Paris 2024: Scoring, boxing, and Olympic potpourri
Doomsayers were wrong about Paris; the Games were a spectacular success, but not without a curious controversy (or two)
For the first time I was not able to see a single Olympic event, ceremony, or broadcast from Paris. The IOC vigorously exercised its copyright and prevented most Olympic performances being rebroadcast. This was probably due to the manufactured outrage over the opening ceremony, the controversy in women's boxing, and a reportedly amusing performance by an Australian breakdancer. Needless to say YouTube, my normal source for all Olympic information, dried up for the Paris Games.
I understand that Paris did a good job as host though. Doomsayers missed the mark about infrastructure failures, were mostly wrong about dirty rivers, and completely misread a local population they claimed would not put up with the weeks of disruption the Games required.
Item 1: Another attempt to score the Games
Since I was cut off from watching any of the Games my scoring exercise is limited to crunching numbers without appreciating the drama that went into the medal tallies.
Originally these analyses of multi-sport events focused on showing how gold medal counts were shallow and misleading. My report on the Tokyo Games tied medal counts and points to a country’s population, the number of athletes entered, and the country’s GDP. In this article I stick with a simple 5-3-1 scheme.
Although these analyses are fun, trying to quantify results across many sports and events is kind of silly. Multi-sport events simply cannot be 'scored' in any meaningful way, and especially not in a way useful to sport governing bodies. For example, men's rowing and women's weightlifting have nothing to do with each other, nor should they be considered as part of the same competitive unit with their scores contributing to a common goal.
But numbers need to be crunched and cooking up various scoring schemes has met that need.
Table 1 shows that simply counting gold medals does not adequately portray overall performance. For example, Great Britain outscored France (16 golds), Australia (18), and Japan (20) with only 14 gold medals. Without a points system Great Britain would be in 6th place instead of 4th. Brazil with two fewer golds outscored Spain based on better silver and bronze results. Also, a gold-only tally would place Japan in 3rd place instead of 6th.
Perhaps a more comprehensive system would be better? What if eight places were scored? Or 10? I used a 3-place point system because there are only three medals awarded and the results in this format are readily available. To score more places would require access to complete results of each tournament. These are difficult to find and that analysis would be much more labor intensive. I didn't do it, but someone did!
The Sports Examiner has been using the 8-place NCAA track & field system to quantify full results for all sports over the past three Olympic cycles. Table 2 shows the top 20 countries and their total points and ranking from Paris:
No matter how you score the Games though you always end up back where you started, with the question of Why? Other than playing around with numbers and spreadsheets—and who doesn't like playing with spreadsheets—there isn't much point to it.
Scoring each sport makes more sense. As I noted in my Tokyo analysis, if we are set on declaring winners then the only meaningful way is to do it by sport.
Most Olympic sports already have world championships held every one or two years. Isn't the Olympic tournament similar to a world championship? Scoring this way would be a legitimate way to judge the results. This would also fix the imbalance of medals offered in individual sports like swimming, gymnastics, or athletics where each event generates a series of medals compared to a team sport like basketball where only one series is offered. Currently a strong swimming country out-medals a strong basketball country simply because of the structure of the tournament. Scoring each sport tournament rather than each event within a tournament would fix this.
Realistically though this is something that is fun to think about but isn't really on top of anyone’s agenda.
Item 2: The Olympic boxing saga
The controversy over the sex of two boxers in the women's event defies logic. Whether Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu Ting (Taiwan) were actually women stumped everyone to the point that the question morphed into a battle of feelings on one side and facts on the other. Neither side won. Reconciling the two fell to the IOC who was hampered partially by its own rules but mostly by how it came across as utterly tone deaf to the situation.
Khelif and Lin have XY chromosomes. This is the biological definition of a male. The backstory of their upbringing as women is not known but one assumes they both have a disorder of sex development (DSD) similar to what affects Caster Semenya, the runner. DSD, commonly known as being intersex, is usually identified at birth by atypical genitalia but sometimes goes unrecognized until years later when a young girl goes through male puberty and discovers that she is biologically a male. Chromosome testing could reveal DSD much earlier but it is not normally done at birth unless abnormalities are present or there is some other reason to do it.
Is this what’s going on with the Olympic boxers? Could they be intersex and not know it? Maybe, but due to political and cultural factors involved it may be some time before we know for sure. A sensible solution, if there is one, has not yet been identified. But allowing males and females to compete together in a combat sport is obviously not a good idea.
While the facts will eventually be known the troubling part of this story is how it was handled both by the Olympic officials and the media.
The IOC officially ended their sex testing of female athletes in 1999 primarily to protect the dignity of athletes who may not know they have intersex characteristics. This left the determination of an athlete's sex, if it was necessary, up to the international governing bodies. An athlete’s sex eligibility can still be challenged in the Olympics but it is no longer a normal part of competition.
The International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified Khelif and Lin from the World Championship in 2023 following gender testing, saying they were not eligible to compete in the women's category. Later, and clouding the issue even more, the IBA was stripped of its recognition as the governing body for the sport due to corruption and other shady practices unrelated to the current dust up. It continues to be in a verbal war with Thomas Bach, President of the IOC.
According to the IOC, the IBA's tests of the two boxers were conducted in an ad hoc manner, outside the rules and thus cannot be used as proof of eligibility or not in the (just concluded) Games.
Mark Adams, IOC spokesperson told ESPN:
"I cannot tell you if they were credible or not credible [gender tests] because the source from which they came was not credible and the basis for the tests was not credible," Adams said. "For that reason there was no consideration of whether they were correct or not correct because they had no bearing for the eligibility of boxing here." ESPN, 5 August
Boxing rules do not allow males to fight females, so some solution to this issue will eventually be created. It should be obvious that combat sports, probably more than any other, need measures to protect fighters from injury.