10 September 2018
Split times the only way to deal with ties
During the World Championship in Innsbruck we have seen a record number of ties. As climbing progress it is just natural that the best climbers even out, increasing the route setters delicate job. Ondra and Schubert did get the same score and there is no way to separate them but to go for count back or time.
Pilz did finish the female route 10 seconds faster than Garnbret. The problem was that during Janja's climbing there were no official split times making it very hard to build up the excitement understanding who is in the lead, i.e. who is climbing faster. Luckily they both topped making it easier to get the winner.
Let us say they both finished with a score of 42, then the judges might have had to watch the videos and see that Pilz got it 2.42 seconds meanwhile Garnbret was 0.5 seconds slower. Such an analyses would probably have taken several minutes to do.
One solution for this could be to use split times for every ten moves which can be used to separate identical scoring until they reach the next split time. This would guarantee that for example during the Olympics we do not need to wait five minutes before the winner in Lead can be announced.
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