UKC

If... (olympics contains spoilers for mens comp)

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 gravy 06 Aug 2021

In the quals Bassa Mawem pulled out with a torn biceps.

I wondered what would happen if Bassa had not had an injury and recalculated the ranking based on the (not entirely unreasonable) assumption that he came 1/8/8.

The new rank order gives:

Coleman (gold)

Shubert (Silver)

Narasaki (Bronze)

Lopez

Mawem M

Ondra

Duffy

Mawem B

So apart from moving Lopez from gold to 4th it doesn't change the rank order. In the quals the discussion was all about Ondra benefiting from the injury but it's clear from this who did and who was cost a medal. Not sure what I think about that yet...

However, I can be sure that the BBC coverage was terrible and the commentating was awful.

The potentially surprising part of the comp (ie the bit where expectations were most inaccurate) was the bouldering and none of the important bits (ie Ondra not climbing) were shown just random snippets like a jumping record. 

I think the worst climbing analogy was something like "it's like you've driven your battery care to the service station and all the charging bays are full" - I guess this was a desperate attempt not to repeat (or possibly to update for COP26) "he's totally gassed" or "he's got no gas in the tank" again.

I guess this is probably discussed elsewhere in detail but I'm still trying for no spoilers for this afternoon...

2
OP gravy 06 Aug 2021

In reply to Jon Greengrass:

So I see - everytime!

2
 planetmarshall 06 Aug 2021

In reply to Jon Greengrass:

> Quote removed

To be fair, if I wanted to remain ignorant of the Olympic Sport Climbing results I probably wouldn't have looked up UKC News.

1
OP gravy 06 Aug 2021
In reply to planetmarshall:

I think the point is the spoiler is there on the UKC home pages, land here and it's splattered there.  Easy to replace with "1st Olympic Men's Gold medal awarded" without mentioning the result.

5
 Jon Greengrass 06 Aug 2021
In reply to planetmarshall:

In User Options Favourite Forum  the only topic you can't turn off are UKC News and Premier Posts. The titles are usually ambiguous like

UKC Forums - NEWS: IFSC Lead and Speed World Cup Villars 2021 (ukclimbing.com) 

UKC Forums - NEWS: Tokyo 2020 Day 1: Men's Qualification - Results (ukclimbing.com)

Posting the result at 17:42 on weekday in the topic title when most people have been at work all day and haven't had a chance to watch the replay is stupid.

10
 Iamgregp 06 Aug 2021

In reply to Jon Greengrass:

Just a suggestion, but if you don't want find out the results I'd suggest not logging on to a regularly updated climbing site that has a news feed?

I think it would be more of a f*ck up if they didn't post the results here. 

 gazhbo 06 Aug 2021
In reply to Jon Greengrass:

> Posting the result at 17:42 on weekday in the topic title when most people have been at work all day and haven't had a chance to watch the replay is stupid.

Is it not more stupid to visit a climbing news website when you actively want to avoid knowing what happened in a big climbing comp that day.  A bit like going on the BBC sport page at 6pm on Saturday then whingeing that somebody ruined match of the day for you.

OP gravy 06 Aug 2021
In reply to gazhbo:

In reply to Jon Greengrass:

I think the point is that it is _really_ easy to announce the result is in without actually forcing it on the unwary.  So, later on, perhaps we can have:

"Olympic women's gold medal result in dramatic final"

rather than

"Nicki Minaj scoops gold in dramatic final"

(obvs names change top protect the innocent)

It's simply bad manners not to try not to spray the result everywhere.

Post edited at 12:57
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 gazhbo 06 Aug 2021
In reply to gravy:

> In reply to Jon Greengrass:

> It's simply bad manners not to try not to spray the result everywhere.

It really isn’t.  It would be poor journalism to redact important information from headlines to protect the sensitivities of people who lack the self control not to look at the UKC forums the second they leave work, despite not wanting to find out information that is bound to be in those forums.  It’s not like they text him the result - just stay off the internet for half an hour!

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 Howard J 07 Aug 2021
In reply to gazhbo:

> It really isn’t.  It would be poor journalism to redact important information from headlines to protect the sensitivities of people who lack the self control not to look at the UKC forums the second they leave work, despite not wanting to find out information that is bound to be in those forums. 

By all means put it in the headline on the news page, just don't put the results in the thread title in the forum. 

The unofficial custom and practice of UKC forums is that most users are very careful not to do this, and also put spoiler alerts in the heading when discussing events, so it is normally safe to visit the forums in the expectation that spoilers can be avoided. It's easy enough to stay away from the new pages.  It's a bit disappointing that The Management haven't respected this practice, especially when given the limited TV coverage most won't have been able to watch the events live.

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 deepsoup 07 Aug 2021
In reply to Howard J:

> By all means put it in the headline on the news page, just don't put the results in the thread title in the forum. 

^ This.  But..

>  It's a bit disappointing that The Management haven't respected this practice, especially when given the limited TV coverage most won't have been able to watch the events live.

It was a bit disappointing, but I think it's much more likely this was just a forgivable simple mistake.  'The Management' usually manage to avoid doing this with other comps after all.  I guess the forum thread is generated automatically, so it probably just slipped somebody's mind that the headline would be copy/pasted verbatum into the thread title on the forum.

 Michael Gordon 07 Aug 2021
In reply to gazhbo:

> It would be poor journalism to redact important information from headlines 

Why? You could keep the piece the same but avoid spoilers in the headline - not difficult.

2
In reply to Michael Gordon:

> Why? You could keep the piece the same but avoid spoilers in the headline - not difficult.

Actually, we took a decision to include the winners in the headline. We discussed it and decided, at this unique moment, we needed to position ourselves as a news site since interest was higher than ever (as was our traffic). To do that effectively headlines need to have results and names in them otherwise they don't appear on search. 

I am actually incredibly proud of the coverage we have given and the whole team has been amazing with midnight edits and very long days putting together the articles and videos. Our in-depth information leading up to the event was the best available and consistently quoted by the commentators. The general climbers' perspective was not matched by any other source and we were the only climbing media we are aware of to send someone to Japan. 

Natalie was amazing with her coverage within the very restricted way she was allowed to report. Her tweets from the venue and interview snippets giving a real insight into the event and what the competitors were feeling. We were running real-time analysis which was being tweeted and sent direct to the BBC commentator (Mike Langley) to keep up with what was required during the lead rounds.

As a team we are very happy with the way things have gone and next week it will be back to normal. I hope those who have found it a bit much will forgive us this indulgence for 1 week every four years.

Alan

 deepsoup 07 Aug 2021
In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:

> I hope those who have found it a bit much will forgive us this indulgence for 1 week every four years.

Already have.

Might it be possible four years from now for the headline of the news article not to be the title of the associated forum thread?  (That was the spoiler as it appeared on the forums page, not the headline itself.)

3
In reply to deepsoup:

> Might it be possible four years from now for the headline of the news article not to be the title of the associated forum thread?  (That was the spoiler as it appeared on the forums page, not the headline itself.)

Well, it will be a very different event I think - two/four separate climbing medal events, virtually same time zone, post-covid (hopefully), likely much more coverage from the BBC - so we will decide how we do it closer to the time.

Alan

In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:

> Natalie was amazing with her coverage within the very restricted way she was allowed to report. Her tweets from the venue and interview snippets giving a real insight into the event and what the competitors were feeling.

My favourite :

"Colin's gonna be mad" - Overheard from an American team rep. 

Great job Nat and UKC for all your coverage. The forums have been buzzing. 


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