Shauna Coxsey has qualified in 1st place for finals on Tuesday after the Combined qualification round. In an exciting twist, due to the fact that Japan has 4 athletes qualified for the Combined final but can only take 2 Olympic spots, all 4 athletes from other countries in the final plus the 9th and 10th place competitors are guaranteed an Olympic ticket for consideration by their National Olympic Committee. Shauna qualified in 1st after placing 14th in Speed, 1st in Boulder and 3rd in Lead.
The first 7 female Sport Climbing Olympians in Tokyo 2020 - pending selection by their respective NOCs - will be (final ranking order to be decided in Tuesday's final):
- Shauna Coxsey (GBR)
- Janja Garnbret (SLO)
- Petra Klingler (SUI)
- Aleksandra Miroslaw (POL)
- The two highest-placing Japanese climbers, to be decided on Tuesday.
- Brooke Raboutou (USA) (9th place)
- Jessica Pilz (AUT) (10th place) (takes unused host quota if Japan select two athletes from Hachioji, or Hachioji quota if they select just one from this event - to be confirmed in next few weeks)
Shauna placed 14th in Speed, 1st in Boulder and 3rd in Lead to qualify in 1st place. Her reaction on Facebook was one of disbelief:
The battle for the two hotly contested Japanese places in the women's event will be between Akiyo Noguchi, Ai Mori, Futaba Ito and Miho Nonaka. Watch the women's Combined final live on Tuesday from 7:20am UK time.
The men's Combined qualification takes place tomorrow.
Stay tuned for Charlie Boscoe's Combined report, and some comment from Shauna...
Watch live on the IFSC YouTube channel.
IFSC Climbing World Championships Combined - Hachioji (JPN) 2019
Results
Comments
Brilliant stuff. To finish ahead of Janja in the Difficulty comp surely must have impressed even Shauna herself!
It is interesting that she would have dropped to third place with the second and third placed climbers each moving up a place if the scoring had been addditive rather than multiplicative. This seems very arbitrary. What is the rationale behind the multiplicative system? A brief play with the maths suggests that it tends to favour less consistency when two climbers' placings have the same additive score, so is the idea to favour climbers with one particularly strong discipline even if another is a bit weak?
It seems to me that additive would have been a better way to do this. As it is, the winner is almost certain to be be someone who's brilliant in one discipline and so-so in the other two, instead of someone who's pretty good in all three.
Having said that - thinking out loud - I'm considering this as if all three scores are independent. I wonder if actually boulder and lead scores are relatively well correlated, and speed is less well correlated with the other two?
reply to Robert Durran:
Yes, I think it is exactly designed to ensure that whoever does well overall will have done well in at least one of the disciplines. If the scoring was additive then there would be the possibility of someone doing averagely in each discipline then doing well overall. I personally think the former is how it should be.
In my view the overall champion should be someone who has got top 3 in at least one discipline and probably has finished pretty high in two (if not all three) disciplines. If the overall champion was someone who had just finished mid-ranking in each discipline then this would not, in my view, represent someone who is excelling enough to merit being champion.
So using multiplication of scores heavily places emphasis on high ranking places but allows one discipline to be not great. Additive would not place so much emphasis on high ranking places.
The alternative would be to use an additive method but where there is some scaling on the score per place (so not just 1,2,3,... but maybe 1, 5, 10, 20,...) to heavily bias high places.
Isn't that effectively the system used in Formula 1?