Paris 2024 Guide: 4x100 Mixed Medley - A Game Of Aquatic Chess, USA, CHN, AUS In Race To Take GBR's Crown
A look at the four top teams heading into Paris, with samples of line-ups and a spread of splits that show us why an AI calculator might struggle: much will come down to coach decisions on the day...
The 4x100 mixed medley relay, introduced to the Olympic program successfully at the Tokyo Olympics, is a game of aquatic chess to some extent.
The brain wearies working out myriad parameters and possibilities and as Paris approaches, the smart teams may well be shovelling as much data into an AI program as possible to get the fastest rapid-response to the question "which four cylinders would be fastest".
Even then, the robot is only as good as the information it can process as raw fact, its ability to take the plausible into account likely to be unhelpful: anything's possible in Olympic competition, as the story of Steven Bradbury - OAM no less - reminds us every passing Winter Games as we peer back down the short track to the moment the whole world fell over and the Aussie who'd stayed out of the way of the risk-takers swept past to convert impossible to I'm possible, as Audrey Hepburn once put it.
