About a decade ago, I joined a climbing gym, a phase which lasted about 18 months.
I wasn’t terrible. At my peak I could dangle upside down for a bit, and today recalling the number of pull-ups I could do is both a boost and blow to my self-esteem. But I wasn’t a great climber, or even, by the standards of climbing-gym regulars, a very good one.
Fast-forward ten years, and here’s what I and Adam Ondra, the undisputed best sport climber in the world, now have in common: Neither of us is likely to win an Olympic gold medal.
The New York Times has an excellent interactive piece about why this is the case. This year, for the first time ever, climbing is an Olympic sport. Ondra, a 28 year-old from the Czech Republic, is the Michael Phelps of that sport. He climbs highest on the walls. He makes it past the trickiest combinations of holds. He should be the favorite.
But in an effort to make climbing more TV-friendly, the Olympics came up with a novel scoring system. In addition to the wall (“lead climbing”) and solving the tricky combinations (“bouldering”), they’ve added a third event, “speed climbing,” into the mix. Speed climbing is exactly what it sounds like - athletes race each other up a wall - which is one reason it will be fun to watch on television.
The problem with this system is that speed climbing is the realm of specialists, and, if you read between the lines of the Times piece, weirdos. Professional climbers seem to regard speed climbers the way professional basketball players regard guys who do trick shots on YouTube. The skills are broadly similar. But the disciplines are different - and not deserving of equal respect.
Which is one reason Adam Ondra, despite being the best sport climber in the world, is not a particularly good speed climber.
And thanks to the Olympic Committee’s scoring system, that’s a potential deal breaker. The medals will be decided by pitting 15 climbers against in each other in all events, and multiplying their ranks in each - the person with the lowest total number wins.
So let’s say Ondra comes in first in the two typical disciplines - lead and bouldering - but finishes ninth in the trick-shot world of speed climbing. He’ll have nine points (1 x 1 x 9). If someone else finishes second in all three events, that person will have eight points (2 x 2 x 2), winning the gold despite winning none of the events.
So what does this have to do with American democracy? And why is “Czechs and balances” a truly perfect pun that works on so many different levels? The answer to the second question is self-evident, so let’s focus on the first.
When it comes to most kinds of competition, we take it for granted that changing the rules changes the outcome. Regardless of what you think about the Olympic Committee’s decision, it’s obvious that their scoring system makes it easier for some climbers to win and harder for others.
It’s not just Ondra who is affected. Every climber is either advantaged or disadvantaged by the Games’ desire to produce quality TV. If you’re consistently strong at all three types of climbing, you have an excellent chance to win. If you’re a great climber, but you’ve ignored the speed-climbing niche, you and I will end our climbing careers with the same number of Olympic golds.
Here’s something else we can easily recognize: if the Olympics sticks to its scoring system, it will change the incentives in the sport - and thus change the way the next generation of athletes climbs. Now that speed climbing is suddenly one-third of the sport, younger athletes who used to look down on speed climbing will start practicing.
More than that, a different kind of athlete will be “selected” for success. If the NBA lowered the hoop by five feet (one can dream), more short people would be professional ballplayers. By the same token, today’s long-and-lanky climbers will probably be replaced with bulkier, more muscly ones - athletes who can hold their own on the wall, but who also have the quads and hamstrings required for a six-second uphill sprint.
None of this is controversial. To say the Olympic rules disadvantage Ondra isn’t displaying a pro-Czech bias, it’s stating a fact. Yet when it comes to a far more consequential type of competition - electoral politics - Democrats have long ignored everything anyone who has ever watched a sport already knows.
American elections, like elections in all democracies, are governed by a set of rules. And those rules have an enormous amount to do with who wins and who loses. The Electoral College, the Senate’s small-state bias, gerrymandering, new voting restrictions, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of taxpayers who live in D.C., and on and on. In the exact same way that the Olympic Committee has given a boost to speed climbers, our current electoral system gives a boost to politicians who can best appeal to white, rural conservatives.
And just as the Olympic Committee is selecting athletes with certain body types, America is selecting certain types of representatives. If you’re a dopey conservative white dude with a dumb haircut and questionable ethics who can wage a good culture war, you can become a national political figure. If you’re a similarly dopey progressive, you’ll have no such luck - not because Democrats are inherently better, but because the rules of the game favor right-wing doofuses far more than left-wing ones.
Of course, our electoral rules don’t prevent Democrats from winning. They have a shot - just as Adam Ondra theoretically has a shot at a gold medal next week. But winning is substantially less likely thanks to the rules currently in place.
Some of the bias of American political competition (such as the Electoral College) is due to a weird historical accident. But most of it is deliberate. While Democrats have focused on the game, Republicans have been busy changing the rules - Citizens United, gutting the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to vote and easier for gerrymandered state legislatures to overturn elections. Etc.
Even Republicans like Mitt Romney, who stopped short of supporting an insurrection, would never support HR 1 or statehood for D.C. And why would he? We wouldn’t expect a speed-climbing specialist to demand more bouldering; why do we expect conservative-vote specialists to expand the electorate?
On the other hand, why have Democrats historically been so reluctant to point out how badly skewed our electoral rules are? When Ondra tells the Times that the Olympic rules are stupid, he isn’t displaying a lack of confidence or undermining the integrity of climbing. He’s pointing out that, by changing the game to favor niche athletes over the sport’s undeniable greats, the integrity of climbing has already been undermined.
There is, of course, one big difference between the predicaments of Adam Ondra and the Democratic Party. (Two, if you count the fact that one is a human male and the other is an abstract collection of individuals and interests.) Athletes can’t directly change the rules. All Ondra can do is train harder and practice more - the Olympic equivalent of trying to out-organize voter suppression. This might work. It probably won't. Either way, it’s the best option he’s got.
But at the moment, Democrats are far better off than a world-renowned wall climber trying to run uphill. Imagine if Adam Ondra was not just his sport’s best climber, but in charge of the committee that designed its rules. Imagine if he had the chance to change those rules so that they were, by almost every objective standard, more fair and reasonable - and in doing so, also make it more likely that he would achieve his lifelong dream of winning a gold medal.
And imagine if instead he came up with a bunch of excuses to keep the unfair rules in place, deny himself the chance to win fairly, and corrupt his entire sport.
Would anyone think that was a bright idea?