I don't get it though, if Ye Zhaoying won over the other person with a higher win rate, that means she's better and can make it into the final on her own merits, no? If Gong Zhichao couldn't win a match against Ye Zhaoying, then they might not even win against Camilla Martin.
I assume badminton is a sport like tennis where skill isn’t measured along a single simple axis, e.g. some combinations of play styles and skills can be more effective against certain players and situations. The article does quote the Danish player who faced off against China in the finals:
"I saw how the Chinese were playing rather strangely in many matches and for many years, so the new information doesn't shock me. Already back then we were upset.
But if you ignore the deeply unethical way of doing things, China was actually acting rather wisely. I could never beat Gong Zhichao, and I much preferred playing against Ye Zhaoying. There's no doubt that the Chinese knew this, and that they had a much better chance of winning gold by getting Gong Zhichao into the final."
If people's skills can vary so much for a given sport such that it's hard or impossible to rank players by skill, then it seems like a tournament bracket is the wrong fit for such a sport. A bracket specifically means there is "one path" to victory and it is specifically structured for producing one winner and it works based on the assumption of the underlying distribution of skill being one where it can be strictly ordered. A fairer system that would match such a distribution of skill would be something like just matches between all players (or many matches at least) and the person with the most wins would get gold, second most silver, and so on. Online video games do this already, tourneys only work in some situations, but player rankings are better for, well ranking because you don't have a situation where the mere structure of a competition causes the winner to not actually be the best player.
This dynamic already exists in almost every competitive sport. Certainly the ones where you go head-to-head with an opponent in a match format vs a race.
Which is why most sports have a variety of formats or phases to address that. The most typical being a regulation season where there is a winner at the culmination. Sometimes those then feed into the more bracket-like format.
The idea that any one of these methods is the path objectively measures the one true best player/team is a fallacy. That any particular award within the same sport is deemed more prestigious than another is largely down to marketing.
I would agree with your last two statements except for the fact that this is the Olympics we are talking about, which literally is the highest competition for sport in the world. Picking out the best is the point of it. Of course likely no one structure can be the best, but choosing a better structure seems wise for a competition which purports to do just that.
I don't really care to attack the structure too, but if the structure is so important that it should be kept, then there still is a good argument that really, arguments about statistics is really not relevant (which is half of what people are arguing with me about). However, a flat structure of just games is specifically the right place to make statistical arguments and judgements because it is naturally ergodic.
> Olympics [...] literally is the highest competition for sport in the world.
Says who? This is strictly down to prestige.
Btw, association football is played at the Summer Olympics. But you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's the highest competition for football. By prestige, that's the FIFA World Cup. By skill, it's perhaps the UEFA Champions League. [0]
[0] I don't know enough about football to say for sure that the Champions League has the highest skill on display. But even the Champions League has way more prestige than the Summer Olympics for football.
I think this is the case for most of the well-known team sports. The professional teams pull players from around the world, and have lots of experience playing together.
Plus the professional teams are have intentionally developed rosters. In the Olympics, if it turns out that Canada has produced the two best goalies this year, then the world's second best goalie will be benched unless there's an injury.
I don't watch football at all, but fifa world cup and champions league are the ones everybody around me watches, from friends to random people, to our cities being half-empty (except the bars with TVs) during final matches.
Olympics are more "meh" and not something people really cared about.
> I would agree with your last two statements except for the fact that this is the Olympics we are talking about, which literally is the highest competition for sport in the world.
I don’t think it is. People don’t really care about the olympics. It’s a far cry from the FIFA World Cup where basically every bars broadcast the games.
Football is the most popular sport in the world and used to be absent from the Olympic and is now present in a mostly uninteresting format. Tennis is fun but not taken that seriously now that it doesn’t carry ATP points.
It’s fairly important for swimming, track and field and the other sports people never watch otherwise.
No.
They are used because you can decide Best of N players in N-1 games.
They are used in sports where the games are long, exhausting (a single player can play only a few of them in short time) and needs a non-trivial infrastructure (think tennis court vs chess board)
You can declare someone to be best of 'Best of N players', but that only really applies strictly if player skill can be ordered linearly and outcome of games is basically a deterministic comparison of skill.
However you are right in general that player exhaustion and logistics play a part as well.
I was not precise.
I didn't mean that it can determine the best player according to any reasonable metric but that it can determine a tournament winner at all.
We just need to keep in mind that the 'tournament winner' is mostly there for entertainment (both of the audience and of the participants), and doesn't necessarily correlate all that well with 'absolute best player overall'.
By creating a big prize (either money or prestige) you create incentive to win and the new definition of best shows up (the one most likely to win this title).
And even in the same sport you can have conflicting goals. E.g. should one try to maximize chance of winning a single prestigious event or get equally good results through the whole season?
At the same time I like analyzing the tournaments from the perspective if the best team (according to a criterion that either players or spectators care about) has the highest chance to win.
> At the same time I like analyzing the tournaments from the perspective if the best team (according to a criterion that either players or spectators care about) has the highest chance to win.
And I declare that 'liking' to be 'entertainment'. Might be a pretty broad definition of entertainment.
Draws of three make luck a major component. If you're disadvantaged against 1/3rd of the field you could end up in a pod with two people you're bad against and ruin your entire Olympics.
This would drastically increase the amount of matches played, making it more of an endurance sport than anything else. There's no perfect solution in the time frame given, all sports tournaments are all well aware of this yet they're still the most popular format.
> if Ye Zhaoying won over the other person with a higher win rate, that means she's better and can make it into the final on her own merits, no?
No. If the only bit of information you have is a single game, then yes, you'd be right to assume the victor was the better player. But in an iterated game, you can easily get into a state where regardless of the outcome of a single game you're still pretty confident that one player is better than the other. It would take many games to tip your estimate. But you don't have many games, you just have the one coming up. What you don't want to have happen is a minor fluke, causing the worse player (estimated win chance 25%) to move on to the finals where they're more likely to lose.
There could also be factors that cause the odds to not follow a simple ordering rule. It could be that player A will likely beat C, B will likely lose to C, and yet B will likely beat A, due to playstyle or something.
But the former thing is more likely what's going on. A beats C is 50% odds, B beats C is 30% odds, A beats B is 70% odds, you want A or B to win and they're playing next, followed by the winner playing against C. B winning can absolutely happen, but it sucks for you if it does.
I didn't understand your point but now I do, because "rock-paper-scissors" as a reply isn't clear enough as a statement to communicate what you wanted, which is just an example of something that isn't transitive.
You're responding to someone giving a reason that isn't based on chance.
Chance is a completely separate topic, but also has a simple answer. Chance doesn't mean that everyone has the same chance. If one player has 40% odds and the other has 60% odds, you want the 60% player to compete.
No complex sport has a one dimensional level of skill. It's always multidimensional. This means it's possible that the relationship of a person beating another person consistently is not transitive.
In any head-to-head competitive sport higher win rates (wr%) do not translate to specific wins, obviously why underdog or upsets happen.
Play style matching matters.
Separately, in video games definitely the concept of winrate stacking/smurfing. Definitely not at the olympic level, but wr% does not necessarily mean a specific win.
In the article Camilla Martin says she could beat Ye Zhaoying but couldn't beat Gong Zhichao:
> But if you ignore the deeply unethical way of doing things, China was actually acting rather wisely. I could never beat Gong Zhichao, and I much preferred playing against Ye Zhaoying. There's no doubt that the Chinese knew this, and that they had a much better chance of winning gold by getting Gong Zhichao into the final.
A Chinese defeating a foreigner (rather than another Chinese) might make for a better spectacle back home. I'm speculating. I don't know anything about Olympics or badminton tournaments.
They are teammates, so they know how each other plays. And Ye is a more experienced player. But she is also famous, so players from other countries studied how she plays.
No, because sports are not fully deterministic. There is randomness involved. You may be strictly worse than another player but still have a 20% chance of beating them.
it's also not cut and dry skill across every player you meet. certain play styles might be one person's kryptonite and a non-factor for others. that's how you get into situations where player A can be beat player B who beats player C yet somehow C can beat A a lot.
