February 13, 2010

2010 Olympics Day 1

I don't have a lot of editorial comment to make about Day 1 of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I watched a lot of it on television, I followed team media announcements on Twitter, and I enjoyed myself. There was a great variety of stuff going on, covering many of my favourite Winter Olympic things.

Canada didn't have a great day, but it wasn't terrible either. Jennifer Heil won a medal in moguls, which will unfortunately fall into the disappointed-not-to-get-the-gold category. Our short track speed skating team didn't win a medal in the men's 1500 m, along the way making a pretty good case for the usefulness of a statistical approach to prediction. Charles Hamelin, considered a very strong contender, ended up in the same semifinal with the eventual gold and silver medalists and failed to advance to the final. Olivier Jean, who I gave an outside chance at a medal, was "advanced" to the final after a crash, and ended up fourth.

Those events have had a detrimental effect on my medal prediction, but not an unrecoverable one. Overall the mean of my predicted medal total has decreased from 27.05 to 26.30, with a small decrease in the standard deviation. The prediction is also impacted by the delay of the men's downhill until Monday.

Sport Event Athlete Category Result Impact
Freestyle Ski Moguls - W Heil, Jennifer Lock SILVER +0.10
Freestyle Ski Moguls - W Richards, Kristi Outside 20th -0.10
Speed Skating - ST 1,500m - M Hamelin, Charles Strong 8th -0.65
Speed Skating - ST 1,500m - M Jean, Olivier Outside 4th -0.10
TOTAL         -0.75

You can see from the figure below that I am predicting Canada will bring in a steady 1-2 medals per day until Day 9.

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