UKC

One year to the day since Sport Climbing made its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020, the schedule for the Paris 2024 Games has been announced. The event will take place over six days from 5-10 August 2024 — an increase on the four-day event held in Tokyo last year.

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Only two years left to come up with a qualification system and a scoring system… that’s going to be a tight deadline.  

Hiya

The Qualification system for Paris has been published a while back here:

https://www.ifsc-climbing.org/index.php/olympic-games/paris-2024

No info on the venues for the Urban Series or Continental yet (or how Urban Series will sit alongside the World Cup series) so all this to still be resolved.

The scoring for Combined is available in this years rules and will be showcased at Munich this week so we can pick it apart after that! 

https://www.ifsc-climbing.org/index.php/world-competition/rules

Less clear on qualification for the combined this week at Munich as it is not published but believe it could be addition of scores from independent boulder and lead events that ranks the top 8 who go through to the combined event so let the addition versus multiplication debate commence.

Excited to see how it all plays out this week to give us a taste of whether a combined comp can deliver a comp the sport deserves. Fingers crossed.

I had a read through the rules.

Is it a bit skewed towards the boulderer?

My initial thought is that anyone who gets four tops from the boulders is going to be hard to catch - 18 moves further on a route seems a long way.

I'll need to apply the rules (albeit with 1 zone) to the last olympics scores to see who would have won to get a feel for how it plays out. I'm sure that must have been done already....

Where are you getting "18 moves" from?

Honestly - It is very difficult to comment until I have seen the comp in action.

In terms of weighting between boulderers and lead I think the rules are good enough and fair enough for now but lets see how Munich plays out.

I just hope Setters are given time, resources, money to practice, play and tinker and be a part of simulation comps between now and Paris to put on the best show they can under the new format to see how you can get a (a) really enjoyable comp and (b) one where the public can clearly understand who was the best and why - men's combined last year just felt like we watched a load of climbing then they did a tombola to see who won at the end .

I don't think there's any argument to be had here. With only 2 events multiplication doesn't solve any ranking problems that addition can't do, and the addition format they've got means your absolute performance counts, rather than relative rankings. The issues with multiplication last time were that speed was knock out and the maths didn't feel very intuitive. As a result the men's seemed like a tombola, as you say.

As ever, it depends heavily on good setting though!

also... difficult to apply to the previous Games as the finals only had 3 boulders so would start to be more artificial and less like for like if you started for example giving 33.3 for each boulder. I think Munich will give us a good idea of whether it will work. It's also a challenge to the broadcast companies to work out good ways to communicate the action. Check out coverage of the World Games if you want a good example of how that could go really really wrong. Again, hopefully they have time and resources so Matt G and co can host a really good show.

In principle, I like the idea on screen of a leader having a clear score then successive athletes going out and eating up the points as they go up a lead route to catch and surpass them.

Feels simple to get to the wider sporting public and if the route had 50 holds on it then its easy to see each hold is 2 points so each move up is a step closer to taking the lead in the overall comp.

However, there is me interfering with a setter by arguing a nice round number would make a good comp as opposed to just telling them to set a banger of a lead route!

I applied it to my spreadsheet from last year, with caveats (assumed everyone got 2nd zone and scaled up to 4 problems). https://twitter.com/treasurewild/status/1557013205456674816?s=20&t=5VPr...

Cool!

Looks like it would have worked pretty well.

Colman takes a good advantage into the lead but folds. Jacob does ok in boulders and gets a top in the lead to win. Ondra poor in boulders but good lead gets him a medal. All seems fair and easy to understand.

Sorry 20 to win.

4 tops = 100

3 tops + 2nd zone = 3x25 + 6 = 81

I'm reading the rules a 1 point per move on lead down from 100, but I may be mistaken.

i.e if the route had 40 holds, first hold scores 61 pnts, 2nd hold 62.... top 100.

Edit: I've found Annex 1 with the route scoring now so not as I had thought...