In the young Olympic event of "speed climbing," Sam Watson (USA) set two new world records, breaking his own previous world record. For that, he got the Bronze medal. The reason he did relates to some concepts I have been mulling over about what makes a good spectator event. The Olympics are the rare time when a whole bunch of sports that are generally relatively obscure become big-audience, big-advertising events. Spectator sports are sports as entertainment, but they are also still athletic.

Watson got the bronze because speed climbing is run in the "pyramid" or "playoff" style where two climbers "race" and the winner of the race advances or gets a point. This is a common style used in lots of sports, and in most of the "mega" spectator sports that get 90% of the audiences and money (Football, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, American Football, Cricket etc.) Watson set one new WR in the early rounds, but he had a minor stumble in the semi-finals so he missed the gold medal "round" and in his bronze metal match set a new WR that was not matched in the official goal medal match.

The problem is this -- there's really no "match" aspect to this particular sport. The two climbers are really just racing against a clock, and the fastest time wins. They rarely glance at their opponent, and while they may have some peripheral perception, in a good run they are racing only the clock. (If an opponent has a very poor run, and falls or stumbles majorly, a climber might notice that and slow down and be more careful, now that a win is assured for them if they don't fall, but not in a good race.)

Most playoff style sports there is a real contest between the opponents. At the very least they are aware of how the opponent is doing and usually adjust their actions to it. In sprinting heats and semi-finals, runners try just to win the heat to qualify, and not overdo it. Sport climbing lacks this, and so should not be done pyramid style perhaps. Most observers felt that Watson was clearly the best climber at the event.

Why this happened is due to other factors that I think are sought in sport design

Goals of a good sport

1. The viewer should ideally be able to tell who won, immediately, with their eyes, except when the contest is abnormally close.
2. The contest should be exciting and entertaining. Views also like to invest in pride in the "home team."
3. We should feel, at the end, that the gold went to the best competitor (at least on that day, but ideally in a global sense.)

The various methods of holding a competition do differently on these goals.

• The worst, I feel, are events which consist of individual runs which are judged by skilled, but subjective judges, who after some time delay, issue a score. Players compete and the highest score or sum of scores defines the winner.
• Not as bad, but still bad because you can't see it immediately, are events timed with a clock (or other computerized method.) You can't directly see who won, though you can look at the listing of times after, and you also feel the clock was objective.
• Better are "progressive" events like high jump, weightlifting etc. In these events competitors keep "raising the bar" (literally or metaphorically) until only one can do it, given typically 3 attempts.
• Many sports use the pyramid approach, where there are 2-competitor contests (including matches of popular sports) and competitors collect wins in round-robin play and then enter a pyramid style playoff for medals. This checks many of the boxes, though in many cases there is concern that final status depends on both who you happened to get paired with, and whether somebody had bad luck in a particular contest, even though overall they are superior. Large sports leagues, like Baseball, resolve this with a months-long season of >80 games to decide who wins the pennant, but then switch to pyramid, though with "best of 7" to lessen the "bad day" effect.
• The simplest sports are races. The Marathon is a good pure example, everybody starts at the same time, and the spectator can clearly see who wins, and how they won. Track racing tends to use a simple elimination pyramid in the heats, but the final race has great purity, though photo finishes are getting common in the short races. The repechage (2nd chance race) helps reduce the risk of randomly eliminating competitors.

Team Sports

Team sports are hugely popular. The classic team sports are actual team sports, where the team works together. There's been a rise in pseudo team sports, where athletes compete individually, and their results are added up to make a team score. These help trigger national pride which gives them some popularity. The relay is halfway to that, but as we saw in the Men's 100m relay this year, when the USA botched a handoff, there is a real team element there. One sign of a pseudo team sport is teams that have never played together before the games. (Though that does happen in the relay.)

As you can guess I am not a fan of these "addition" based team sports, though they certainly trigger the "national pride" factor, though mostly they show what nations are rich and populous enough to gather enough depth for a winning team. They are thus popular with the US audience. (Sometimes they reward the small specialized nation, like Jamaica in sprinting.) I am a supporter of more non-segregated sports, and some, like the mixed relay, are largely additive. It's pretty easy to make a cooperative team sport into a mixed sport, just require that a minimum number of team members be female.

Entertainment factors

Spectator sports are entertainment. This may explain the popularity of some sports that entirely violate the principles above, such as figure skating. Figure skating depends on subjective judges, and they are so subjective that we've seen corruption scandals (like in the 2002 Pairs competition where a judge was bribed to deprive the Canadian team of Gold and give it to the Russians) and many instances where it strongly seems scores have been allocated based on reputation as much as the performance that day. Figure skating is also a sport where the randomness of mistakes plays a large role -- the winner is the one who didn't fall, possibly because they tried too much difficulty -- rather than the best in the sport if you watched them do 100 routines. That's part of the reason judges factor in reputation. Some sports try to reduce this by allowing each competitor to do several attempts and keep only their best score. There are arguments both ways on this.

Also very entertaining are sports like short track speed skating, and the "cross" events like snowboard cross. These events are filled with collisions and spills that are terribly unfair, including to those who had somebody fall down in front of them, taking them out. We've seen quite a few short track races where the winner was simply the one who didn't get caught in a fall. It's exciting, but hardly makes you feel like you've seen the best get the gold. But people do tune in.

There is some argument that in a purely athletic contest, artistic impression should get little role. Audiences enjoy it though. A recent criticism of Gymnastics "floor" contest is that women are scored on facial expressions, and must have music, and men's expressions are not scored and they may not use music. Gymnastics tend to also violate the principles above, and they are very popular, at least with US TV networks. (I join with the many who feel NBC greatly overdoes its coverage of women's gymnastics and figure skating, at the expense of other worthy events.)

Randomness

The view of randomness is strange. Some hate it, some love it. Randomness removes the feeling that the winner must be the best, but audiences are entertained by it, and it helps them feel that maybe they could do well themselves. (The two most popular game shows on TV, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, are opposites but both are popular. Jeopardy is all-skill, WoF mostly luck.)

Improving sports

The "progressive" sports like high jump end up being pretty exciting to watch, even though they start off with disadvantages, as sports that are inherently individual performance. One could even imagine a progressive figure skating event, where competitors move through a series of steps of greater and greater difficulty until only the winner(s) can do them and nobody can do the next level. (Less entertaining, they should also have padding to avoid injury.) But I feel this wouldn't please the audience as much.

We might also see the arrival of AI judging. Today, AIs could probably do an equivalent or better job of judging the various elements of form in many sports than humans. Even at judging flair and artistic style, if trained on the scores of human judges who do that consistently.

Most importantly an AI judge would be 100% consistent, and probably highly objective. (It would encode the biases of the human judgments it was trained on, but work could be done to minimize those more than they can be minimized in humans.) Consistency is key, though, and in fact competitors could get copies of the AI and thus practice under the exact same judging they will face in competition. (While they could try to game the AI judge, this would usually be obvious, and spotting that would be the job of remaining human judges. Instead, rules could require them to report any flaw they find in the AI judge, if it's rewarding or punishing something that obviously is not what is wanted.)

An AI judge would also help in any progressive contest. Spectators still would not be able to see immediately what happened (as they can't today) but at least the score would appear instantly, not after 30 seconds, more like a clock--and we happily accept the clock as computer judge today.

Giving contestants more attempts so that failure doesn't greatly affect the results is easier in a world where people watch on digital TV -- you can just edit out most of the failed attempts. Doesn't help those in the stadium, of course.

So what to do with Speed Climbing? It's not good to give the bronze to the world record. But it's more exciting to watch than just a series of time trials. Perhaps something can make the competition more real. Or it could be made progressive, like high jump, so climbers just keep trying until one succeeds and the rest fail after 3 attempts.