An Analysis and Critique of the Scoring Method Used for Sport Climbing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the scoring system used in Olympic sport climbing, comparing it to traditional methods and proposing a new square-root based approach to improve fairness and accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scoring method based on the sum of square roots of rankings and analyzes its advantages over existing product and sum methods.

Findings

The product-based scoring method can disproportionately favor certain climbers.

The proposed square-root sum method offers a more balanced evaluation.

Analysis suggests the new method improves ranking fairness.

Abstract

Sport climbing was a new Olympic event introduced at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. It was composed of three disciplines, and the final rankings were determined by computing the product of each climber's rankings in the three disciplines, with the lowest score winning. In this paper, we compare this product-based scoring method with the more usual sum-based method. As well, we propose and analyze a new method based on taking the sum of the square roots of each climber's rankings.