Did D score bonus work?

[rlayt]

Kensleycillected data on D score bonus and the effect on USA MAG’s use to see if if it helped get them to a bronze medal.

Podcast!

 

[RAFIKI]

I thought this was really interesting and it made me wonder if the US MAG people have gone into this much detail for their analysis. The only concept that wasn't really touched on, perhaps because it's so obvious, is that all teams are aiming for a moving target because no team is standing still and not trying to improve. It's the "it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place" idea from Alice in Wonderland. Unfortunately we can't do the experiment of rerunning the triad without US MAG trying something new, but it's very possible that they would have fallen further behind than their recent usual of 4th/5th without the D-score bonus.

One think that irks me about US MAG is the sense of entitlement, the idea that they should be medaling as a team. Just because your WAG team is good, or that you have a large population, doesn't mean that programmes/fans should expect medals. When they kept coming 4th/5th that attitude grated on me.

 

[irichluck21]

Well the US SHOULD be medaling as a team. Too many times they have faltered in team finals.
Too often they perform well in qualifications but then collapse in team finals.
London, the US should have easily medaled, but fell apart when it counted. Rio was also an opportunity for that team to medal but, yet again, crumbled.

So yeah the 4th/5th places were disappointments, because the men were capable of much more. They just never managed to compete to the best of their ability when medals were on the line.

 

[OnoNoKomachi]

It isn't possible to tell if the D score bonus worked or didn't work with the available information. There is no practical way to find out. One would have to see what would have happened without it and compare what happened with it. USAG doesn't have any of the resources to do that.

I don't think it does anything. Most people aren't doing the hard skills because they can't.

I don't credit the D score bonus with medaling in Paris. First of all, Russia wasn't there (although who even knows what they would have looked like, considering all the chaos). Second, there is no way to show that the D score bonus had anything to do with the US performance. "After this, therefore because of this" is a well-known logical fallacy. It's certainly possible that it helped, but the people claiming it did are the same people who thought it up in the first place.

The US men did compete to the best of their ability in Paris.