No place for stats or predictions in Games
BEIJING Take your analytics and your algorithms and your artificial intelligence, your fancy data dissection, your stats crunching.
And stuff it.
Because projections – divinations — while maybe fun and perhaps useful for betting on the Olympics under-over, afford little consideration for the sheer whim and caprice of sports, the glorious unpredictability of predictions.
I mean, if it could all be calculated in advance, why play the Games?
Gracenote, which puts metadata and content recognition technology through the forecasting wringer, had presaged on its virtual medal table — just before the Beijing Olympics launched — that Canada would rack up 22 medals in a neckand-neck race with the United States for fourth place. Behind Norway, Germany and the Russian Olympic Committee.
Austria, currently holding down No. 5, wasn’t even in the top 10.
I just love it when the athletes show up the tyranny of the machines.
Applied computation that, just for instance, never so much as sniffed a podium finish for a group of Canadian ski-jumping mooks who, yumpin’ yimini, soared way off the radar this week for a sport that is comatose in Canada, with a team that trains in Slovenia. Sweet, sweet bronze in the mixed team ski jumping event, Canada’s first ever ski jumping medal. Give it up for: Mackenzie BoydClowes, Matthew Soukup, Alexandria Loutitt, Abigail Strate.
Boyd-Clowes was the team’s last jumper, executing a cool and collected leap of 101.5 metres and team-best score of 128.1.
By the time they were getting their real medals, next day, their phones had been blowing up with messages and congratulations. “All of us are pretty overwhelmed, just staring at our phones going nuts,” laughed Boyd-Clowes.
That was but one of the dozen medals accumulated by Canadian athletes at the midway point of the Games, although it might be 13, depending how tall foreheads wrinkle in the matter of an illegal substance apparently ingested by Russian teenager Kamila Valieva in the team figure skating event, with the Canadian contingent sitting fourth.
When the sun rises in Beijing on Day 8, Saturday, the Canada collection: one gold, four silver, seven bronze. Knotted with ROC for medal totals, but down when measured by gold. And, for what it’s worth, a slight bump for Canada on the updated Gracenote prediction tally to 25.
It’s the unforeseen grace notes, I think, like the aforementioned ski jump bronze, that raise the spirits of an Olympics. Like Jack Crawford, the 24-year-old from Toronto, ending Canada’s drought with the country’s first medal in an alpine event in eight years, delightful out-of-the-blue bronze in men’s combined over at the Yanqing Alpine Ski Centre.
The event combines — natch — downhill and slalom runs. Crawford, a speed specialist, was in second place after the downhill portion, then posted an impressive 48.97 in the slalom run, just seven hundredths of a second behind Norway’s Aleksander Kilde, but both were passed by Austrian Johannes Strolz for gold. Cool factoid: Strolz, whose father won gold in the same event in Calgary, 1988, had actually lost his place in the country’s powerhouse ski team and worked as a cop last summer to keep his career alive. Now he’s a second generation hero.
Crawford, meanwhile, had never placed better than fifth at a World Cup event. He was also fourth — the dastardly fourth, the bane of Canada’s existence in multiple events, including Laurie Blouin in snowboard slopestyle and Megan Oldham in ski big air — in downhill. Seriously impressive, though, just 0.07 seconds behind Austria’s Matthias Mayer for bronze, and sixth in the super-G.
I mention this because some rather heroic efforts tend to fall between the medal cracks at the Olympics, receiving scarcely agate-size mention. They deserve some boldface recognition. So, yay Jack.
A sidebar rah-rah too — because it’s OK to cheer for your home side at the Games, even reporters expected to climb on the bandwagon — for Scott Gow, from Canmore, Alta., who elbowed his way into the Canadian biathlon record annals, fifth in the men’s 20-kilometre individual event, best-ever result for Canada over 20K at the Games. Made 19 of 20 shots. “Almost a perfect race.”
The Games smile on some athletes. And frowns at others. Say … Canada, as defending Olympic champions in mixed doubles curling, where the tandem of John Morris and Rachel Homan dove into dire straits, losing first to the 0-7 Australians (coached by Morris, just sayin’) and then eliminated by Italy, and when Italy became simpatico with curling you tell me.
In any event, curling goes on forever at the Olympics. Catch you up later on the team thingy.
With a bronze in mixed team aerials, Canada is also demonstrating a keen knack in the gender-jumbled events. Skijump, oh-so-nearly the shorttrack relay, but for a DQ that is smelling ever more rank, and maybe teenager Florence Brunelle not actually the culprit. In any event, mixed team snowboard cross still on tap Saturday morning (Friday night in Toronto), and two of those Canadians already have individual medals in Beijing.
To briefly recap Week One of the Olympic fortnight:
Just one slim gold so far, but a go-go glitter for Max Parrot in snowboard slopestyle, triumphant — from silver in Pyeongchang — on a challenging coarse, and less than three years removed from a gruelling 12-pack session of chemotherapy for the Hodgkin’s lymphoma that had attacked his athlete’s body.
“To be standing here, three years later and winning gold, that is completely crazy,” marvelled the 27-year-old from Bromont, Que, now cancerfree. So over-the-moon, he tossed his snowboard in delight when his 90.86 scored second run stood up for top of the podium laurels.
And speaking of board flips …
Mark McMorris, who really believed his third run in that same event had scored high enough for silver, maybe even gold. Instead, it was a third straight bronze in his third straight Olympics, another chunk of hardware for the trophy chest at his parents’ lakeside home in Saskatchewan. “I definitely knew I was on the podium but I definitely thought gold or silver, to be honest.’’
Silver for the king of moguls, Mikaël Kingsbury, defending Olympic champion, whose good luck T-shirt reads: “It’s good to be the king.” Except on this day, the sovereign was usurped by Sweden’s Walter Wallberg. “He gets to sit on the throne today.” All-class, Kingsbury, first man to win three Olympic medals in moguls.
Éliot Grondin, 20, from SteMarie, Que., silver in snowboard cross, in a photo finish.
You want photo finish? We got photo finish. Steven Dubois, arguably the least likely of medal threats on a heavily decorated short-track squad, straining to get his toe and blade over the finish line in the 1,500 metres for silver, holding off Semen Elistratov from the ROC.
Kim Boutin, bronze, in shorttrack 500, all smiles, two days later shaking her head over the “crack in the ice” she blamed for the bizarre wipeout this close to the finish line in the 1,000-metre heat she’d been leading.
Isabelle Weidemann, Canada’s first double medallist of these Games, silky silver in a hard-fought 5,000 metres at the Ice Ribbon long-track oval, after bronze in the 3,000.
Meryeta O’Dine, bronze in snowboard cross, four years after a devastating training race fall brought an abrupt end to her Pyeongchang experience before it had even started, resulting in a concussion. “Scratched the whole side of my face up. Looked like Freddy Krueger.”
That’s all for now, folks. As we say in the news business on breaking stories … more to come.