JDS Journal of Data Science 1683-86021680-743X1680-743X School of Statistics, Renmin University of China JDS1042 10.6339/22-JDS1042 Data Science in Action An Examination of Olympic Sport Climbing Competition Format and Scoring System NguyenQuang1 ButlerHannah2 MatthewsGregory J.gmatthews1@luc.edu1∗ Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Department of Statistics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Corresponding author. Email: gmatthews1@luc.edu. 20221942022202156167 Supplementary Material

All data and code for reproducing the analyses presented in this manuscript are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/qntkhvn/climbing.

12120222832022 2022 The Author(s). Published by the School of Statistics and the Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China.2022 Open access article under the CC BY license.

Sport climbing, which made its Olympic debut at the 2020 Summer Games, generally consists of three separate disciplines: speed climbing, bouldering, and lead climbing. However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) only allowed one set of medals each for men and women in sport climbing. As a result, the governing body of sport climbing, rather than choosing only one of the three disciplines to include in the Olympics, decided to create a competition combining all three disciplines. In order to determine a winner, a combined scoring system was created using the product of the ranks across the three disciplines to determine an overall score for each climber. In this work, the rank-product scoring system of sport climbing is evaluated through simulation to investigate its general features, specifically, the advancement probabilities and scores for climbers given certain placements. Additionally, analyses of historical climbing contest results are presented and real examples of violations of the independence of irrelevant alternatives are illustrated. Finally, this work finds evidence that the current competition format is putting speed climbers at a disadvantage.

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