http://www.seattlepi.com/sports/article ... 752199.php

Some have argued the counter point that the fault completely lies with those who designed the tournament with perverse incentives and not that of the athletes trying to navigate it in their best interests.

Of course off hand you'd expect an Olympic athlete to give it their all. And it's disappointing to see something so contrary to our expectations. But can you expect an athlete to be punished in their tournament progress because they won?

It's unfortunate. Almost every tournament with a round robin followed by predetermined knockout stages, you hear about the potential for someone taking it easy in the last game. I've heard it for every World Cup that I can remember. But I have never seen it this painfully obvious. I saw parts of one match and it was outright ridiculous.

The round robin itself isn't the faulty part of the tournament structure. It's the predetermined structure of the knockout stage. The draw should be done after the round robin is complete, so all teams have no way of predicting when they would play another.

SuperAnt wrote:The round robin itself isn't the faulty part of the tournament structure. It's the predetermined structure of the knockout stage. The draw should be done after the round robin is complete, so all teams have no way of predicting when they would play another.

This is the part I don't understand. Back when I was fencing competitively just about every tournament would do a round of pools to establish seeding for the Direct Elimination table. The better you did in the pools the easier your bouts would be in the DE because first played worst. second played second worst so forth and so on.

How would losing in the round robin portion of the tournament get you an easier game in the knockout stages. I would assume that doing better gets you a lower seeded team and doing not so better gets a higher seed team then you normally would have. Am I wrong?

I believe what happened was that one of the highly fancied Chinese teams unexpectedly lost to the Danes in the group stages, which dropped them down a place in the standings and so meant that they stood to meet the other Chinese team in the next round. Since the two Chinese teams were the favourites for gold this was obviously a bad thing for them and represented an unexpectedly difficult draw. It also meant that only one medal could be won by China of course, which probably wasn't what the team management had in mind.

My suspicion is that there were team orders to manipulate the draw so as to maximise the number of Chinese medals, but the players will now be hung out to dry.

Ah ok, now I understand.