Insight Check #13: Strategies seen at the Olympics

Aug 13, 2024 2:14 pm

Insight check

A sometimes weekly email about decision-making, strategy, games and other observations.

Olympics

The Olympics are the pinnacle of games. 4 years to prep and think about how you are going to beat your competitors to some Eiffel Tower Blang and become an all-timer.

Also one of the best places to brush up on flags and look out for some amazing strategy insights! Here are the things that caught my eye.

On Branding

Our favourite athletes of the times are the ones that are believably themselves. I love Noah Lyles’ passion for anime, Simone Biles owning her Mental health parity to physical health and the two sharpshooters that had main character energy. This is a huge signal for leaders everywhere that authenticity is the most likeable vibe right now. Sport is a huge signal of public opinion because it’s OK to villainise or idolise narrative and characters without too much harm. The clear Idols from this years games were characters that just oozed Authenticity. It probably reflects the high-performance psychologists recognising the edge in performance this gives as well as our next-gen athletes in the spotlight of social media have found the only way to stay sane in the public eye is to be a version of yourself that is sustainable.

This is a huge lesson to all leaders, politicians, professionals… anyone who relies on public opinion… that the zeitgeist of the moment, (where YouTube and socials give so much authentic content), is that being yourself is the most sustainable and relatable vibe.

On Strategy Vs Tactics

Australian Female athletes absolutely dominated these games, giving us Aussies our best ever gold medal Haul (and putting our comparatively small population up with heavyweight nations). But one Aussie Female athlete grabbed more attention and internet bandwidth than all others…. Of course I am talking about the breakdancing sensation that was Ray-Gun.

Stories in the Olympics catch fire into lore, and I instantly understood why this blew up. The meme aura is 10million dollarydoos. I also understand the (attempted) strategy here from Ray-Gun… And I think it is a perfect example of good strategy (plan) bad tactics (execution).

Pretend for a second you are Ray-Gun in this situation; New national representational sport, lower athletic skill than competitors, results heavily subjective judgement dependant…. Now think about your expected outcome. If you do the same 5 moves all other competitors have practiced, you will probably not make it past the prelim rounds. This is a low risk - low impact expected outcome. Possibly… just possibly… if you do the unexpected, it might pay off. It probably wont… but if you throw in some national animal inspired moves, it might be a point of difference. High-risk but small odds of high-impact. You see the same strategy with the Olympic diving or gymnastics, when a higher score is needed, you leverage up the risk. I’m assuming breaking doesn’t have a fully established portfolio of difficulty-ranked moves and/or Ray-guns arsenal didn’t have much tooling. The strategy wasn’t bad, but the tactics were wrong.

Ray-Gun misread the meta. The Olympics are all about looking at a performance and being wowed at things the average person couldn’t do. I admire the courage to Hail-Mary a risk move in a subjectively judged new sport, but most people at home want to look at olympians and say “I could never do that”. Unfortunately every uncle with an upcoming wedding was taking frantic notes on moves.

On Specialising

IMO one of the most insane performances was that of Dutch Distance runner Sifan Hassan, who won bronze on the track in both the 5000m (smashing my local duck pond 18’38 park run time with 14’30!) and the 10000m (in 30 minutes!) (This is a huge feat already) and with 37 hours recovery…. Then win the marathon with a sprint finish by 3 seconds and an Olympic Record in 2’22. What the actual hell. As a runner myself, this blows my mind. However, begs me to wonder- how risky! The confidence to know you could do these back to back to back and get the results over such different distances means she did not at all pick a lane to snag one medal but just spread efforts and training and recovery all over the shop. Strategically, this only makes sense if you are confident you could recover and still put down competitive times. Obviously she could. Hats off.

In comparison, Sydney M-L copped it a bit for not running in the 400m and choosing to focus just on the 400m Hurdles. Picking a lane here paid off. Gold medal and ROI on the goal better than hedging into two maybes. Hats off again here on strategy meeting the goal.

On Competitor Mono-vision

Huge lessons here for anyone with fire eyes level focus on your main competition. I actually was watching the Ingebrigston / Kerr Ego battle over YouTube the last few months in the lead up to this and it was great. Two absolute beasts at peak fitness ready to lock horns in a race that has a heap of strategy, the men’s 1500m. The narrative was all about which of them would win and no doubt, their whole focus was how to beat the other. Ingebrigston chose to just set a manic pace from the gun and in hopes to break everyone, keeping cards close to the chest of how many petrol tickets he was burning. Kerr chose to just stay in touching distance and be more economical until the final 200. What neither considered, was that the field was stacked and others would opportunistically take advantage of their pissing contest. It was Cole Hocker who drafted the whole race and got a clean inside line to overtake both in the final 50m. Interestingly, it was Ingebrigston who opened up this inside line for him after he knew he was out of petrol tickets, letting us all wonder if this was on purpose, seeing Hocker was the only man who could at least let his rival Kerr not win Gold.

Don’t fail to recognise when you are in a multiplayer game, especially if so far you plan like it’s 2-player. Don’t forget about the rear-view mirror!

On Incrementalism

Special mention to world record breaking pole vaulter who has beaten the world record 9 times in 1cm increments. This is insane precision and discipline. I’m sure in 2020 when he jumped 6.17m to break the then world record he was tempted to jack it up to 6.20 because he knew he had it in him… but he has constantly just advanced the incremental limit and with it, gained confidence of the next one being ‘just one step closer’. A testament to persistence and patient strategy. A lesser vaulter would have jacked it to 6.20 9 times and probably missed it all.

It’s OK to aim for the clouds, but incremental horizons are where the gains are at.

On teams Vs individuals

Dropping the baton is such a great metaphore. Watching the 4x100 is always a favourite of mine. I used to run this event in high school and our team was never stacked with the best runners but we actually practiced our baton changes and we usually placed well. I am amazed at how many Olympic teams seemingly don’t practice the handover. Loss of pace and momentum is most likely in these gaps and transition periods. Beware baton changes!

A gold medal awarded to whoever has the best team, not the best stack of individuals.

Story Arc…hetypes

One of the coolest papers I have read this year in methodology. They got about 1,300 classic books from Project Gutenberg and sliced them up into 10,000 word chunks and ran it through 3 different machine learning methods to decide how negative/positive the sentiment of that chunk was.

Then they could map those chunks to the plot to see the sentiment pattern of the plot to see the pattern of the story arc.

This led to the emergence of six main emotional arcs:

‘Rags to riches’ (rise).

‘Tragedy’, or ‘Riches to rags’ (fall).

‘Man in a hole’ (fall-rise).

‘Icarus’ (rise-fall).

‘Cinderella’ (rise-fall-rise).

‘Oedipus’ (fall-rise-fall).

Also interesting- ‘Icarus’, ‘Oedipus’, and ‘Man in a hole’ arcs, are the three most successful emotional arcs, which have high numbers of downloads. We certainly love a story about a person falling from grace. Perhaps it is the evolutionary ‘cautionary tale’ element or the social bonding over gossip… who knows.