For swimming, you have to have a tie breaker during qualifying rounds because there are only 8 swimming lanes. If 8th and 9th place tie, only one of them can go to the next round. To break the tie, they have a ‘swim-off’. This rule seems logical but it does favor the swimmer who can ‘peak’ twice. This does not happen often but just imagine having to swim 1500 meter twice!
Taekwondo break ties with one round of extended time. Like hockey, sudden death – the one that score first wins. Makes sense. However, if nobody scores during the extended time, their fate go to the judges – but based ONLY on their performance during the extended time, not the entire match. Hmmm, yes….make a lot of sense (sarcastically) but that was how one of the gold medals was decided.
For wrestling, it was a total eye opener for me. For every round, if there is a tie, they draw from a ‘bag’ – blue or red to decide who has the advantage (i.e. one person has to expose a leg to his/her opponent for a one-leg grab to start the . Of course, the person that grab the leg has the advantage. Furthermore, at that level of competition, I have yet to see someone successfully defend themselves. If round 2 is a tie again, they do a random draw again. Anyways, this tie-breaker is on my top of my dumb-rules list. (Article from the province)
Exercise:
– Have you encountered any rules that is totally crazy to you? Describe.
– To evaluate any rules / solutions, you must have a set of criteria. Pretend that you can decide the rules for the new game, create the criteria for tie breakers.