Is there a harder Olympic sport to win than the road race?

Not in terms of physical effort (though it’s got to be up there), but in terms of the odds of the “best” athlete winning?

In most other sports that I can think of there are clear favourites and the cream usually rises to the top (or thereabouts).

But there are so many variables in road racing – parcours, tactics, form, mechanicals, crashes, huge field of athletes.

Do any other sports come anywhere near the same level of complexity?

Probably something with horses

Probably most of them are just as hard? Certainly the shorter races and the ones judged on technicality.

Yep, that’s the most obvious one I thought of. Otherwise canoe slalom is one where even the very best will often make a very small mistake which is enough to lose a medal.

Actually I’ll revise that on behalf of the local… The time trial after you bust a collarbone racing the road race…

Yeah I can see how the whitewater canoe events could be vulnerable to bad luck.

Do courses suit some competitors more than others to a significant extent?

Actually that’s putting it even better than I did, where I suggested mistakes – the courses all tend to surge a little bit with waves changing and that can affect your run (it’s a sport I competed in to a fairly high level – I could at least get round the courses they’re using, though a lot slower).

There are some differences in strengths needed for courses, but it’s probably more about familiarisation with the characteristics of a course. The top guys will have been out getting all the practice they can on the course, and it’s something where I know at London there was a certain amount of (unfair?) home advantage as the GB team had it as their training base whilst international teams got more limited time slots.

Do courses suit some competitors more than others to a significant extent?

Most of the athletes will have trained and raced at the slalom course beforehand so they will know where the features are; holes eddies etc.

However, depending how the ICF officials set the course you could get a set of gates that suit you – or doesn’t. Comes into it even more for the C1 and C2 crews. Hence, you’ll see the athletes and their coaches walking, and walking, and walking the bank to try and learn it. Spent many an afternoon doing that with my wife in the past!

Over the course of a year BMX cream seems to rise to the top as the ‘bad luck’ gets spread around but as a one off event you’d probably be wasting your money if you put in on the favourite.

First video I’ve found of the course with some interesting lines possible:

https://vimeo.com/146517371

Hard to think of one worse than the road race in those terms. Though I guess any team event sort of counts – the best rower won’t win in a crap eight, nor will the best footballer/hockeyist/basketballer in a crap team. Though arguably the former does at least have the option of a single scull. Well, the cyclist can enter the TT or track events too, though of course they suit different types of cyclist to some extent.

I guess the easy way to tell is look at odds immediately prior to the event – do the implied probabilities for the top few favourites add up to a lot, or a little? What were GVA’s odds?

Well that’s down to the course being unfamiliar* and them not having a chance to practice it before their race run, so they have to do that to learn it, rather than it suiting one paddler more than another. At the level I competed I still got one practice run, and best run counted, so less of an issue, but we still did plenty of that (and even best run counting wasn’t always good – in one of the last events I did I got a penalty for missing a gate I’m sure I got, and then second run my knee strap broke). I’ve seen the horsey folks walking their jump courses for similar reasons.

*I’d expect for the top guys who do lots of training on the course that they should be familiar in general with most if not all of the gate placements as they’ll have practiced them.

Still luck involved though.

Just to get away from canoe slalom and if we’re allowed to do winter Olympics, it occurred to me thinking about walking technical courses that skiing slalom is very similar – which then lead me to thinking that biathlon is also a sport where favourites make mistakes.