ratings.
I do personally dislike it though and find the parity via CBA to be artificial. It just causes continuity on a contender to be untenable.
And continuity is what makes for good basketball, hence why dynasties are so fun to watch. It's not just that they win, a lot. It's that they have a consistent style of play with a consistent cast of players (stars and role players) that fans get to know over the course of those dynastic years.
Not always. Some of the most prestigious horse races in the UK, US, and Australia ar handicap races. The horse that is most successful carries the most weight. The handicapper attempts to create a dead heat.
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?
Can you imagine Monaco with no quali >_<
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.
Why should swimming be different?
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.
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.
Would it be fairer to use randomly assigned lane? Then you get almost equal competitors in advantageous and disadvantageous lanes?
Isn't the top result in a year also used for qualification purposes (and thus lane assignment) for top-level competitions? Basically, you earn a spot in the best lane throughout the calendar year.
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.
Note that the advantaged swimmers in middle lanes are really objectively faster: they earn their spot through year long competitions and in-event qualifications. Sure, they will be an odd case or two.
See https://www.quora.com/How-are-the-lane-assignments-chosen-in...
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.
The second list are not judged by racing against the clock and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
That’s irrelevant in terms of spectators. Which was the GPs point.
If the spectators can watch solo runs in X then they can watch it in Y.
> The second list are not judged by racing against the clock
I know, I said that already.
> and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
There are plenty of point-based competitions which are still competed simultaneously. Like Paralympic races. Darts. Shooting. Dancing competitions. I could list plenty more.
You’re conflating requirements with tradition.
———
The real crux of the matter isn’t any arbitrarily defined condition. It’s just what people are conditioned to expect.
Certain sports and even specific competitions within certain sports are structured a certain why because that’s how the organisers have decided. Yeah ticket sales will always be a factor in the decision making, but that doesn’t mean that one format is inherently incompatible with spectators than another format.
The real reason I think swimming is unlikely to ever be swam solo is for the same reasons Paralympic swimming races combine people with different disabilities: there just isn’t enough time in the calendar to fit every swimming event in if everyone swam solo. There are a multitude of different strokes and distances that get competed. It’s not like mountain biking where there’s only one way down the hill.
It's not just a tradition or conditioning out of nothing: it was also feasibility to do so. Eg. you don't get that gymnastics podium seven times over, you only get one. Whereas for bowling and darts, adding one extra spot is not that much extra space. You also completely ignored one reason GP brought up: safety (in rally driving). To save on time, they still usually start with a few minutes delay on the same track.
Where it is feasible to compare side-by-side, we do (swimming, running but not eg. discus throw or high jump), and we award medals on direct result. Where it isn't, we use other independently tracked scores (time, points...).
But that aside, you’re building a strawman argument here (eg I was never arguing against safety elements) doing so actually agreeing with the point I was making:
Spectators are not the only, or even in many cases, primary, reason that events are structured the way they are.
I agree there are a plethora of other reasons and made that point myself. Safety being just one of them. Feasibility being another. But a lot of the time these problems can be solved by one means or another if event organisers truly wanted ways to run their event differently.
I can give you an example from my own sport: triathlon. It has two broad categories: short and long course. Short course is generally draft legal, and was developed specifically to get into the Olympics. Plenty of people can name the Brownlee brothers, Alex Yee (place Olympic athlete of your own home nation here). Most of my own damn triathlon club have no idea who Lucy Charles-Barclay is (the UK’s best long course triathlete and Ironman and 70.3 world champion)!
They might not be your field of expertise but calling (for example) Rally as “niche” is insanely off the mark.
> I can give you an example
Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.
Well done on the triathlon though. It’s a very tough sport to get any good at.
I tried a few times but hated the running part haha
I say this as someone who’s uncle was a rally driver: it’s niche.
> Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.
Half correct: long course is, in theory, a race between people. In practice, it’s a bunch of time trials that sometimes sees a pass, but there’s not much interaction by the time you get to the run.
If we wanted to talk within a sport: cycling has time trialling and road racing. I can tell you the difference in spectator numbers is stark. Like, time trialling has 0 spectators and road racing gets plenty. I love it but it’s really not that interesting to watch compared to road racing.
Funny enough, mine too. That’s a hell of a coincidence for something that’s “niche” ;)
I don’t think you know half as much about this motorsport than you think you do. That or you have a really distorted opinion of what constitutes as “niche”
It’s multimillion dollar industry for starters.
Car manufacturers specifically make models for professional rally circuits.
There’s video games sponsorships and all sorts.
We aren’t talking about Redbull Soapbox racing here. It’s up there with other popular forms of motorsports like NASCAR.
Granted Rally isn’t as big as F1. But F1s success doesn’t automatically make another sport niche either.
Anything that is a multi-million dollar industry is clearly well beyond the realm of “niche”.
Skiing is another massive industry. It’s definitely well beyond what any normal person would define as “niche”.
You have more of an argument with bobsled but it still gets its spectators come the Winter Olympics. So even if it were niche, it’s still evidence to my point regarding spectators of timed events.
> If we wanted to talk within a sport: cycling has time trialling and road racing. I can tell you the difference in spectator numbers is stark. Like, time trialling has 0 spectators and road racing gets plenty. I love it but it’s really not that interesting to watch compared to road racing
I don’t know enough about cycling to comment on TT vs road racing but plenty of other sports have a mixture of TT and head to head racing and still see high numbers of spectators for the TTs. So I suspect there’s other variables at play in cycling to explain the lower turnout. Possibly because spectators are low to begin with and TT are such early stages that people would prefer to see the final stages instead, which are not TTs?
> It’s multimillion dollar industry for starters.
Most niche hobbies are
> Car manufacturers specifically make models for professional rally circuits.
See above, most niche hobbies have this.
> There’s video games sponsorships and all sorts.
Yeah... so?
> It’s up there with other popular forms of motorsports like NASCAR.
NASCAR is a single country and still outstrips all of rally viewership globally.
> Anything that is a multi-million dollar industry is clearly well beyond the realm of “niche”.
Nope, it's still niche.
> Skiing is another massive industry. It’s definitely well beyond what any normal person would define as “niche”.
Almost nobody takes part in skiing, it's niche.
> it still gets its spectators come the Winter Olympics.
So does track & field but most of those sports are incredibly niche.
> Possibly because spectators are low to begin with and TT are such early stages that people would prefer to see the final stages instead, which are not TTs?
TdF gets high numbers for the TT because it affects the grand tour but TTs on their own get far fewer spectators. The Tour of Britain will have loads of people along the route cheering it. When our region hosted the National 10 Mile TT championship, the only spectators were the families of the competitors and those of us marshalling it.
To be clear: not all TT format sports are niche, I just point out that, in general, head-to-head races get far more viewership than time-trial format sports. In fact, the examples you gave pretty much proved that point. F1 annihilates WRC for viewership. As does NASCAR (even from the UK I know of its cultural impact!)
> Almost nobody takes part in skiing, it's niche.
You are aware that there are hundreds of ski resorts? Particularly in Europe. It's a massive pastime in the mountains around here.
In fact it's actually a rather mainstream hobby.
> So does track & field but most of those sports are incredibly niche.
It's on TV multiple times a year in the UK. And I'm talking about the main terrestrial TV channels (of which we only have 5). Not satellite nor cable.
Track and Field athletes are big name celebrities here too. Which does not happen with niche sports.
And that literally every school from infants to secondary school teaches T&F and even devotes an entire day each year for track and field events. They call it "Sports Day".
In fact almost all UK schools, even small village primary schools/kindergartens, also have facilities for T&F.
It's not niche.
---
If you want to talk about niche sports, then talk about handball, polo, croquet, shuffleboard, bar billiards, etc. Not stuff that is on TV regularly and taught at every school.
This might be a cultural thing and you just don't see much of these sports where you are. But you could at least research these sports before claiming they're niche.
WRC isn’t niche. Period. It might not be as big as F1 but that doesn’t make it niche. And your arguments about how it’s “niche” only demonstrate that you don’t know what a niche sport is.
I partake in plenty of niche sports. And compared to them, WRC is massive. Some might even say it’s mainstream in comparison to some of the sports I’ve competed in.
Anyway, to the point at hand:
Speedway racing is niche in comparison and that’s head to head. Thus by your logical fallacy, TT should be more popular than head to head. Clearly that’s not a correct deduction of the statistics though.
Ping n Ford races are head to head and they have extremely small view figures.
In fact I could list dozens of obscure sports that are head to head and get smaller viewing figures than other TT events.
All your arguments prove is that some sports are more popular than some other sports for a variety of reasons which are far too broad to distil down to a single variable.
And this is the point I’ve repeatedly made. To argue that one format exist because of one singular reason is overly simplistic to the point of being stupid.
I mean I'd make the tradeoff that there be no forward passes in the NFL but I'm not a follower of that sport so I'd likely not put that opinion out there because frankly I don't care.
Now we only need to get Elon on board to fund the rest.
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.
And I guess it looks good on TV to have those nice chevrons
Lol? How did you work that one out?
By extension, should the olympics be comprised entirely of each country's worst athletes?
The magnitude of the energy in that turbulent wake will depend on how efficiently the oscillating fin interacts with water over time to produce forward thrust. The cool thing about oscillating foils as opposed to rotating thrusters, is that when the fin 'swoops' once it creates Vortex 'A' spinning clockwise, and when it 'swoops' back the result would be a Vortex 'B' spinning counterclockwise, and the two vortices will partially cancel out. That cancellation serves to recover energy from Vortex 'A' and the energy is transferred back into forward thrust.
In other words, fish tails create trails of contrarotating vortices and continually push off of them. It's like walking up a springy staircase, where each step you make, a little energy is recovered to bounce you up to the next step.
In theory, if you had a swimmer in front of you, generating a Karmen Vortex Street and not effectively canceling out those vortices, but instead just shedding vortices, you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward - barely using any energy yourself. Those complex hyrdodynamic relationships could be why some swimmers/flyers tend to fly in specific formations with other animals in their school/flock.
Bottom line, I would bet that any residual vortices that spread into adjacent swimming lanes will tend to interact chaotically and result in unstructured turbulance, which should yield less optimal swimming conditions for swimmers in those lanes.
When I swam competitively in the early 1980s, we did this during workouts; we'd all swim in a line with very close spacing, and switch off who was in front after every lap (two lengths--this was in a 25 meter pool). Being in front you could feel the extra work you were doing.
This bears out in the real world. Much like a peloton in cycling, swimming directly behind another swimmer can be far more energy efficient than swimming by yourself and feel like you are getting pulled along for the ride.
But that’s not really the case with swimming. We didn’t evolve a natural swimming instinct or form for speed.
When I learned that (nearly?) all terrestrial mammals can swim to some degree (even ones that look like they shouldn’t be able to - like ungulates), I was a bit surprised, but it’s not too surprising upon reflection. But that got me thinking then: what is the best terrestrial mammalian body plan that also happens to be good for swimming? What terrestrial mammal would also be fast swimmers if they could learn and train for it as humans do? Maybe my thinking is clouded by anthrocentrism, but the human body plan which is good for bipedal running also seems to work out pretty well for swimming.
Of course, top human swimming speeds are pretty terrible compared to human running speeds and the swimming speed of basically any other aquatic animal, but we’re not made for it!
Surprisingly not everyone seems to be convinced of that
Sprinting: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6S0ctkOixj8
Galloping / jumping: https://old.reddit.com/r/toptalent/comments/ldxsoz/these_peo...
"Behind the Scenes of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KighzjHkZtY&t=803s "Ape School" starts at 9m35s. Quadrupedal running starts at 13m23s.
That looks remarkably like an April Fool's article released at the wrong time of year. The second-to-last paragraph is where they reveal the joke to anyone who wasn't already in on it:
> This study has limitations. Although statistical models are significantly related to mathematical formula [sic], the use of a statistical model to accurately predict future athletic performance is challenging (Hilbe, 2008). Fitted linear models should be treated with some caution. The use of linear regression for world record modeling would yield a continued decline that would eventually become negative, thus suggesting that update of world records can be continued until 0 s. It must also be noted that quadrupedal world records did not exist before 2008. This relatively recent involvement [sic] of quadrupedal running results in a somewhat tenuous comparison of world record times. Therefore, despite a high coefficient of determination, a large diverging confidence interval was found.—
—and then right back into it—
> —The 95% confidence intervals [sic] indicates that projected intersects could occur as early as in 2032 (9.238 s) or as late as 2076 (9.341 s).
A "rebuttal paper" might accept their major premise (i.e. feasibility of "a statistical model to accurately predict future athletic performance") but argue that rather than fitting a straight line (linear regression), we should fit an exponential decay curve (exponential regression). In an appendix, we'd try fitting a hyperbola (y = K1/(x-X0) + K2), taking X0 for quadrupedal running at 2008 and X0 for bipedal running anywhere from 2 million to 10 million years ago.
In an alternative "experimentalist approach," the rebuttal paper's author would actually run 100m himself, first on two legs and then on four; plot these as an additional data point (with x=2025) in each set; and fit a polynomial to that data. This would likely change the conclusion quite drastically. ;)
IIRC, I read somewhere that they are the biggest species of bear (on average).
Checked:
Not realy. It is pretty common to compare the average ability when we are comparing between species. For example when we say cheetahs can run at X m/s we don’t talk about the speed of the fastest cheetah who won the cheetah olympics. They just measured a few and we use that as a basis.
> I very much doubt that any non-human ape will ever get close to Adam Ondra's ascent of "Silence" (9c).
I don’t know what you base this on. Is this just a hunch? Are we talking here about the chances of a monkey randomly catching a fancy for that cliff? Because i agree that is unlikely to happen. But with a sufficintly trained and motivated one I wouldn’t be so sure.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
One of the most amusing things in your comment is the idea of training, which only humans really do.
I'd say it's our hand to make tools, our brain to plan, and out throat/mouth to communicate
Even elephants can swim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpD40ewOyC4
Her name always makes me laugh because I then think about her brother's name: Buster.
I've tried reading all these names out loud and don't get what's funny.
According to onlypassingthru in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542370 "The optics of an underwater race were not good".
Additionally consider (as was pointed by swarnie in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542285 ) that there exist clothing restrictions in Olympic swimming - in my opinion this is also a contradiction to the spirit of "freestyle".
As another comparison point, look at Formula 1, where technology is a huge part of the competition, with the result that a driver can be dominant one year and then fall way back the next because of some technological shift. Of course, even F1 does tinker with the rules a lot to try to preserve competition, as when they banned electronic stabilization.
Sponsored by fags (obviously)
F1 is all about the drivers except it is also all about the marques (who pay quite a lot for it and need to show a return).
The rule book for F1 is pretty daunting these days and I'm not too sure how much is driver and how much is car these days. I do know that F1 drivers do abuse themselves badly during a race - they experience G forces that would make you and I weep and probably pass out.
It's all for our entertainment so all good 8)
My argument against this is that there are already so many activities where less wealthy are priced out. Most prospective athletes (or families) don't have a bunch of money to shell out for stuff like hydrophobic full-body suits, or hockey gear, or whatever.
underwater restriction at least makes safety sense - stroke restrictions do not
I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
If I could change things in the world, I wouldn't eliminate the extraneous strokes in swimming, but I would include additional competitions in all the track distances: backwards running, handstand walk, and one-legged hopping.
Is the variety in locomotion in the races you listed regulated by the governing body? Like, would you be DQ'd if you skipped the last 50m of a 100m dash?
For the record, I would fully endorse a "hurdles" equivalent in swimming: put an obstacle every 10m that the swimmers have to go under. Make the lanes zig-zag.
Butterfly is my favorite. It’s so fun to fly through the water like that.
It makes sense to me to have different stroke events, although I wish there was a true freestyle that allowed for anything, including underwater.
For cars, such races seem to exist (have existed?) in the Netherlands:
> Dutch Reverse Racing
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLgPTJWAysY
These kinds of races seemed to be popular in the Netherlands because DAF (a Dutch manufacturer) produces the Variomatic transmission system
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variomatic
"Because the system does not have separate gears, but one (continuously shifting) gear and a separate 'reverse mode' (as opposed to reverse gear), the transmission works in reverse as well, giving it the side effect that one can drive backwards as fast as forwards. As a result, in the former Dutch annual backward driving world championship, the DAFs had to be put in a separate competition because no other car could keep up."
This is arguably what race walking is, though it's over longer distances.
Given:
"Some especially strong underwater swimmers stayed submerged almost the entire length of the pool, since there was no rule against it. That all changed in 1998, when FINA, the world governing body of competitive swimming, ruled that swimmers performing the backstroke had to surface after 15 meters."
This is used to explain a conclusion used throughout the rest of the article, namely, the dolphin/fish strokes aren't useful in competitive swimming because people using them have to surface.
But I don't understand: the rule says swimmers performing the backstroke have to surface, and when I look up backstroke, it is someone laying on their back? Which doesn't sound like either of these
The updated rules essentially say a swimmer in a "backstroke race" must perform the backstroke for 35 meters. Prior to this rule, top swimmers would stay underwater for most of a length and only do a few actual back strokes before their flip turn.
In other words, before this rule they mostly were not performing the backstroke, despite the name of the race.
i.e. I'm familiar with track and field - it's "transport yourself X distance, fastest time wins"
With swimming, its "transport yourself X distance using method Y"
And you could have used the methods described in a race where method Y == backstroke at some point, as the requirements for backstroke were such that you just did a couple things quick, then could go underwater and do your thing till you finish...but that workaround is no longer available given the 15m rule.
(ty all)
Backstroke start technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwq-IsGNa28
Backstroke flipturn technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-WNtRGwSjQ
Underwater dolphin kicks can be done on your front, back, or (I guess) side, so it also works for backstroke. And the way that starts and turns work in backstroke still puts you underwater at the start of each lap.
This was an amusing comment considering it is pretty much exactly what happened with the Fosbury Flop.
Cool article though. I wonder if eventually a new event will be added for it in competitive swimming.
I wonder how much potential for improvement there still is for the human body.
https://fyfluiddynamics.com/2018/07/when-i-was-a-child-my-fa...
The latest rule change in this area was banning dolphin kicks on your back on the breast-to-free exchange in IM. Ryan Lochte triggered that one.
"That all changed in 1998, when FINA, the world governing body of competitive swimming, ruled that swimmers performing the backstroke had to surface after 15 meters."
... which aligns with my recollection of the '96 Olympics and being gobsmacked at how long the swimmers were holding their breath.
Here is the 92 backstroke final. The announcers mention the rule: https://youtu.be/FTfTyzkSzQs?si=E82rvKql-w9vuwSf
I tried to find 96 and cannot but it was the same.
Here is the butterfly performance in 96 that ultimately triggered them to chamge it for fly/free: https://youtu.be/Zp2NTFjeXQQ?si=e_E-D1ZAvzNmjACe
Pankratov's start really was incredible. His lungs have to be off the scale.
I see three avenues:
1) Clothing - Already banned in the Olympics
2) Medication - Also officially banned in the Olympics but the Enhanced Games look like a promising test bed.
3) Go full Cult Mechanicum?
And, if you look at one of the Chinese Olympic winners last year - the wave in front of him was significantly smaller than in front of anybody else. Have no idea how he achieved that though.
If people start racing underwater, there will probably lots of blackouts.