In reply to UKC Articles:
that was an interesting and insightful thought experiment! thank you.
even given the bits of finagling required to match the olympic boulders to the new scoring system, it’s good to see that there was still a reasonable separation in the women’s field, given that it was effectively 6 competitors only, and nobody topped anything except janja.
it’s also interesting to see that neither of the pure top-performers in one discipline (seo and raboutou) did end up in the medals, with pilz (5th in boulder, 3rd in lead) snagging silver and noguchi (4th in both lead and boulder) getting bronze, due to the rather big gap between 4th and 5th place in lead while the separated but still closely packed 3rd–5th ranks in boulder put these athletes on practically equal footing in a sum-up of points.
this appears to indicate a sentiment i’ve heard said before: the setting for each discipline is going to have a big influence, when it’s not ranks per discipline but performance-based points that make the final result.
i think it was on a youtube vlog on the channel by akiyo noguchi, the narasaki brothers, and yudai ikeda, where they said that boulder problems are set so that even nonspecialists can reach an expected minimum performance (i think it was one top or something like that), while the lead route is expected to weed out athletes over more or less its entire length. that would mean even a pure lead specialist but comparatively bad boulderer gets 25-ish points in boulder and is expected to go near 100 in lead, whereas a top-performing boulderer weak in lead will get 100-ish points in boulder and single digits or so in lead.
when three athletes with nearly the same performance in a discipline get weighted nearly the same instead of overweighting whatever minute differences they had between them: good.
when one discipline gets weighted more than another so that a discipline looks nicer for spectators: …not so good.