Category: Sports
What is a disability?
Swimming has 10 classifications for athletes with different physical impairments, plus three more for visual impairments and one for athletes with intellectual deficits. For that reason it is particularly prone to challenges, and swimmers say they sometimes suspect that athletes have not been classified correctly.
Three weeks before she was set to compete in the London Paralympics, Mallory Weggemann, an American swimmer who is paralyzed from the waist down, learned that officials from the International Paralympic Committee had questions about her level of ability and were requiring her to submit to reclassification in London.
And this:
The most notorious example of Paralympic classification manipulation took place at the 2000 Games in Sydney. The Spanish men’s intellectual disability basketball team was stripped of its gold medal after it emerged that many of its members were not intellectually disabled at all.
After that, mentally disabled athletes were barred from the Paralympics while officials revised the classification process; they are back again this year.
The athletes say they sympathize with the difficulties faced by the classifiers, who are forced to determine how to sort people who have several hundred different types and degrees of disability.
There is more here, interesting throughout and yet also more interesting than the article itself as well.
Increased aggression during human group contests when competitive ability is more similar
From Stulp G, Kordsmeyer T, Buunk AP, Verhulst S.:
Theoretical analyses and empirical studies have revealed that conflict escalation is more likely when individuals are more similar in resource-holding potential (RHP). Conflicts can also occur between groups, but it is unknown whether conflicts also escalate more when groups are more similar in RHP. We tested this hypothesis in humans, using data from two professional sports competitions: football (the Bundesliga, the German first division of football) and basketball (the NBA, the North American National Basketball Association). We defined RHP based on the league ranks of the teams involved in the competition (i.e. their competitive ability) and measured conflict escalation by the number of fouls committed. We found that in both sports the number of fouls committed increased when the difference in RHP was smaller. Thus, we provide what is to our best knowledge the first evidence that, as in conflicts between individuals, conflicts escalate more when groups are more similar in RHP.
The paper is here, hat tip goes to Neuroskeptic. One hypothesis is behavioral. The other hypothesis is more directly microeconomic. Perhaps fouling has positive expected returns within the context of the game, but costs a player long-term reputation, risks long-term retaliation, and so on, and thus the aggression is deployed more in the really important situations.
Football coach may refuse to punt
San Diego State head coach Rocky Long told Tod Leonard of the San Diego Union-Tribune that he’s considering not punting or kicking on fourth downs in 2012. Instead, Long is considering going for it on fourth downs inside an opponent’s 50-yard line in order to try and pick up a new set of downs every time.
Kevin Kelley, the head coach of Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas has developed the strategy over the years. He claims punting is an offensive failure, and is essentially a voluntary turnover.
Here is more, hat tip goes to Mark Buckley, and for previous MR posts on this topic see here and here.
Olympic Game Theory
How can you win a race by going slow? Check out the following video from the World Cup 2012 Individual Sprint Track Cycling (similar scenes can be found at the Olympics). The two cyclists, some of the fastest riders in the world, start out by going as slow as possible, almost like something out of Monty Python. In some races the riders will even come to a standstill.
Loyal reader Andy Garin has the analysis:
…in an all-out sprint, drafting creates a huge advantage, as the leading cyclist wears out very quickly. So both drop their speed so low that neither can take advantage of the other–well, at least until the last lap, at which point the advantage to being in front is about the same as the advantage of drafting from behind for 2/3 of a lap or so.
But note that this sort of problem arises because there are only two cyclists in the race. In Tour De France style road racing (or even the Keirin even on track, which is apparently also an Olympic event), one cyclists’ speed decisions only very marginally change the incentives of other riders. But in the Individual Sprint, you see something more like Bertrand-style dupolistic competition–that is, in the latter, one’s strategy is entirely based on the behavior of the other player. Specifically, it’s always better to “undersell” the other player (i.e. to be in the rear) in the first two laps. And thus, you get the odd equilibrium where both set their speed to a negligible exertion level.
Unlike in the badminton tournament where some teams tried to lose, the cyclists are trying to win so going slow isn’t considered unsporting but it does make for a peculiar race.
Cyclists in the group event, however, will sometimes deliberately crash, as just happened in the Olympics.
“I just crashed, I did it on purpose to get a restart, just to have the fastest ride. I did it. So it was all planned, really,” Hindes reportedly said immediately after the race. He modified his comments at the official news conference to say he lost control of his bike.
…”He (Hindes) should not have told the truth,” Daniel Morelon, a Frenchman who coaches the China team, told the AP. “It’s part of the game, but you should not tell others.”
Hindes and his team went on to win, so engineering a crash can earn you gold. Surprisingly, cycling turns out to be kinda like banking.
What predicts when an Olympic record will fall?
It turns out that if the current holder also set the record in the past, the record is more likely to be broken at the next games.
If the current Olympic record is also the world record, it is less likely to be broken in the next games.
A change in the number of countries competing in an event is also an important indicator of whether the record will fall.
And most surprising of all, the percentage by which the existing record improved on the first Olympic record, is also a significant indicator.
There is more here, and the original paper is here. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The economics of Olympic success
Here is my new Grantland piece with Kevin Grier. Excerpt:
Predictions
1. Medal totals will become more diversified over time. The market share of the “top 10” countries will continue to fall (it was 81 percent in 1988) as economic and population growth slows in the rich world. The developing world has greater room for rapid economic growth, and most parts of the developing world also have higher population growth. The Olympic playing field will get more and more level.
2. Japan will continue to fade, mostly because of aging and population shrinkage.
3. Italy will follow Japan for similar demographic reasons, as well as because the Eurozone crisis will continue to cut into budgets, training and otherwise.
4. Since Rio is host to the next Olympics, Brazil should do better than expected due to the “pre-host” bump.
5. Many African nations will rise. Currently about half of the approximately 1 billion people in Africa have a cell phone, and the middle class is growing. The chance that an African star will be spotted and trained at the appropriate age is much higher than before. Africa also continues to grow in population, and that means lots of young people. Most of us still think of African nations as very poor, but infant mortality has been falling and per-capita income rising across Africa for the better part of a decade now.
6. China will level off and then decline as a medal powerhouse. In less than 15 years, the typical person living in China is likely to be older on average than the typical person living in the United States, in part due to the country’s one-child policy. As of 2009 the number of over-60s was 167 million, about an eighth of the population, but by 2050 it is expected to reach 480 million people older than 60, with the number of young Chinese falling. The country will become old before it is truly wealthy.
7. Bob Costas will make you cry.
The Great Olympic stagnation?
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on the way to the London Olympics: Athletes stopped breaking world records. Remember the run-up to Beijing in 2008, when the sports world was abuzz over how many marks Michael Phelps would smash? He set seven world records there but hasn’t bested a global time since 2009. The Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 provided plenty of drama but few record-shattering wins — Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo’s highest-ever score in pairs figure skating wasn’t exactly a Bob Beamon moment. World records are now decades old in classic men’s Olympic sports such as the long jump (1991), shot put (1990) and discus throw (1986).
Many scientists have concluded from recent events that athletic performance is hitting a wall. Geoffroy Berthelot of INSEP, a sports research institute in Paris, looked at competitions from 1896 to 2007 and found that peak scores stopped improving in 64 percent of track and field events after 1993. Giuseppe Lippi of the University of Verona examined nine Olympic sports from 1900 to 2007 and found similar results. “Improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities,” he wrote. Berthelot has predicted that the “human species’ physiological frontiers will be reached” in most sports around 2027.
Yet his conclusion is more measured:
But what these researchers are detecting isn’t some final biological frontier but rather a lull in technological enhancement. Athletes have always relied on science to push the bounds of achievement. Olympic athletes’ great stagnation, then, is really a temporary halt in innovation.
That is from Peter Keating, here is more. For the pointer I thank Allison Kasic.
The culture that was Japan
“It was a generation,” Kuroda said through an interpreter, “when [baseball] coaches believed you should not drink water.”
Born in 1975, Kuroda is one of the last of a cohort of Japanese players who grew up in a culture in which staggeringly long work days and severe punishment were normal, and in which older players could haze younger ones with impunity.
Summer practices in the heat and humidity of Osaka lasted from 6 a.m. until after 9 p.m. Kuroda was hit with bats and forced to kneel barelegged on hot pavement for hours.
“Many players would faint in practice,” Kuroda said with the assistance of his interpreter, Kenji Nimura. “I did go to the river and drink. It was not the cleanest river, either. I would like to believe it was clean, but it was not a beautiful river.
“In order to play,” he added, “you had to survive. We were trained to build an immune system so that we could survive and play.”
Here is more, hat tip to Hugo. As I often say, I am a utility optimist and a revenue pessimist, for Japan most of all.
Does Larry Bird hate Adam Smith?
From Christopher Veldman:
I saw this interview with Larry Bird on ESPN yesterday and thought you might find it interesting.
“‘The one thing that bothers me the most is guys taking big pay cuts for a year to go down there and try to win a championship,’ Bird told ESPN. ‘There’s a lot of guys who like to ride the coattails of the best and they’ll take a pay cut just to have an opportunity to win that ring.'”
Moneyball 2.0
Or should that be 3.0?:
The technology was originally developed to track missiles. Now, SportVU systems hang from the catwalks of 10 NBA arenas, tiny webcams that silently track each player as they shoot, pass, and run across the court, recording each and every move 25 times a second. SportVU can tell you not just Kevin Durant’s shooting average, but his shooting average after dribbling one vs. two times, or his shooting average with a defender three feet away vs. five feet away. SportVU can actually consider both factors at once, plus take into account who passed him the ball, how many minutes he’d been on the court, and how many miles he’d run that game already.
It’s big data in a relatively small pool, and it has the potential to impact everything about basketball, from how it’s coached, to how it’s recruited–even to how we calculate a player’s worth. Sportvision, another sports data collection system based on the same underlying big data idea, has already massively impacted baseball since it came into play in 2006. Now SportVU is generating more basketball data than anyone ever has. And its potential has only begun to be tapped–health care researcher Kirk Goldsberry, who recently wowed the stats geeks at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference with his spatial analysis to determine the best shooters, has begun mining SportVU’s data for new insights. But only 10 teams in the NBA are currently using SportVU. Four of them made the playoffs. One even made it to the finals: The Oklahoma City Thunder.
Malcolm Gladwell on Bill James
James turns out to be not just the most important writer/thinker on baseball of our generation but also — completely unexpectedly — to have read more books in the true crime genre than maybe anyone else alive. In Popular Crime he works his way though every major true crime story of the last 200 years — from Lizzie Borden to JonBenet Ramsey — making (as one would expect) all kinds of brilliant, wildly entertaining and occasionally completely nutty Jamesian observations. Why Popular Crime wasn’t a huge bestseller, I have no idea. OK. Maybe I do. It’s 496 pages …
That is from Gladwell’s dialogue with Bill Simmons, much of which covers talent allocation and talent spotting, channeled through the medium of sports, and how technology, talent, and fame interact.
The real inflation problem
Competitors are said to pump air to deliberately inflate the udders before sealing the teats with superglue to stop the air or milk leaking out. The procedure gives the cattle the appearance of having full udders, an attribute believed to be desirable in show cattle. The practice, which leaves cows in “severe discomfort”, is understood to be an attempt to win agricultural prizes for their animals. Champion animals can fetch up to £100,000 at auction and are highly prized for breeding. The RSCPA has promised to investigate complaints, although no prosecutions have yet taken place.
Here is more, courtesy of Rahul.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
It is here, along with the table of contents. Here are two segments, reproduced from the front page of the journal:
Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and the Guy Next Door: Race, Ethnicity, and Baseball Card Prices
David Findlay and John Santos replicate an analysis of the market for baseball Hall-of-Famer rookie cards produced since 1947, when Jackie Robinson made his major-league debut. The earlier study did not find evidence of significant racial discrimination by card buyers. Having detected a pattern of data errors in that study, Findlay and Santos correct the errors, extend the analysis, and include Hispanics. Their more powerful analysis also finds no evidence of significant racial or ethnic discrimination.
- The Findlay and Santos article
- Robert Muñoz—one of the authors of the original study—acknowledges the corrections, applauds the extensions, and explores dimensions of the discrimination question that are not well illuminated by the findings of the investigation.
Characteristics of the Members of Twelve Economic Associations:
Using survey responses from 299 U.S. economics professors, the authors report on membership in the professional economic associations with names including the following terms: American, Eastern, Southern, Western, Econometric, Evolutionary Economics, Private Enterprise Education, Feminist Economics, Public Choice, Socio-Economics, Austrian Economics, and Radical Political Economics. Association membership is related to voting, policy views, and favorite economists.
Can Timeouts Change the Outcome of Basketball Games?
From Serguei Saavedra, Satyam Mukherjee, James P. Bagrow. Here is the paper, here is the abstract:
In basketball, timeouts are believed to reverse the momentum of a game. However, here we show timeouts have no significant effect on the final outcomes of games. Moreover, we find that the timeout factor only appears to reinforce the game of dominant teams, meaning that only the most successful teams can find any positive benefit. We find no association with team payrolls, suggesting that richer teams are not particularly better at capitalizing on timeouts. Our findings support that strategic breaks have little impact on workplace performance and productivity.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Markets in everything
And while I knew that retired baseball players sell their autographs for $15 a pop, I had no idea that Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for life for betting, has a Web site that, Sandel writes, “sells memorabilia related to his banishment. For $299, plus shipping and handling, you can buy a baseball autographed by Rose and inscribed with an apology: ‘I’m sorry I bet on baseball.’ For $500, Rose will send you an autographed copy of the document banishing him from the game.”
That is from Thomas Friedman.