Midway through a podcast series in which I break down the race to the Paris Olympics, I took a page out of Seth Davis’ book. Davis is a tremendous basketball writer for The Athletic, and as March Madness approaches and bracketology ramps up its fervor, Davis has a one-word, all-caps tagline on X when he feels a team has punched their ticket into the NCAA Tournament:
SHARPIE!
On the Road to Paris spinoff podcast of SANDCAST, I, too, began to Sharpie teams in. A few listeners and viewers thought I did so a bit prematurely in some cases, namely the Brazilian women’s race. I wondered, then, if there were an empirical, statistical manner in which I — or someone else good with numbers — could calculate the odds of each team remaining who had a legitimate shot at qualifying.
I called up Garrett Springer, my brother-in-law, a statistics major at BYU with a bent on sports stats in particular, and he took on the project with aplomb.
How, exactly, he did it, I’m not entirely sure, but Springer was able to simulate the next 10 events — the final 10 in the Olympic qualifying race — and it spit out the percentages in which each team qualified for Paris.
The percentages you see below are the percentages of times in the simulated events that the teams qualified for the 2024 Olympic Games. It is important to note that we removed World Championship winners Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, and Ondrej Perusic and David Schweiner of the Czech Republic, as they have clinched a bid that is guaranteed to the winners of the World Championships.
We will do our best to update these probabilities as often as possible. In an ideal world, that will come after every tournament, until the Ostrava Elite16, the final Olympic qualifying event that concludes on June 9.
Men’s Olympic race probabilities
Anders Mol, Christian Sorum: 100%
Nils Ehlers, Clemens Wickler: 100%
David Ahman, Jonatan Hellvig: 100%
Sam Cottafava, Paolo Nicolai: 99.9%
Andy Benesh, Miles Partain: 99.9%
Andre Loyola, George Wanderley: 99.6%
Alex Brouwer, Robert Meeuwsen: 99.1%
Adrian Carambula, Alex Ranghieri: 98.6%
Adrian Gavira, Pablo Herrera: 97%
Michal Bryl, Bartosz Losiak: 95.9%
Cherif Samba, Ahmed Tijan: 94.3%
Evandro Goncalves, Arthur Mariano: 90.8%
Thomas Hodges, Zachery Schubert: 90.7%
Julian Horl, Alex Horst: 68.1%
Theo Brunner, Trevor Crabb: 56.7%
Stefan Boermans, Yorick de Groot: 54.9%
Esteban Grimalt, Marco Grimalt: 27.1%
Matthew…
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