A small technical change has a big effect through a small effect

This is about statistics but it isn’t about statistics exactly: Bode Miller, speaking about Ted Ligety, noted that Ligety is hurt by equipment changes, that the change in rock angle of skis changed and this enabled a more direct approach to the gates. The interesting point: the change undid a prior change that helped Ligety win because it enabled his style. The effect on overall times is not knowable because the courses are all at least slightly different in setup, in snow, in wind, in sun, in temperature, but if we assume actually remain the same, then what’s happened is a reshuffling of the players, exactly the kind of evolutionary change you expect from a changed context, with the subtlety that the actual changes are little bits of seconds. One of the interesting things about competing to a line is that people approach the line until the differences become insubstantial but repeatable. As in the top skiers tend to win even though they’re only slightly better than the next group. As in races over extensive distance, over big drops in height, and large terrain changes may be settled by a thousandth of a second. So a small action, changing the rocker angle allowed, relatively shifts times within the group of competitive skiers by reasonably small amounts sufficient enough to rewrite much of the list of top skiers.