Is it possible to 'win' the Commonwealth Games?
A few weeks before the start of the Commonwealth Games there was a brief flap in the local press when sport officials refused to announce the hoped-for medal 'target' for the Malaysian team. Various reasons were given but depending on who you listened to the explanations seemed to be contradictory. Then something happened. Malaysian officials said they wanted to do better than they did in the last staging of the Games, in other words they wanted to improve on their 10th place finish from the last staging of the games in Glasgow. Previously I wrote that setting medal targets is not a good way to gauge improvement since all you're doing is comparing yourself to others, a relative comparison that doesn't really tell you anything. In this article I want to explain why "10th place or better" is not a good goal, and how getting various "places" in multi-sport events is impossible anyway.
Can a country really win the Commonwealth Games?
The answer is no. There are no multi-sport events that rank the overall placing of participating teams. The Commonwealth Games don't do it, nor do the SEA Games, the Olympics, or the Asian Games. Declaring winners for this type of competition started when the press began ranking teams based on the gold medal tallies. This has no validity and no matter how much it's talked about by the media you will not find any Games federation that publishes overall team rankings as results. To do this you would have to score the competitions, which isn't done but which I wrote about in an article regarding the "winner" of the SEA Games. The 5-3-1 point system described in that article is not an accurate portrayal of a country's overall performance but it at least recognizes the significance of second and third place finishes, something that the gold medal tally alone doesn't do.
Adding to the confusion of medal tallies are multi-event sports; sports that have many events and which award many medals as opposed to sports that award only one. Football and hockey, for example, have only one winner, so the Commonwealth Games tournaments for these sports will award only three medals. Swimming and athletics, on the other hand, have many events in their tournament programs and will award over 60 medals in their competitions.
10th place is a relative goal based on factors that cannot be controlled
To be effective goals have to have specific endpoints so that athletes and coaches can judge whether it has been achieved or not. The 'goal' of finishing in 10th place or better for the Malaysian team is impossible to judge. Each individual athlete or team has no clear idea of what their role in achieving this 'goal' is. Although they may have personal goals for the Games unless these can be tied to the overall team effort the overall goal is somewhat meaningless. This is even more ambiguous when coupled with the reliance on gold medal counts as indicators of success. A goal that relies on placing higher in the Games based only on the final gold medal count is not a goal at all.
'10th place or better' is also relative to the performance of other teams and athletes. Malaysia cannot control what other athletes do, so Malaysian athletes may succeed or fail, regardless of their own performance. This is an example of poor goal setting since there is no clear objective to strive for.
Individual performance is the key to overall improvement
As I wrote previously, focusing on individual improvement is the best way to secure success in sport competitions and the only way to actually improve national results. Comparing yourself to others is focusing on a moving target. It's much easier to achieve performance when comparison is made against personal results. This can be done in several ways. Have skills improved? Is stamina or speed increased? How do we know? The key to gauging improvement is being able to measure performance, and this means focusing on data, large amounts of data and setting goals accordingly.