Swiss Sailing Team Athlete Portfolio Optimization
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Kilian Wagen, Grégoire Siegwart, 470M bronze medal at WCS Genoa 2019. Photo: Sailing Energy Sailing Photo: 2019. WCS Genoa at medal bronze 470M Siegwart, Grégoire Wagen, Kilian SWISS SAILING TEAM ATHLETE PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION by Marco Versari 17-905-563 Submitted to the Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Chair of Entrepreneurial Risk Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich July 2019 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Didier Sornette Co-Supervisor: Dr. Spencer Wheatley Co-Supervisor: Marco Brunner, Swiss Sailing Team Abstract The Olympic Sailing sport is subject to complexity, uncertainty and change. We explored this challeng- ing sport with an interdisciplinary approach, using well-known tools in Economics and Finance for a new interpretation of success in Olympic Sailing. With this work, we offer an exploration with new lenses of an eminent domain for Swiss Sailing Team. To address the topic, we firstly studied the role and the contribution of the luck. So, we computed the ratio between the variance of the winning percentages for a large sample of Olympic classes elite sailors and the variance of the hypothetic scenario where the luck is the only factor in who wins and loses the sailing races. We identified that Olympic Sailing sport is a skill-based discipline, and the medallists are affected only for 10% to 20% by luck. Secondly, we ana- lyzed in-depth the performance of the elite Swiss sailors. In total, we designed two predicting models, and we qualitatively validated both by keeping into account the luck and the risk. We are persuaded that these predictions could be used for goal setting. The first was elaborated by using the power-law func- tions; by doing so, we characterized the learning curve of each Swiss sailor and projected it into the future. In the second, by using the economics principle of the production functions and performing multi- linear regressions, we identified how the different factors that define the performance in Olympic sailing are interconnected and contribute to the improvement of the results. We empirically found that this par- ticular production function has an increasing return to scale. The predictions performed lead to the con- clusion that some of the elite Swiss athletes have the potential to achieve a medal at the XXXII Olympic Games. In the last milestone of this work, we assessed the risk and return of the Swiss Sailing Team athlete portfolio. For that, we initially borrowed from Finance some tools of the modern portfolio theory, and we run the first round of optimizations to highlight the contribution of each member to the success of the whole team. In the end, we defined a more sophisticated multi-criteria objective function by using, on the one hand, the experience of the Swiss Sailing Team management, and on the other hand the finding of this work. We concluded the analysis by computing how much each of the sailors in the port- folio contributes to the success of the whole team while keeping into account different scenarios of the multi-criteria objective function. So, a new route for an enhanced decision-making process and a pro- spective rewarding methodology has been drafted. 2 […] “La via del mare segna false rotte, ingannevole in mare ogni tracciato, solo leggende perse nella notte perenne di chi un giorno mi ha cantato donandomi però un'eterna vita racchiusa in versi, in ritmi, in una rima, dandomi ancora la gioia infinita di entrare in porti sconosciuti prima...” Odysseus, F.Guccini Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge Prof. Dr. Didier Sornette, Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks, for inspiring with his lessons and meetings the whole idea for this thesis and for supporting it with ad- vice and valuable information. I also wish to mention Dr. Spencer Wheatley for supervising this work and for the support through the challenges that I have encountered. From the Swiss Sailing Team; I would like to thank Marco Brunner for all the crucial insights and Dr. Thomas Reulein for encouraging my professional development. A friendly mention goes to Dr. Riccardo Rota, Scientist at the EPFL La- boratory of Theoretical Physics of Nanosystem, for his spontaneous interest on this work. Moreover, thanks to Barbara for backing during the whole continuing education journey. 3 Content 1 Introduction ________________________________________________________________ 6 1.1 Olympic Sailing ______________________________________________________________ 6 1.1.1 Qualification System for the Olympic Games _______________________________________ 7 1.1.2 A complex sports discipline _____________________________________________________ 7 1.2 Swiss Sailing Team ___________________________________________________________ 8 1.2.1 The object of the research _____________________________________________________ 8 1.2.2 The sources of the data ______________________________________________________ 10 1.3 The Full House of Elite Sports _________________________________________________ 10 1.3.1 Professionalism in Sailing Sport ________________________________________________ 11 1.4 Methods ___________________________________________________________________ 11 1.4.1 Multinomial Distributions ______________________________________________________ 12 1.4.2 Law of Diminishing Returns and Learning Curves __________________________________ 12 1.4.3 Optimization _______________________________________________________________ 14 2 Luck Contribution __________________________________________________________ 15 2.1 Skills-Luck continuum in Sports ________________________________________________ 15 2.2 Generalization for Olympic sailing _______________________________________________ 16 2.2.1 Multinomial distribution approach _______________________________________________ 16 2.2.2 Matrix form for the Luck Contribution ____________________________________________ 17 2.3 Skills-Luck continuum in Sailing ________________________________________________ 18 2.3.1 Sampling methodology for Races and Athletes ____________________________________ 19 2.3.2 Estimating the Luck Contribution _______________________________________________ 22 3 Race Results and Performance _______________________________________________ 29 3.1 Modelling the Luck Contribution ________________________________________________ 29 3.2 Race Results as Learning Curves _______________________________________________ 30 3.3 Predicting model for Race Results ______________________________________________ 34 3.3.1 Performance Development Process and Race Results ______________________________ 35 3.3.2 Interdependences of the Performance Development Process factors ___________________ 38 3.3.3 Assumptions Verifications and General Considerations ______________________________ 41 4 Team Success Analysis _____________________________________________________ 44 4.1 Risk and Return assessment __________________________________________________ 44 4.2 SST Olympic Project Review and prediction ______________________________________ 51 4.2.1 Result Target Achievement interpretation _________________________________________ 54 4.2.2 Long-term Results and Performance prediction ____________________________________ 56 4.3 Objective Function and Scenarios Optimization ____________________________________ 58 4 5 Conclusions and Outlook ____________________________________________________ 64 Annex _________________________________________________________________________ 70 List of World-class Events __________________________________________________________ 70 Pool of international Athletes Selected ________________________________________________ 71 Performance Development Process form ______________________________________________ 72 Performance Development Process data ______________________________________________ 73 Race Results and synchronized PDP data _____________________________________________ 74 PDP Fitness and synchronized Team Physical Test data _________________________________ 75 Analysis SPSS ___________________________________________________________________ 76 Declaration of Originality ___________________________________________________________ 92 Literature & References ____________________________________________________________ 93 Information to the author ___________________________________________________________ 95 5 1 Introduction 1.1 Olympic Sailing The sailing sport was first contested at the Olympic games in Paris 1900 and, except for the 1904 Summer Olympics held in St. Luis (Missouri, USA), sailing was always part of the Olympic program. The sailing disciplines represented at the Olympic games changed over time, trying to follow the equipment and sport evolution. During the first editions, the sport was dominated by bigger boats, sailed by crews composed by several members, up to 12 people. Starting from Paris 1924 and in- creasingly after the 1950 edition, the role of smaller and one-design oriented boats became more rele- vant. At the XXXII Olympic Games edition in Tokyo1 (August 2020), a mixture of dinghy boats, high- performance classes and windsurfs will represent sailing. The competitors will battle for a total of 10 medals to win. As it follows in the list below, 6 events are for males, 4 events for females and 1 event is held with mixed crews: • Men’s Events: o 470 Class – Two-person dinghy men, o 49er – Two-person high-performance skiff men, o Laser – One-person dinghy men, o RS:X – Windsurfer men, o Finn – One-person dinghy (heavyweight) men. • Women’s Events: o 470 Class – Two-person dinghy women, o