The 2020 Code of Points: What we might expect

Floor lacks skill variety

The Code of Points for the 2020 Olympic cycle is official. The time has come to make some wild speculations about the consequences of these code changes.

After having scraped the new code of points for most of the relevant information into a machine readable format I thought I would play around with some (very amateur) analysis.

Side note: The most up to date, machine readable code of points file is freely available on my github page. Due to inconsistencies in pdf formatting this file is probably not completely correct with descriptions, values or even entire skills missing or wrong in some way. Feel free submit changes and updates via github, twitter or facebook and I’ll do my best to keep it up to date. Also feel free to take the data and use it any way you like.

Pommel and Rings have some flexibility in routine construction

The first analysis done was a heatmap type graph plotting the occurrences of each skill value compared to its element group. Not extremely complex but enough to get an idea of where skills are concentrated in certain values and element groups. The darker the colour, the more occurrences of that skill. To see more varied and, in my opinion, interesting routines I’m willing to speculate we need two things from these graphs:

1. A concentrated distribution at C and above values, since most routines will be made up by these skills.
2. A more uniform distribution across element groups, since this will encourage variety with lots of skills to choose from.

These apparatuses have the best distribution for unique routine structure

My predictions looking at these charts are:

• Floor will be tend towards similarity as there are few skills to choose. Routines will trend towards the same skills and combinations in slightly varying order.
• Pommel and Rings routines may have some difference and flair with a good number of skills available to construct differing combinations. Although in saying that there will be a core set of skills which almost all routines will contain.
• Parallel Bars and Horizontal Bar will be where we see the most variety in routine construction with a large range of skills on offer over different element groups. Gymnasts will be able to play to their strengths more and routines will be more unique.

Am I off the mark in my interpretation of the Code?