Tag: Olympics

The Russian Death Sentence

On Tuesday, the Russian Olympic Committee was suspended from participating in the Olympic Winter Games at PyeongChang in February 2018. The action was in response to “the systemic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system in Russia, through the Disappearing Positive Methodology and during the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014″. These penalties for doping are without precedent in Olympics history. Plenty of athletes have been kicked out or lost their medals for doping. This is the first time an entire county was kicked out.

This all stems back to the corrupt doping testing facilities at Sochi. Thomas Bach, president of I.O.C., noted that Russia’s cheating was widespread. Even worse,  it corrupted the Olympic laboratory that handled drug testing at the Sochi Games on orders from Russia’s Olympic officials. Russia’s sports ministry formed a team that tampered with more than 100 samples to conceal evidence of athletes’ steroid use throughout the course of the Sochi Games.

This is a terrible outcome for Russian athletes and will likely have a huge negative impact on the PyeongChang Games. The Russian athletes have excelled in many of the winter competitions. Clearly, some of that was from doping. But not all. (Do you believe in miracles?)

The IOC opened the door for some Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag as Olympic Athletes from Russia. The IOC has organized a group to extend invitation to a select group of athletes, support staff and officials to participate in this manner. As you might expect, the athletes must not have had a prior doping violation and must go through a battery of tests before the Games.

It’s not clear how big this pool of invitees will be. Yevgenia Medvedeva, a favorite to medal in figure skating favorite, said that she “can not accept” competing in PyeongChang as a neutral athlete. She pointed out that she was 14 during the Sochi Games and not a member of the national team.

This is obviously a huge blow to the Russian sports federation, but the IOC indicated that the Russian flag may be allowed to fly at the closing ceremonies, presumably as a symbolic indication that they can move past this and compete clean in future events.

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Cheating Your Way Into the Olympics

Vanessa_Mae_holding_olympic_torch

Vanessa Mae really wanted to compete in the Olympics, but she is better violinist than a skier. She has sold 10 million records so that is a very high bar. The International Ski Federation decided that she cheated her way into the Olympics.

When Eddie the Eagle competed in the 1988 Olympics, some thought it was a great underdog story and some thought it was degrading the biggest sports event. In response, the International Olympic Committee instituted a new rule in 1990 which requires Olympic hopefuls to compete and place well.

In Sochi the musician raced for Thailand and finished last of 67 competitors in the two-run giant slalom. Her quote after the race:

“You’ve got the elite skiers of the world and then you’ve got some mad old woman like me trying to make it down.”

To qualify, Ms. Mae raced four times in Slovenia in January in a last-ditch bid to meet the Olympic qualifying standard. Under current Olympic qualification rules, countries with no skier ranked in the world’s top 500 may send one man and one woman to to compete in slalom and giant slalom if those athletes meet racing criteria.

Thailand has no skiers ranked in the world’s top 500.  To meet the racing criteria, Mae had to produce an average of 140 points or fewer over five recognized races. She slid under the wire and made the score.

But it turns out those races in Slovenia were a fraud, staged to get Mae the points she needed. According to the FIS report:

  • The results of two giant slalom races on 19th January included a competitor who was not present at, and did not participate.
  • At least one competitor started away from the starting gate outside the automatic timing wand that was manually opened by the starter when she was already on the course.
  • A previously retired competitor with the best FIS points in the competition took part for the sole purpose of lowering the penalty to the benefit the participants in the races.
  • The races courses were not changed for the second runs as is required by the FIS rules.
  • One of the races was a junior championship, with Mae being 15 years older than all of the other racers.

The FIS banned five officials from Slovenia and Italy for between one and two years for their role in the scandal. Ms. Mae is banned from skiing for four years. But she still achieved her dream of competing in the Olympics.

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“Vanessa Mae holding olympic torch” by Yemisi Blake from London, United Kingdom. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Badminton Falls Down

Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters

Few in the United States watch Olympic badminton. Fewer still are likely to watch after the ridiculous play in preliminary games. (Maybe a few will try to watch, just as a few slow down to watch the results of a car accident on the side of the road.) Four of the best teams in the world were kicked out of the Olympics for intentionally trying to lose matches and gain a competitive advantage. Clearly the competition was poorly structured if there was an incentive to lose.

This year the Olympics switched to a round-robin tournament, replacing the one-and-done format, so teams compete in three round-robin games before seeding them in medal brackets. There are four pools of four teams. The top two teams in each pool qualify for the quarterfinals and the bottom two spend the rest of the competition in the Olympic village.

China’s Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang won their first two matches and secured a spot in quarterfinal. Their final match against a South Korean team would determine first and second place in Pool A.

The first complication came when the other Chinese team, Qing Tian and Yunlei Zhao, lost to Denmark in an big upset. That placed the Chinese team on the same side of the bracket as the winner of Pool A. If both Chinese teams won their quarterfinal matches, they’d meet in the semifinals and only one would make it to the finals. At best that’s gold and bronze, not gold and silver.

To avoid this situation, the Wang and Yu tanked their game. The South Koreans did not want to meet the other Chinese team so they tanked also. At one point the four players traded 6 service errors in a row. Five went directly into the net. The one that made it over made in way over and went long off the back line. That’s much more like how I play in the backyard.

After the Chinese tried to throw their match, the South Korean team of Ha Jung-eun and Kim Min-jung faced the Indonesian team of Meiliana Jauhari and Greysia Pollii in Pool C. Both teams adopted a similar losing strategy to avoid having to face the fearsome Wang and Yu. (Watch the video and you can see that they were not trying.)

A well designed tournament should eliminate strategic losses. Getting a higher seed should convey a benefit, generally it means you play someone who isn’t as good. Pool play to determine seeding means more games and allows a margin of error for a team. Clearly the Olympics missed something.

The NBA tried to eliminate an incentive to lose by implementing a draft lottery instead of merely giving the highest draft pick to the team with the worst record. The NFL gives an incentive to win by giving the teams with the best record a week off before the playoffs. That still leaves some lackluster games at the end of the season when teams pull their starters.

Strategic losing does not appear to be a new strategy in badminton. Statistics show that more than 20 percent of matches is either not finished or not played when the Chinese play against their own compatriots. They met each other 99 times on the circuit in 2011, and 20 matches were either not played at all or played partially before one of the opponents retired. This shows that 20.20% of matches between Chinese shutters were not completed in 2011. But only 0.74% of matches were uncompleted between China and other nations.

What does this have to do with compliance? Look at your internal structures and incentives. Are any designed to allow an incentive to fail. Do any give incentive for one business unit to cause another to fail?

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